That tells me most of what I need to know.
There’s another, opposing voice, and that quiets her. There isn’t anything else that I can hear. Suddenly the door to the office opens and smashes into the wall with a bang. Amber freezes when she sees me. Tears are streaming down her face, and I barely recognize her because of the rage and grief in her eyes. Shock, and then anger, fill her face as she takes in that I’m there.
“How?” she asks, voice barely a whisper. “How could you do this to me? You promised.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t think that this would happen. I didn’t realize they’d involve the school. I was worried and I just wanted you to be okay. I—”
“Worried?” she cuts me off. “You destroyed my life because you were worried?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The show is off,” she says viciously. “Everything is gone. Down the drain because of you. They won’t let me perform because they think it might endanger my health.”
Cold, brutal, guilt pours over me. “Amber, you’re sick. You’re passing out and you barely remember. I’m sorry, I never thought that it would affect the show.”
“I told you I was fine,” she says. “All I had to do was make it one more day, and you couldn’t even wait that long to stab me in the back? This was everything, and now it’s gone.”
“I love you,” I say. “I love you more than anything, and I wanted to protect you. I would never hurt you on purpose. I’m so sorry. Please…” I trail off because the look she’s giving me is one I’ve never seen. It’s one of indifference. Like a switch has flipped and suddenly I’m no one.
“If you loved me,” she says, “really loved me, then you wouldn’t have set my future on fire.”
My future. Not our.
Amber turns and walks away. I call after her, but she doesn’t turn. She disappears around the corner and doesn’t come back. She doesn’t come back to school. Doesn’t come to graduation.
I never see her again.
20
Peter
Present
“I never meant for your show to be cancelled,” I say. “I never meant for anything bad to happen to you. I loved you so much, and I thought you might be sicker than you were letting on. Your mother caught me in a lie, and I couldn’t find a way out of it. Believe me, I’ve thought of a thousand things that I should have done since then. I should have made something up. Should have kept my mouth shut. So many things.
“Amber,” I shake my head, “the last thing I ever wanted to do was set your future on fire. All I wanted was for you to be okay, and I thought that I was helping. I thought that the worst that would happen was that your mom would make you go to the doctor after the show. They’d been completely supportive, and I never thought—” My voice cracks as emotion wells in my chest. I’ve been over this train of thought so many times, imagined how this conversation would go, and now it’s here.
A breeze rushes up over the mountain, and catches Amber’s hair in the breeze. In the last rays of the dying sun, it’s like I’ve never seen her before. She’s always been beautiful, but now that I’m able to tell her what I’ve been dying to for years, I feel like she’s radiant. She took my breath away when she walked into the restaurant, and everything that I already knew was confirmed. I never stopped loving Amber Dwyer. I was kidding myself if I ever thought that.
It’s overwhelming, this emotion. “I’m so sorry. If I could turn back time, and do it again, I would. I would do it this second, so that you could have everything you wanted. Everything that we wanted together.”
She stares at me for a long time, saying nothing. So long that the sun fades and we’re left with just the lights of the city. “I was angry with you for a long time,” Amber finally says. “I mean, I let it go a long time ago, but when you showed up on set, it all came rushing back. I couldn’t seem to get over the fact that you did that. That you knew everything I had gone through to get that show off the ground, and you still decided that you knew better than I did about what I needed.”
I don’t say anything. I’ve said enough, and now I need to take whatever she decides to give me.
“It hurt, worse than almost anything I’ve ever felt. And even with everything that happened in the year after that, stuff that you don’t know, Peter, I hated you.”
“I don’t blame you.”
She tucks her knees further into her chest, holding them tight. “I never thought about what it must have been like to see me get sick like that. Not until the other day when we filmed…you know. And I still don’t think you should have done it, but I can forgive you now. Especially because of what I’m going to tell you.”