Firefighter's Virgin

“Impressive.”

I laughed. “Yeah, sort of. Hey, it was nice getting to meet your parents,” I said.

Cole smiled. “Yeah, they really liked you. In case you couldn’t tell.”

“Your mom seemed kind of sad.”

“It’s this time of year. My sister died on the 17th, and that anniversary is coming up, so it’s always a hard time for my mother.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, I had no idea.”

“We don’t talk about it that much.”

“What happened?”

He paused. “She died of a drug overdose. It happened just a few days after she got out of rehab, actually. My parents had sent her away up north to this recovery program. She was up there for a while, actually, and we went up to get her, but instead of driving straight home, my mom wanted to make it a bit of a celebration, so we were staying at this bed and breakfast a few towns over. It was about a five-hour drive from my parents’ place, so almost in Canada. And that’s when Marissa decided to do it. We don’t know where she got the drugs from; as far as any of us knew, she’d been clean.”

I touched his shoulder. He had a pained expression on his face. “I’m so sorry. I can’t even begin to imagine what that must’ve been like.”

“I was the one to find her. Which was incredibly fucked up, but in a way, I’m glad it was me and not my mother, because I don’t think she would have been able to handle that. I think that would have sent her over the fucking edge.”

“Wow,” I said. “Cole, I’m so sorry.”

I wanted to kiss him, but I knew that wouldn’t be the right thing to do right now, not when he was telling me this.

“There’s some things you just can’t take back, can’t change,” he said. “No matter how badly you want to.”

It seemed like there was something more he wanted to say, but when I waited for him to elaborate, he didn’t, so I didn’t push it. If there was something else, though, I hoped that he’d feel like he could talk to me about it. Because sometimes talking about it really did help, even if there was nothing you could do to change it.

Chapter Fourteen

Cole

June 17th.

The day my sister died.

I’d need to call my mother later and let her cry on the phone, as she’d done every year since Marissa’s death. They’d sent her up north to a rehab in the hopes of getting her off of the opioids that Sam had gotten her hooked on, and the few times we’d gone up to visit her, she’d seemed better, like she was on the road to recovery.

We’d all felt as though things were getting better, that life was getting back on the track that it was supposed to be on.

Sometimes, I replayed the scene in my head, going into my sister’s room to find her, slumped on the floor, the needle still sticking out of her arm. How long had she been there? Where had she gotten the drugs? Her skin was lukewarm, her lips tinged blue; there was nothing anyone could have done. But I still couldn’t help but wonder if I’d gone in sooner, if we hadn’t stayed at the bed and breakfast, if my parents hadn’t sent her away to that place to begin with, if maybe things would’ve gone differently.

My 1:30 appointment had canceled, so I shut myself in my office and called my parents’ house. My father picked up.

“Hi, Dad,” I said. “How are you?”

He sighed heavily. “We’re doing the best we can,” he said. “Today is always a hard day.”

“I know. That’s why I’m calling.”

“You aren’t at work right now?”

“No, I am, but there’s a break between patients.”

“Oh, okay. Well, we appreciate you calling. We went to your sister’s grave earlier this morning.” There was a pause. “I wonder what she would’ve been like today if she was still alive,” he said.

My father didn’t talk about Marissa much; I knew that he wanted to come across as strong, especially for my mother, but I knew how much it bothered him. He and I were alike in many ways, we both wanted to think that we could fix things, that we could take care of things. But the whole thing with Marissa had shown us, if nothing else, how little control we really had over anything.