“Oh, Mar,” she said quietly as she wrapped her arms around me and tugged me into a tight hug. “Don’t cry, deirfiúr. It’s all right. I just meant—”
“I know,” I whispered with a throat so thick it was hard to speak, hard to breathe. “I know what you meant, it’s just that it’s so hard, Neve. It’s too damned hard sometimes. I see people getting hurt, people maybe dying and I don’t know what I can do to stop it from happening.”
“I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but I’ll say it again. Nothing’s set in stone.”
“Some things are.” I sucked in a breath and mopped at my eyes with the heel of my hand. “There are some things that I see over and over again in different variations. They’re the things I know I can’t stop but I can hope to maybe make better than the worst of what I’ve seen.”
“But you can change it,” she said.
I laughed bitterly, sagging back against the wall again. “Only if I can figure out how, Neve. I have to figure out how before I can do anything. That’s what’s so hard. I never know what I can do.”
“Have you talked to Thom about it?”
“Some.” I closed my eyes, tilting my head back. “But there are some things I can’t tell him—just like there are some things he can’t tell me. We’ve learned to respect that about each other.”
“Phelan told me—”
“He knows. He pretends that he doesn’t.” I smiled weakly. “It is what it is. The reason Thom doesn’t tell me some things is the same reason I don’t tell him some things. Before…before the end of everything, he and I had mostly broken up. He thought that he was protecting me by doing that. All it really did was hurt.”
Neve blinked. “He thought he was protecting you? Did he know about your…?”
“Thom’s always known,” I said. “It’s part of why things happened between us the way that they did. My insistence that we could both see things drove us apart because he was afraid. Truth be known, I’ve always been afraid, but it didn’t do me any good to dwell on that fear. Not back then, anyway.”
“It doesn’t do you any good now, either,” Neve said, squeezing my arm. “Let it go, Mar. Just let it go.”
I looked away, staring at the snow. “I don’t know if I can.”
“Try. It might be easier than you think.”
