The Search for Lily Myers ✓

37 | Breaking Point, Pt. II

The yellowing grass made a dry, bristly sound beneath Amelia's feet as she slipped out into the backyard, and had the circumstances been different, she might have spent more than a singular second noticing how nice the patio area was. Henry and Liam were sitting next to what appeared to be an in-ground hot tub and although the jets were turned off, someone must have been using it shortly before dinner and left it uncovered. When she silently sat down next to Henry and curiously dipped a hand into the water, it was surprisingly still lukewarm. The lights embedded in the walls of the tub cast an unearthly, almost eerie glow up onto their troubled expressions.

Henry turned his face away from hers when she lowered herself onto the ground next to him, as if embarrassed that she was there.

"I'm sorry you had to see all of that," he eventually managed to say, his voice coarse and uneven. "I hate when you see me angry."

Amelia gently placed her hand on his forearm, her thumb drawing little circles. She wasn't going to try to force him to look at her; he'd do it when he was ready. Liam had the right idea about coming out here and sitting silently with him in his feelings instead of trying to chastise him yet.

"It wasn't exactly one-sided," she reminded Henry.

A gradual sigh seeped out of his lungs like air deflating from a balloon. "Uncle Daniel—he's not usually like that. I'm not usually like that."

"We know," Liam said. "We know who you are. You don't have to convince us."

"I've just...no matter how old I get, I've never been able to fully wrap my head around how unsupportive they seemed while Sarah was sick. I mean, I was only a preschooler and I could still tell that something was off. There were so many appointments, so many times I had to sit around in waiting rooms by myself because my parents both needed to be with her and there was no one else around to be there for me. My aunt and uncle were the only family we had around and they were always too busy with work or Lily or whatever else they claimed to have going on. It was lonely, you know? I remember wondering at the funeral why they thought they were allowed to be as sad as I was. What kind of six-year-old thinks that? But I did. I was already bitter that they could have made it all just a little less miserable for my family and they didn't."

Amelia's heart seemed to crumple in on itself—she had never heard him talk about his sister's funeral before.

"As I got older, I tried to forgive them for being absent because it felt like what I had to do. I felt like I was the one driving the rest of the family apart, and I guess I was. I was jealous of Lily for even getting to exist, for getting to live with all of this–"

He spread his arms to gesture at their luxurious surroundings. "–While my family was just doing anything we could to make ends meet. I kept asking myself why they didn't do more to help us and I obviously get now that it was probably way more complex than I realized. But as a kid, my instinct was just to push Lily away as a way of retaliating against her parents. I hate myself for not enjoying her company for what it was for so many years. Maybe them pushing back against me now that she's not here to see it happen is just what I deserve. But...it still really sucked to hear him getting mad at me for it when he barely lifted a finger back then to help me not be so mad at her. Children don't know how to properly deal with grief—they just don't."

Amelia hadn't heard much about this part of the story before, this bizarre denial from the Myers parents about what was happening to their niece, but hearing him genuinely question if he'd been asking for it, if the universe was toying with him and this was some screwed-up karma from how he'd behaved as a child, made her want to punch something.

"I thought...I thought your aunt looked up to your dad a lot," she admitted. "Didn't she come here in the first place to be closer to him?"

"Yeah," Henry sighed. "He moved from Italy to Chicago when he was eighteen to go to college and ended up staying, and she followed him once she was old enough. But then, once she was here...something just changed. She stopped looking up to him so much."