33
Marcus
Guilt, strong and unfamiliar, flavors every bite of the buttery branzino that is my main course. Emma got herself a Greek salad, and my chest aches as I watch her eat it, her manner unusually subdued.
She opened up to me.
She told me about her painful secret—and it was all I could do to let her carry on as if I was hearing it for the first time.
As if I didn’t already know about the whole ugly mess.
She didn’t tell me everything, of course—like the fact that her mother was once arrested for p**********n, or that she died in a car crash while being chased by a lover whose bank account she’d emptied earlier that day. But what she told me was enough.
Enough to know that her fear of turning out like her mother—the fear she’d talked about in her college essay—is still there, as
