Walking into the coffee house near school shouldn’t have made my stomach so fluttery. Had it been any other day, it probably wouldn’t have, but Mike and I were meeting Tanner. Mike’s reaction to Tanner hadn’t been as warm as I hoped, but I understood him. Mike saw anything putting me in danger as a failure. The prank James pulled on me senior year had been Mike’s fault, according to him, because he hadn’t been there to stop him. Tanner’s part in my attack over a year ago was a failure on Tanner’s part, but if I knew Mike, he held on to some of that guilt, too.
I wondered if either of them had ever stopped to consider that the responsibility for my life belonged to me, and not to either of them. By the glare on Mike’s face the moment we caught up with Tanner at a corner booth, I would gues
