“I said I would wait for you, Mattie, and when you didn’t go, I stayed. I needed to know you’d be safe, that you were okay.” His eyes have lost their teasing light and he’s serious. He is looking at me the way I’d always wanted a boy to look at me, and I want to scream at the unfairness of it all. Why does he have to be dead? Fate is cruel. She gives me someone I could really come to trust, to maybe even love, and I can’t have him. That is not his fault, though. He did his best for me, now it’s my turn to help him. “I am okay, Eric, because of you.”
