He couldn’t finish.

He didn’t have to.

“Then you’d be staying,” I said softly.

“And Daisy would find out you stayed.”

He nodded, and the tears came in earnest now, and the whole terrible architecture of it was finally clear to me — a boy who had sabotaged ten shots at happiness out of love, and had then been unable to sabotage the eleventh, and was now drowning in guilt for the crime of having let himself be loved.

That was the shape of his whole agony, laid bare at last.