Angry as he was, as much as that letter had him burning on the inside, he loved her, and he couldn’t ignore her unhappiness.
“Hey,” he said gently, and she startled. “Ou byen?”
“Wi. I’m fine.” She kept her voice too low for his siblings to hear, not that they would’ve over the raucous conversations taking place. She put the cover back on the pot she’d boiled the pork in, keeping it warm for later, when she would make the sauce. She didn’t look up at him. “Dr. Thornton mentioned that you never called him.”
Tobias wished that he’d escaped to his room after all. Or that he’d gotten a place of his own this afternoon. Or vanished from the surface of the planet. Anything but this, where he felt more like a bumbling infant instead of a grown man. “No, I didn’t.”
“You said you would.”
Because it had been the only way to escape that awful lecture last week before he ended up shouting at his parents, not because he needed to be back on meds. And that was what she was getting at—Dr. Thornton was a friend of the family, he knew the history, he knew what Tobias’s parents wanted, and he would pull out a script pad, and that would be that. In normal circumstances, it might not even be a bad solution; clinical depression frequently came back, so going unmedicated could be risky for some people who’d been diagnosed with it.
The problem was that Tobias hadn’t been diagnosed with it. The ER doctor had mentioned depression as a likely cause for his cutting that long-ago day in the hospital, and his parents had accepted it at face value. Tobias had never corrected them, even when the psychiatrist at Woodbury had decided that the cutting hadn’t been the result of depression so much as a cry for help from a teenager trapped in an overwhelming set of circumstances that he had no clue how to escape on his own. It had shocked Tobias how fast his mood and thoughts had turned around once he’d gotten away from school and all the expectations and the little voice that said what you’re doing won’t be enough. In fact, once Ghost had come into his life and kept the bullies at bay—seemingly just by breathing—Tobias had been almost happy at Woodbury. The months in treatment had given him better coping skills and a break to bolster himself, and since he’d never felt the need to cut since then, he figured his psychiatrist had been right.
Unfortunately, she’d wanted him to make a lot of big changes in his life to ensure he didn’t wander into the same situation twice, something he’d never quite managed to do.
Regardless of that last point, neither Dr. Thornton nor his prescription pad could help Tobias now. Not that he could explain any of that to his manman. So he said, “I’ve been busy.”
“Not with schoolwork.”
“Yes, with schoolwork.” It chafed that he was expected to explain this. His parents had always been deeply involved in his and his siblings’ lives, and it had never occurred to him to mind when he was growing up; his aunts and uncles were the same with their kids. It was normal. But he was much older now, and he couldn’t help thinking that the dynamic should’ve shifted by now. His parents didn’t treat Mirlande with such kid gloves. How much longer would he have to pay for a single mistake back in high school?
“Your papa said you haven’t taken him up on his offer to arrange an internship at Cancer Care.”
He forced his breathing to slow. “That’s because I’m not sure that an internship with a parent will look good on my applications, not because I’m not taking care of it.”
That was a lie. He hadn’t submitted a single internship request anywhere. He had a stack of half-completed ones in his desk, but he couldn’t—he hadn’t had time.
“It wouldn’t be with your papa. It would be with one of the other practitioners. It’s not like they won’t judge you as strictly as anyone else—”
“Manman.” He ground his teeth, trying to choke back the roughness he’d spoken with, not liking the way her expression twisted when he snapped at her.
“Is it like before? Is it happening again?” Her fingers clamped around the lid of the pot so tightly the beds of her nails went white. “You’re so far away.”
“I’m right here,” he gritted out. Bondye, he wanted to walk out.
“I love you. We both love you. We only want to help. We only want you to be happy.”
That was the problem. That was the root of all of it, the good and the bad. Their desire to help, to protect, even when it meant taking things that weren’t theirs to take. But she was watching him with such awful worry, such...such fear, and most of his anger drained in the presence of it. All but the small, hard kernel behind his sternum which remained where it’d been for weeks now.
“I’ll call Dr. Thornton.” He knew when he’d been beaten. “I’ll set up the internship. It’s not happening again.”
Her shoulders didn’t loosen. “Tobias.”
“It’s not,” he insisted. “I’ve got everything under control. I’m busy, not broken.”
“You’ve never been broken.” Her stiffness vanished. She took his hand, squeezed it, and he squeezed back. “You’ve fought so hard to get your life on track again. You’re so close to the
