“Oh, Lexie,” she says. “Is everything all right?”

She glances around. I watch her expression change as she registers where she is. Ty’s room. Ty is gone. Ty is dead.

Grief floods her face.

“I came down to wake him that morning,” she says. “He was right here. He seemed all right.”

“I know.”

“I should have sensed that something was wrong that day. I’m his mother. I should have been able to tell.”

I never know what to say to this. She has her blame game and I have mine, the difference being that I actually have something to feel guilty about.

“It’s cold down here,” I tell her as I help her sit up. “Let’s get you upstairs.”

Later, after I’ve got her tucked away in her own bed and she’s sleeping again, I slink back to the basement to investigate the open drawer. It’s empty, except for a single item. A sealed envelope.

A letter.

My heart jumps, thinking that he might have written it to me. I didn’t answer the text, so he wrote down what he wanted to say. His reasons. His accusations, maybe. His last words.

The idea fills me with relief and terror.

I turn the envelope over with unsteady hands, and that’s when I see the name scrawled in Ty’s terrible handwriting across the paper.

For Ashley, it reads.

12 February

The first time my brother tried to kill himself, almost 2 years ago now, was the day my parents’ divorce was finalized. I don’t know if he meant it as a kind of grand statement or what. I wasn’t there for him that night, either; I was at a movie with Beaker. I can’t even remember which movie. I only know I wasn’t present when he marched up to the kitchen sink with a family-sized bottle of Advil and proceeded to gulp down pill after pill after pill. He did it practically under our mother’s nose as she sat with her back to him at the kitchen table, alternately studying for her nursing board exams, making her slow way through a giant stack of note cards labeled with dosages and parts of the human body and the definitions of different medical terminology, and studying the Bible, trying to come to peace with where it said that divorce was okay so long as there was adultery involved.

At 42, Mom was the oldest student in her class at nursing school, but she was the best. She was focused, driven, determined to make a new life for herself post-Dad. She didn’t even look up when her 14-year-old son took 63 tiny maroon tablets of pain reliever, said good night to her, then went downstairs to his bedroom and went to sleep.

He was disappointed when he woke up the next morning. He emerged from the basement with an expression I’ll never forget: a kind of resigned, puzzled frustration that he hadn’t simply floated away during the night.

“I’m not going to school today,” he announced as we sat down to breakfast. “I don’t feel good.”

My mother, ever the nurse even before she qualified to be one, felt his forehead. It was cool. She asked him some questions: Sore throat? Headache? Stomach pains? He shook his head and looked up at her, shrugged his thin, birdlike shoulders, and told her what he’d done.

At the hospital the most they could really do was put him in a room for observation. It was too late to pump his stomach. I sat in the corner and watched TV with him as the nurses came and went, checking his vitals, changing the saline in the IV. Every now and then Mom burst in, tearful, in agony over the choice she was being forced to make about whether or not to stay with us all day or do her clinical rounds in the hospital, her final week of requirements for her nursing degree. Without which she couldn’t graduate.

“I’m okay,” Ty told her, and even smiled at her to prove his point, his face wan under the fluorescent hospital lights, his lips colorless as he formed the word go.

“I’ll be back,” she promised again and again before dashing off.

I didn’t know what to say to him that day. I slumped in the uncomfortable plastic chair and tried to think of some big-sisterly advice that would draw him back from the edge. But I was 16 then—what did I know? I had my own problems, my own private miseries, and if I’d been honest I would have admitted that the idea of checking out had crossed my mind a few times in the past gruesome year, between my dad leaving us for the cliché he’d met at the office, who was exactly half his age, and my mom going back to school, the house suddenly empty of adults in a way that felt implicitly wrong.

But I never had a real plan to end my life. I was too afraid of dying. Of the blackness. Of ceasing to exist.

“It was stupid,” he ended up saying to me that day when the silence grew thick between us.

I was relieved to hear him say it.

“Yes, it was. Totally moronic,” I agreed, and then we went back to watching World’s Wildest Police Videos on the TV that perched near the ceiling. The nurses came and went. My mother came and went. And we both wondered (but not out loud) whether our father was going to show up at all.

In the end, he did. He was wearing a golf shirt, I remember. He’d come to take us home, since the hospital had decided to release Ty, and Mom still had 3 more hours of her clinicals. Dad also didn’t seem to know what to say as he drove us back to the house. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, checked the rearview mirror, met my eyes, looked away, then cleared his throat.

“Tyler—” he said as we pulled into the driveway.

“Come home,” Ty interrupted. “Please, Dad. Come home. Please.”