Read Online When You Were Here by Daisy Whitney - Free Book Online Page A

both words and tears. But I can’t care about her anymore. I can’t keep pretending that I’ve forgotten what we had. Because I haven’t, but I can’t have her the way I want her. And seeing her here and acting like we’re all fine hurts too much. I’ve got to make the hurting stop.
    “I don’t want to throw it out,” she says. “Okay? I just don’t. And if you’d just—”
    “Why are you here then? You could have left this morning. You didn’t need to make me breakfast. I’ve been makingtoast since I was eight. I didn’t have to start making toast when my mom died, okay?”
    “Danny,” she says, and the look on her face is soft, and it’s sad, and it has to be a harbinger of more pity from her.
    “Why did you leave me, Holland? After everything, how could you do it? How could you do it and then just keep showing up like nothing ever happened between us? Because I don’t want to just go to the movies with you and eat takeout in my kitchen, and I don’t want to find you on my couch in the morning. Don’t you get it? I can’t just pretend with you.”
    She looks hard at me, her blue eyes steely around the edges. “I do get it. But there are things that you don’t get, and if you’d let me—”
    But I feel stronger for the first time in weeks, and lashing out at her feels so good, it feels like survival. “I don’t want to go back to being best friends with you. But you’re like a disease. You’re always around, and you’re always showing up, and you act like nothing’s changed, but everything’s changed, and you—you’re like a cancer.”
    The words come out without warning, too quickly for me to stop them, too fast for me to abort.
    I watch as her shoulders drop, her eyes lower, the thing I just called her fully registering. She speaks in the lowest possible voice, so low it’s a barrier to protect herself from me. “I can’t believe you really just said that.”
    Neither can I. But I know if I open my mouth again, any ounce of self-preservation left in me will wither.
    I stare at my plate of uneaten, cold toast as she grabs her book and her black shoulder bag and gives Sandy Koufax a quick pat on the way out before pulling the door closed behind her.
    There is nothing, nothing but smoke and dust and debris, here for me in California. The only choice I have, the only chance I have, is to leave.

Chapter Nine
    We adopted Sandy Koufax two years ago, and she’s named after the greatest pitcher ever, a lefty like me, and a Jew.
    “We should name her Sandy Koufax,” my mom said as I drove us home from the shelter while she petted the little border collie–lab puppy sitting in her lap.
    I shook my head. “Sandy Koufax is a guy. This dog is a girl.”
    She narrowed her eyebrows at me and hugged the dog tightly. “Sandy Koufax is not a sexist pig. She doesn’t mind being named after a man.”
    “Dad would have liked this dog,” I said.
    She nodded. “He always loved animals.”
    “He would have been glad we got her from the shelter too.”
    “He liked shelter dogs best of all,” she said.
    Sandy Koufax was a fitting name for the dog for other reasons too. He wasn’t just the greatest pitcher ever, in my view. He also played through pain, pitching with a damaged elbow, throwing heat with injured fingers. He didn’t let the pain stop him. The name would be a fitting tribute not just to my baseball idol but to my mom. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew the dog would outlive my mom by many, many years. But I wanted to believe that my mom—who was kickass at everything she did—would kick cancer’s ass too.
    Now Sandy Koufax is all mine. She always was mine, truth be told. The first night home she slept in my bed.
    I’m going to miss this dog like crazy.
    I drive her to Jeremy’s house. His mom and dad love dogs. Like crazy love. They have two Chihuahua–minipinscher mixes, and Sandy Koufax races to the yard and starts rounding up the diminutive dogs.
    “You’re the only