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“And then you went back to Silt.”

“You saw what it’s like there. There’s no place for me to want anything. It’s just what I can want for Frankie. At least, that’s how it feels. Maybe that’s not how it is. Maybe I could’ve called you up, said, ‘Come help me do this,’ and we would’ve been okay there, but it didn’t feel like anything I could let myself do.”

“Tell me how it felt.”

She’s stroking my head, my neck. I’m so tense, my back teeth ache.

“It felt like if I tried to do that, I would ruin you. Not even that I would be doing it. That Silt would, my family, just the way it is there—where I come from ruins people. Good people. And I’d have to watch it happen. I’d be responsible for it, because I wanted you and drew you to me across all those miles. I couldn’t.”

I get my hands in her hair and kiss her. “I couldn’t.”

She smiles, but it’s the sad kind, the kind that hurts. “You were ten when Frankie was born.”

“Yeah.”

“The same age she is now.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Do you ever think about that—your sister with a baby?”

“Christ. No.”

“But it’s the same, right? If Frankie were in your shoes, if she had a baby brother born and nobody to take care of him but her—”

It gives me chills. “Don’t.”

She runs her hands up and down my arms, warming away the goose bumps. “It’s cruel even to think about, isn’t it? She’s a kid. She’s too young. But so were you.”

“I was old enough.”

“You were always as old as you had to be. That’s the part that breaks my heart.” She resettles herself on my lap, pressing closer. “How old were you when you met the Tomlinsons?”

“Sixteen.”

“How old the first time? With Mrs. Tomlinson?”

I didn’t tell her. She never asked me directly, and I avoided the subject, never wanting her to have to think about me fucking an older woman, a married woman, a woman I gave what she wanted so she’d give me what I needed.

I fucked Mrs. Tomlinson because that was what I had to do to get out of Silt.

Caroline knows it.

She’s figured it out. I can see it in her eyes.

“Baby, don’t you think—”

“How old?” she repeats.

I blow out a long exhale. “Sixteen.”

“Did you want her?”

“She was pretty. I wasn’t a virgin.”

“But she was the one who initiated it.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t have …”

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