I told myself his silence meant he didn’t care.
What if his silence is just him doing the one thing I never thought Stanley Ermington was capable of — giving me room?
I don’t fix anything today. I want to be honest about that. I don’t decide I was wrong. I don’t decide I was right. I don’t text him, and he doesn’t text me, and the day goes gray to grayer outside the window. But the certainty I had when I woke up this morning doesn’t hold anymore. And if I was wrong, then I didn’t save him last night. I just hurt us both.
I lie back on my unmade bed in the gray middle of a Saturday I don’t know how to be inside of, and I am not okay.
On my desk, propped against the base of the lamp, is the note.I’ll make you another pie.I haven’t thrown it away. Not even now, after I’ve decided we’re over.
I stare at it for a long time.
The one piece of physical proof I own that says it was real.
I leave it where it is.
Chapter 37
Stanley
I have flown a hundred times in my life and never once been scared on a plane, and I am scared on this one. I’m at the window seat, and the decision to get on a plane was made the moment I was staring at her window from my truck.
Bart Linwood got into his daughter’s head, which means he’s the one who can fix this, but a man like him can’t be convinced over a phone call or a text. I have to show up and talk to him in person.
So that’s what I’m doing. I’m going to Connecticut. Tonight. To sit in that man’s house and admit the lie and ask him, properly, for a thing I never once asked for the right way.
I’m fucking terrified.
I ran it past the Hawthorne boys before I made the flight because I don’t do something this unhinged without my brothers weighing in.
Benson said it wasn’t a bad idea — and from Benson, who measures every choice like it costs him money, not a bad idea is basically a golden ticket. Percy looked up from his stall andsaid, “You’re batshit crazy,” which is more words than Percy has said to me consecutively all season. Blue said, “That’s — yeah. That’s pretty intense, man.” Rowan, who has not given me the pie recipe yet, said, “You’re insane.”
And then every single one of them agreed it was the reasonable way to make it right.
That’s the thing. Four guys who think I’ve lost my mind unanimously agree that going to the man in person and taking the hit to his face is the honorable move. Benson walked me to the door and said the only thing that mattered. “If you’re gonna blow it up, blow it up to the right guy first.” The brotherhood I turned Halifax down for, signing off on the play that might cost me everything. I carried it out the door with me. I’m carrying it now, at thirty thousand feet, the one warm thing in a cold seat.
When I land at my connecting flight, I decide it’s time to tell my parents.
I call my dad, and he picks up on the second ring, warm, riding high, already mid-sentence.
“Cup! Perfect timing, your mother and I were just—”
“Dad,” I say, because if I don’t stop him now, he’ll keep going. “I need to tell you something, and I need you to let me get all the way through it before you say anything, because if you stop me, I’m not sure I’ll start again.”
He pauses, and the brightness goes out of his voice. “Alright. Your mother’s here, you’re on speaker. Go ahead, son.”
And I tell them.
All of it. The party. The kitchen. Gavin closing in on her, and her grabbing the nearest body, which happened to be me. The deal we struck. The rules we wrote down. The fact that none of it was ever real — that the thing they’ve been so proud of, the Thanksgiving they flew over for, started as a lie two people told to survive one party and it got blown out of proportion.
I don’t dress it up. I don’t reach for any jokes, not once, even though I can feel it sitting right there the entire time. A joke would take the edge off, the deflection that would land it softer on me. I don’t pick it up. I let it be exactly as bad as it is.
And then I tell them the other part, because it’s true, and they’ve earned the true part. That somewhere in the middle of the lie, it turned into the realest thing in my life. That I’m not telling them to be forgiven. I’m telling them because I’m done with the lie that’s hurting her now.
When I stop, there’s a silence on the line. The silence runs long and heavy. I sit in a chair facing the window, watching a plane drive by, and I make myself stay inside the silence. I don’t fill it. I don’t try to make this better. I refuse to make a joke to lighten the mood.
“So when you called me,” my dad says finally, and his voice isn’t angry, “in that hotel, and I asked if I’d overstepped.” A long breath. “That whole time, you were—”
“Yeah.”
