“What? No!” I insist. “It’s ... them. They’re trying too hard, and ...”
“They’re great,” Luke tells me, placing his hand on my knee and squeezing. Tingles spread all the way up my thigh, but I try to act normal.
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not,” he says.
At the end of the night, when I walk him to his car, he’s still sticking to his story.
“Listen, you’re their only child. They want to make sure you don’t end up with a deadbeat.”
“They only started caring about that yesterday.”
I’m surprised to hear the words leave my mouth, but before I can backtrack, Luke says, “That’s what’s bothering you, huh?”
“What?”
“Their ... new interest.”
I shrug. “It’s nice that they care—it really is—I know lots of people have parents who suck, but it’s also ... new. I feel a bit like I’m in an alternate reality.”
“I get it,” Luke says, surprising me. “I’m glad they’re here now, though. That counts for something.”
“I know,” I say, but I’m still uneasy about the whole night. It felt like all four of us, my parents especially, were acting. Like they were trying so hard to pretend the past never happened, trying to pretend things have always been this way.
Maybe that’s what’s bothering me—that we’ve never actually addressed it, this change. There was no moment when my mom sat me down and saidI’m feeling betterorI’m sorryor tried to explain about the past eighteen years. It feels like I’m the only one with any real memory of how things used to be.
“Well, thanks for coming and being such a good sport,” I say now.
“If I’d been in Winchester when we ... before,” he says awkwardly, “I’d have come a lot sooner. I’ve always wanted to know your parents better.”
“Well, now you know them,” I say, trying to be comical.
“Maybe it would have helped solve some of the mystery.”
“What mystery?” I ask, confused.
“You. You were this gorgeous, brilliant girl who just appeared in our lives one day. Out of nowhere.”
I guffaw. “I was never a mystery.”
“To us, you were.”
Luke climbs into his car then and drives away, but I’m still going over his last words.
To us, you were.
Who is us?
Him? Mel? Rowan?
For some reason it feels like he meant Ro and him, and I wonder now if they used to talk about me when I went home at night. What they thought about me.
I always thought I was such an open book, perhaps a little too open. I wonder what Luke could possibly have wanted to know about me that he didn’t.
And why didn’t he just ask when we got together?
Maybe he didn’t have enough time.
