I dial Hank’s number without really thinking. He’s an early riser, like me, probably already at the restaurant or on his way.
“Hey, bug,” he answers, and the sound of his voice almost has me crying. I swallow over the lump in my throat, over everything that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours, the last week, the last five, ten years.
“Hey,” I say. I balance my coffee on the arm of the chair and wrap my arm around my knees. “Just wanted to check in.”
“You okay?” he asks, and I think back on all the times he’s asked me that, even before I moved in with him, when he’d call me every Wednesday like clockwork, checking in. When he was looking out for me before I even knew I needed it. I think about all the times I dealt in half answers too—not just with him, but with everyone.I’m fine, work is great, everything is going according to planeven when the truth wasI’m lonely, I don’t know what I want anymore, I think my heart is broken and I can’t tell anyone about the person who made it possible to break in the first place.
“I’m—” I start, head swaying a little under the weight of it all. I feel like I’ve been swimming for days, trying to keep not only myself but this trip, this group, my feelings for Everett above water, and I’ve only now crawled onto shore, my limbs weak. Maybe I’ve been swimming like that for years. “I’m really tired,” I finally say, so quietly I’m not sure Hank can even hear it.
He doesn’t say anything. I can hear the creak of the ancient office chair he won’t get rid of, no matter how many times I try to convince him to buy a new, ergonomic one, and I know he’s waiting me out.
“Why did you never get married?” I ask him, almost at the same time the question occurs to me.
“Hmm,” he murmurs, thinking it over. “I just never met the right person, I guess.”
“Did you want to?”
“I think if I found someone I wanted to spend that time with, who made life feel a little lighter, sure,” he says, which strikes me as odd. Hank only ever makes life feel lighter for me. But then, I think, maybe that’s it. We’re so much the same. There would need to be someone who could lighten the load for him, even when it seemed like he didn’t need it. Even when he was projecting to the world that everything was wonderful. But it couldn’t have been easy, suddenly raising a teenager, starting a family he’d never planned for.
“Bug,” Hank says after a while. “I think that if you want that person, you should find them. I don’t think you need to keep carrying everything on your own.”
It’s like he’s reached through the phone, squeezed a hand around my shoulder. We might not talk like this all that often, but part of it is because we’ve never had to. Even if we didn’t say it out loud, it didn’t mean we didn’t understand each other.
“I love your mother, don’t get me wrong,” Hank says, which surprises me. He’s avoided talking about my parents with me for most of my life. “But there’s a lot of me that’s still mad ashell at her.” My breath seizes in my chest at this. “I just never want what they did to make you feel like you don’t deserve all the love in the world.”
“Hank,” I say. “I love you for saying that, but... I had the best. No one could have raised me better than you,” I tell him. I loved it all—the restaurant, of course, but every trip we took together, every tradition we made, the way he taught me how to build a family for myself. How he always gave me a place that felt like home when the concept had been ripped so quickly and cleanly away.
I think about the girl who told Everett on a rain-soaked pier that she’d dealt with it, that there was no need to rehash anything. The version of me who believed he agreed with me, when really, he wore his own pain even more obviously than I did: in every easy laugh, everysomething like that, every quick, casual response. And I suppose it was true that we’d understood each other from the very beginning, but now I know it wasn’t in the way I’d originally thought. It wasn’t that the things that had happened to us didn’t matter. It was that we both had the same scars in us, and that we both held people at arm’s length because of them. Except for maybe each other, for a brief, beautiful moment.
“I’m proud of you,” Hank says after a minute, and I feel a familiar pang of guilt slice through me, making me wince.
“Hank,” I say. “Hypothetically, how would you feel if I... were considering a career change?”
“Well, I think it’s a little late for medical school,” he says, prompting a small laugh out of me. Hank is silent for a moment, the creak of his chair the only sound before he clears his throat and says, almost guiltily, “But I think you might be asking me about the restaurant. And maybe... a cookbook?”
My shoulders drop. “You knew?”
I can hear him shift on his end of the line, sitting up straighter. “You might be good at keeping a secret, but that best friend of yours isn’t.”
Something cracks in my chest, and I pull my knees tighter in, some protective layer between me and the implication of Hank’s words. “Laurel told you?” I ask, throat going dry.
“She’s already planning,” he says. “Wanted to make sure my schedule was cleared in July. Two years from now. Don’t tell her I told you. It’s supposed to be a surprise. Long time to keep a surprise secret, in my opinion.”
I shake my head, Hank’s confession not lining up with the conversation I had with Laurel last night. With how our friendship has been for a long time now, really. I can’t blame her for this week, even if all I’ve wanted is for her to tell me how she’s really feeling, to tell me what happened between her and Stephen. She’s allowed to be distant, sad, if that’s what she needs. But last night, she made it clear she doesn’t need any of us anymore.
“I’m honestly kind of shocked she told you,” I tell Hank.
“Why?” he asks. “This is exactly the kind of thing Laurel would do.”
“The kind of thing she used to do,” I say. “The kind of thing I used to do for her.”
“I don’t know about ‘used to,’” Hank says. “Didn’t you plan this whole week?”
I hear Davi’s voice, Laurel’s, in my mind.That she texted me first because I’m the best at planning.And suddenly it seems so stupid that I was ever angry about that. Of course Laurel called me—not because I’m the most reliable, but because I’m the person who could plan itbestfor her. Who would be the one to try her hardest to re-create this week just as it was, even if I’d failed spectacularly along the way. I’d thought I wasdoing it to repair something we’d lost, to prove to everyone we still need each other, but for Laurel, it was comfort.You’re the one who taught me that, she said last night. It had felt like a slap to the face, but now I wonder if it was Laurel doing the same thing I always have: trying to control the narrative as a way to protect all the pain in her.
And I’d spent half of the week arguing with Everett and the other half lying to her, being annoyed with her, trying to pull something out of her she wasn’t ready to hand over to me yet.
“We got in a horrible fight last night,” I say to Hank, squinting out at the water, gray in the early-morning light. I try hard not to let my blurry vision give way to anything, but as soon as I blink it does, my voice coming out hoarse. “I don’t know if we’ll be doing this kind of thing for each other anymore after this week.”
