"It rotates. Every few weeks." I mute the television. "Why?"
She picks up her mug and walks quickly to the kitchen. I'm up in a second and following her.
"Why?" I insist again, but no matter how much I search her face she won't give me anything.
"So I know when to come by." Her voice is so low and small that I take a step back, because I've never seen her like this, never heard her like this.
"For your dad. I still want to come see him. I want to make sure I'm not..." She trails off. Starts again. "I was thinking it'd be easier if I knew when you weren't here."
"Why?" I repeat before I can remove the emotion from it.
She looks up, and I wish she hadn't. Her face is tired, open and honest in a way she usually keeps tucked away where I can't see it. It isn't the smile she deploys like a weapon, the one that says she knows exactly what she's doing and is enjoying every second.
"It's getting harder, Callahan." She swallows. "Being here. With you, I mean. That's all."
She picks up her bag and says something about telling Dad goodbye on her way out. I hear the back door, then his voice, then hers, then the front door a few minutes later.
I don't move from my spot. She wanted to know when I wasn't here. She's building her schedule around my absence just as I did with her when she first moved here. While I have spent the last months building everything around her presence because the alternative is harder to bear.
It feels like a closed door. I stand there for a long timeafter she leaves and do the thing I'm least good at: being honest with myself.
I'd told myself this was manageable. The visits, the dinners, the playlists still running in my car, the hair clip that's been on my bathroom counter for so long I stopped seeing it. Manageable. Fine. A problem I was handling.
But the idea of coming home on a random day and knowing she wouldn't be here, knowing she'd checked the schedule, found my name, and come on another day instead, is all wrong.
That isn't manageable at all. I press the heels of my hands against my eyes and sit in my quiet living room, trying to locate a version of this that doesn't feel like it's eating me from the inside.
Outside the workshop light is still on, and I can hear Dad in there. The low sound of the radio, the familiar rhythm of him and his one-sided conversation with my dead mother on a warm evening in May.
Everything exactly as it was. Except it isn’t.
12
LILY
Everything I have done since the age of ten has been done with too much energy and force.
When my parents left me so easily, with great relief, it broke me. I never showed it, but it broke me. It hurt me and it hasn't stopped hurting since.
I have always done well in school, making sure Rome passed on the news of my achievements in the hope that they would be proud and come back for me. They never did, instead making me feel like I didn't do enough. LikeIwasn't enough.
Johns Hopkins and Stanford. Johns Hopkins and Stanford, and that is it. The only two schools that ever earned me the slightest bit of attention from them. Now they have become an obsession I have to reach. They were also the reason I pushed myself so hard that I burned out at the age of twenty-one.
I have been working on my medical school applications and choosing to go to the town library. At home, I get easilydistracted, but the days I go to the library I see it as working hours.
At this point my time in Harbor Hill is not as great as it started. Yes, I am resting. Yes, I am seeing my brother and everyone I love every day. Yes, I am keeping up with my studies as much as I can.
But also, very much yes, I did exactly what I shouldn't and let Callahan take too much space in my life. Space he didn't even ask for.
So I decided to apologize to him and put an end to all of this. It took me longer than it should have. I spent two weeks convincing myself I had nothing to apologize for, telling myself I was friendly, fun, the kind of person who shows up and makes everything lighter. If Callahan Holt couldn't handle that, it was a him problem.
Except it wasn't, and I knew it wasn't, and at some point I couldn't keep lying to myself.
The man had made it as clear as a person could without using actual words that this was not something he wanted. He left rooms and sat across from me at tables and fixed his eyes on anything that wasn't my face.
I had chosen to interpret all of that as a challenge. I'm starting to understand it was just a man asking me to leave him the hell alone.
He hadn't once been cruel about it, but he had been clear. He didn't want this, and I hadn't listened, and that was on me.
