I felt Paige go still beside me. Her hand had been resting on the railing next to mine, and I felt her fingers tighten, just barely, against the wood.
I turned my head and looked at her.
Her face was already arranging itself back into the warm sister face. But she had not been quite fast enough. There had been something there for a fraction of a second—a tightness around her mouth, a flicker behind her eyes, the small private rearranging she did when she was thinking about something she wasn’t going to say out loud. It was there, and then it was gone. By the time I was actually looking at her, she was looking back at me with an expression that was almost convincing.
“Yeah,” she said. “Good. That’s good.”
“Paige. What was that look?”
“What look?”
“That look you just had.”
“I didn’t have a look, Cara.”
“You absolutely had a look.”
She turned back to face the lawn and took a small breath, and I watched her decide what she was going to say next. Paige was a careful person about a lot of things, but she was not usually careful with me. Tonight, she was being careful with me. It wasthe carefulness that made my stomach do the small, uncertain thing it had not done all evening.
“I just don’t trust him,” she said finally. “His going quiet doesn’t make me trust him more. It makes me trust him less. Quiet isn’t the same as gone. That’s all. He’s a creep. Jerks like him aren’t known for giving up that easily. Just a feeling.”
“Okay,” I said.
Quiet—the word landed somewhere it hadn’t before. Quiet isn’t the same as gone. I looked out at the lawn, at my sisters moving through the warm evening, at the familiar geography of a place I’d loved my whole life, and felt the edges of something I’d been deliberately not examining start to come into focus. I’d been relieved this week. I’d let myself exhale, let myself enjoy Eric’s absence.
Paige, who had been running a bar in this town for years and had seen more of human behavior than most people twice her age, didn’t think it was resolution.
I turned that over quietly and didn’t like what it felt like.
“Okay,” I said again, softer this time, and meant something different by it.
“That’s all, Cara. I promise.” She bumped her shoulder against mine again. “I don’t want you thinking about him at all. I want you to think about Friday. I want you to think about Jasper. I want you to think about what you’re going to wear and what shoes go with it, and whether you should put a little extra mascara on. I want you to think about a good man who is choosing you. Okay? Promise me again.”
“Okay.” I laughed. “I promise.”
“Now go say goodnight to Grandma,” Paige said, in the lighter voice she used to close a conversation, “before she puts another piece of cobbler on your plate. Because if she does, you’re not going to be able to walk to your car.”
I said my goodbyes—it took twenty minutes because every single person had to hug me twice. Grandma pressed a foil-wrapped square of cobbler into my hand as I left, because she could not let me leave without leftovers. Lucy hugged me hard and whisperedI love you; Friday is going to be amazinginto my hair. Eliza hugged me with both arms wrapped all the way around my back, like she’d done since she was small. Piper kissed the top of my head. Paige hugged me last and held on longer than usual.
I walked to the gravel turnout with Grandpa’s hand on my shoulder and tried to work out what had just happened in there.
I’d been on dates before. Not many, not recently, but enough that my family had some frame of reference. Enough that this shouldn’t have felt like a collective event, like something worth pulling me aside about, like something that required two hugs from everyone and a foil-wrapped square of cobbler. I wasn’t a teenager. I wasn’t someone who had never done this before.
But somewhere between Piper asking me three times if I had a good outfit and Lucy cornering me by the lemonade and Grandma holding both my hands and looking at my face like she was reading something she’d been waiting a long time to find there—I’d started to understand that they weren’t reacting to the date. They were reacting tome.
I thought about the last person I’d dated seriously. I’d been present for that relationship in the technical sense—showed up, tried, went through the motions with genuine enough intention. But I’d been careful. I’d been measured. I’d been, if I was honest, a little bit absent in all the ways that mattered most. And then he’d turned out to be a lying cheater, so there’s that.
I didn’t feel absent right now. I felt the opposite of absent. I felt like every nerve I had was awake and paying attention and slightly terrified, and apparently that was visible from across a porch because my entire family had spent the evening lookingat me like I was someone they recognized but hadn’t seen in a while.
The pugs followed us down the gravel. Lois, the chocolate lab, followed the pugs. The goose, somewhere in the dark, honked once at something I couldn’t see.
At my car, Grandpa squeezed my shoulder one last time. “Drive safe, kiddo.”
“I will, Grandpa.”
“Tell whoever he is I want to meet him sometime.”
I went still. I looked up at my grandfather in the soft yellow porch light. He was looking at the gravel between our feet, not at me, in the careful way he looked at gravel when he was saying something he’d been working up to all night.
