Except it's not going to end. Not for me. I know that now, sitting at my mother's table with Josie's knee against mine. I'm just the only one at this table who knows there was ever a lie to dismantle, and I'm starting to wonder if I'm dismantling anything at all.
“You've gone quiet,” Josie says, low, just to me, while my mother and Gemma argue about whether the goats count as grandchildren.
“I'm fine.”
“You're doing a face.”
“I don't have faces.”
“You have one face. It's doing it now.” Her voice drops further. Her hand finds my knee under the table, light, there and gone. “Hey. You okay?”
And that's the part that gets me. Not the lie holding. Not my mother's joy. The fact that in the middle of a table full of people she's supposed to be performing for, Josie Porter looked overand saw that something was wrong with me, and the first thing she did was check.
Nobody checks on me. I'm the one who checks. That's the whole arrangement of my life.
Her scent shifts when she's worried, I've learned that this week, goes a little sharper at the edges, and it's doing it now, on my account, and the only thing in my head is putting it right. Everything else can wait. That one can't.
“I'm okay,” I tell her, and for once it isn't the flat deflection, it's just true, because she asked. “Eat your trifle. You made it, you should suffer it with the rest of us.”
She laughs, surprised, that real one, and across the table Gemma's eyes flick to me, sharp and knowing, and I don't even care.
Gemma cornersme in the pantry while I'm getting the second bottle of wine, exactly as forecast.
“So that's real,” she says. Not a question. She says it low, the way she used to tell me which kids at school were lying. “I watched her all through dinner, Finn. The way she turns toward you without checking first. The way she goes looking for your face every time something's funny. That's not a woman on her best behavior for the family. That's a woman who's already gone, whether she's said it to herself yet or not.”
“Gem.”
“I've watched you hold her hand in public all week like it's a press conference, Finn, all stiff and careful, the whole Hollow taking notes.” She crosses her arms. “That, in there, tonight? That wasn't careful. You couldn't take your eyes off her, and you didn't even know you were doing it.”
“I don't know what that means.”
“You do.” My sister, who has spent ten years being unreadable about exactly one subject, looks at me with more tenderness than she usually spends in a month. “I know what it looks like when somebody's in it and won't say. I see it in the mirror most mornings.”
And there it is, the thing about Gemma nobody in this family says out loud. My little sister, who reads every animal and every anxious owner who comes through her clinic, who missed her calling as a mind reader by about an inch, has been carrying something for years and set it down for exactly no one.
“Gem.” The big-brother thing comes up my throat before I can stop it, the one that's been getting me in trouble with her since she was born. “In the mirror. Is there something you're not telling me?”
“Nope.” She holds up a hand, flat and final, the Morrow move, the one she learned off me. “We are not doing mine tonight. Mine stays in the mirror. Tonight's about the woman out there who's gone for you and hasn't figured out you're gone right back.”
I don't have a flat last word for that. Because she's right, and because I just watched my sister do to me the exact thing I've been doing to everyone for six years, and it's a lot uglier from this side.
“Does she know?” Gemma asks. “How far gone you are?”
“It's complicated.”
“It always is, with you.” She takes the wine out of my hands, because apparently nobody in this family trusts me to carry beverages tonight. “Tell her, Finn. Whatever the complicated thing is. Tell her before the complicated thing tells her for you.” She heads for the door, then stops. “She's good. I like her. Mom's not wrong, which I will deny saying.”
She goes back out to the warm loud kitchen and leaves me standing in the pantry holding nothing, in the house I grew upin, having just been told to do the one thing I have spent my whole life not doing, by the one person who'd know.
Through the door I can hear Josie laughing at something my mother said. Easy. Like she fits.
Six days. And I'm starting to think the clean exit I bargained for is the stupidest deal I've ever made.
Chapter 17
Logan
Ihave loved Josie Porter for a lot longer than anyone in this town thinks I have, and tonight I'm doing the one thing I have never once done about it.
