Page 134 of These Secret Years

“You really can’t go to the police?”

“They’ll just say I wanted it. Apparently there’s video of me not saying no, so… Anyway, can we drop it? You know what happened. I definitely don’t want to get into details because I feel like I’m a walking billboard of the details, and I really preferred what we were talking about in the kitchen. Can we get back to that?”

Okay, fuck, that was a lot to process. I pick up my own coffee. “You’re gonna need to give me a minute.”

“Sure,” he says, almost brightly. Well, brightly for him.

He gives me something like a minute before he starts talking again. “Being here with you like this reminds me of that first summer in all those houses. Remember?”

Of course, I remember. “Yeah, I do.”

“I was so miserable then. Such a dick to you. I don’t know why I was like that. I don’t think that’s how I really am. I don’t know. Hey, maybe I get to find out now.”

“Now that it’s over, you mean?” Sorry, I can’t let it go yet.

He sighs and puts his head on my shoulder. The smell of his hair takes me back to last spring in the woods. Warm vanilla. Cozy like cashmere and just as soft. I shut my eyes and breathe him in.

“Yes,” he says. “Now that it’s finally over.”

Chapter Thirty

SULLIVAN

It’s a very long drive home, but somehow I manage to fall asleep within minutes of getting on the highway, and I stay asleep until Knight is nudging me awake, asking for directions to get to my house. We’re on Main Street in Sunrise Point and there’s drool on my chin, which I wipe, mortified. I’d wanted to talk to him. We were supposed to have so many uninterrupted hours together, and there was so much I’d been wanting to ask him, to learn about him, but all I remember is him offering me his hand, and after I took it in mine, that was it. And now we’re home.

I don’t want to be here.

The story I’ve made up in my head to tell my mom about why I look the way I do is that I was on a hike with friends, hit a rock with my shoe and pitched forward. I’d bent my wrist too far back trying to catch myself, it broke, and then I face planted.

The kind of break I have is consistent with falling hard and trying to catch myself. It was the surgeon who’d put the idea in my head when he was explaining the X-ray. While a fall is such a trite excuse for an abusive man, it is, in fact, plausible. And the friends thing holds up, too, since I do actually have a few. One is even kind and amazing enough to drive me all the way home when he already had a flight scheduled.

My mom’s shitty house has a fresh coat of white paint on it, and it doesn’t look quite as shitty. There are even a few strands of Christmas lights strung up, which she probably did for my sister.

I stare at the windows all lit up because it’s just now getting dark outside. “Sorry I was bad company.”

“You obviously needed the rest,” Knight says. “How long are you planning to stay?”

I’m still staring at the house, but I realize I don’t know the answer to his question. “I guess I haven’t thought about it.”

I feel his eyes on me. My subconscious brain knows what he’s probably thinking. That I’m a mess, and I don’t know what to do with myself, and yeah. But my conscious brain finally responds with, “I’m gonna play it by ear.” I can do that now. I can decide how long I’m staying all by myself.

When he’s helping me get my bag out of the trunk, he whispers a curse. “Shit, we forgot your violin.”

“No,” I say. “I can’t play, and anyway—I don’t have one anymore.”

“What?”

I wince, remembering the way I limped out of Adrian’s house with only my bag, my phone, and my swollen wrist held tightly to my chest before dawn had even broken. I’d been crying, sniveling like a pathetic toddler, and worried way too much about my hand. “It wasn’t mine. It’s no big deal,” I tell Knight. “I don’t need it.”

“Right now maybe, but…”

“Hey, it’s okay. Violins are everywhere at school. When I can play again, I’ll rent one or something.”

“Sullivan, I⁠—”

“Stop. It’s fine.” And I tell him the thing I keep telling myself to make it all go away, to put the past in the past. “It’s over, remember? I’m free.”

“Can I hug you?”