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And then he laughs — soft and startled, a sound I haven’t heard him make before, like it got away from him before he could decide whether to let it — and he pulls me back into him so my spine is flush to his chest and his mouth finds the nape of my neck, and he doesn’t say anything clever, doesn’t make it into a thing. He just holds on. Like I’ve handed him something and he has no intention of fumbling it.

And that’s when it comes.

All at once, cold, up through the floor of me, because it’s out now and there is no version of the next hour where it goes back in. I said it to him. Out loud, in a bed, in a house with his name on the mailbox, his heart going steady against my back and nothing between me and the open air.

I gave it away.

That’s the part I can’t take back. Not the loving him — I couldn’t help the loving him, the loving him happened to me the way weather happens to a town. The saying. The saying was a choice, and I made it, and now he has it, and the people who end up with the truest thing you’ve got are the same people who can take it with them when they go, and everyone who could leave me has left me, and I just lay down in the warm dark and handed the last one the map.

“Hey.” His voice is a low rumble against my neck. “I can hear you thinking.”

“You can’t hear thinking.”

“I can hear yours.” He presses his mouth just below my ear. “Go to sleep, Sloane. Nothing’s on fire.”

Something is, I don’t say. Something always is. You just can’t smell the smoke yet.

I don’t sleep.

He drops off the way he does, all at once, trusting, his arm heavy across me, and I lie awake in the dark and watch the ceiling of his childhood room and let myself, finally, stop performing, because there’s no one awake to perform for.

The knowing is done. It’s been done for two days; I just wouldn’t let myself look at it — and now I’ve said it out loud, which is so much worse than knowing, because knowing stays in your own chest where you can manage it, and saying puts it in someone else’s hands.

Here it is, the thing I handed him tonight: I love him. That’s not in question anymore, hasn’t been for weeks, and as of an hour ago it isn’t a secret either. I love him and his family is kind and his mother teared up and his father sees through people and his sisters have planned my next visit and the house has a name and the plates have no chips and none of it, none of it, changes the thing the nine-year-old me has known since the powder room, since the gravel drive, since the named mailbox: that I am a girl from a floor that opens, standing in a house that’s never once shifted under anyone, and that the distance between those two facts is not a thing love closes. It’s a thing love postpones. For a while. For as long as the season’s good and the boy’s in love and nobody’s looked too hard at the seams.

And then something happens — there’s always a something, the floor always finds its reason — and the postponement ends, and the gap is still there, exactly as wide as it always was, except now you’ve let yourself believe, and the believing is the part that kills you.

I’m not going to wait for the something. That’s the decision I make, somewhere around three in the morning, in the perfect quiet, in his arms. I’ve spent my whole life leaving rooms before the floor goes. I’m good at it. It’s the one mercy I know how to give myself.

I said it tonight. I meant it. And I’m going to leave anyway — because in my experience, meaning it has never once been the thing that let me stay.

I just have to figure out how to leave this one.

I don’t know yet that I won’t have to figure it out. That in four days a different floor is going to open all on its own — that my father, two hundred miles away in the town I won’t name, is about to hand me the reason I’ve been waiting for, gift-wrapped, the way he handed me everything else.

I don’t know that yet.

For now I just lie in the warm and the dark and memorize the weight of Beau’s arm, and I let myself have the last of it, and I do not cry, because I don’t, because I never.

It’s so quiet in this house.

You’d think a house this certain would be the safest place in the world to fall asleep.

I’ve never felt less safe anywhere in my life.

Chapter 26

Beau

My mother has been saying goodbye to Sloane for eleven minutes.

I know it’s eleven because I clocked the stove the first time she said it, and I clocked it again just now, and somewhere in between she’s hugged Sloane twice, fed her a cinnamon roll “for the drive,” and pressed a Tupperware into her hands that Sloane keeps trying, politely, to give back.

“Mom.” I’m in the kitchen doorway with both our bags already on my shoulder. “It’s two hours.”

“Then she’ll want the rolls.” My mother doesn’t look at me. She’s got both of Sloane’s hands inside both of hers now, the way she holds things she’s decided are hers.

Sloane catches my eye over the top of my mother’s head. She’s doing the polite face. The one that means get me out of here and don’t you dare at the exact same time.