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Margo is quiet for a second, which for Margo is a full monologue. “Maybe,” she says. “I love you, and I’m not going to sit here and call you a coward.” She says it plain, the way she says everything. “You’ve survived things that would’ve folded me in half, and I won’t pretend I know what they weigh. But I watched you be happy this fall. I’d never once seen it on you before. I didn’t know that’s what your face did.” She stands and fixes my collar, because Margo cannot leave a room without straightening something in it. “Just don’t decide it’s too late while it’s still only hard. Those aren’t the same thing. You’re the one who taught me that.”

I don’t answer her. Outside, the snow keeps coming down through the light, and across town a phone I am not going to call sits face down on a counter, and I sit on a borrowed bed with my whole body pointed at the door, holding the one thing I sacrificed everything to protect — which turned out to be the wrong thing entirely, and didn’t even have the decency to hurt.

Chapter 32

Sloane

The call comes at eight on Christmas morning, and the screen says Liv, but it’s both of them, because the Sorensen twins have never once in their lives operated a cellphone separately.

“Sloane. Don’t hang up.” Liv, breathless, and behind her a second voice going give it here, give it— “It’s Liv. And Britta’s here. Don’t hang up, okay?”

“I’m not hanging up.” I’m already upright, already reaching for the lamp, because a Christmas-morning call from a number I saved at a dinner table in Greenwich five weeks ago is not one you let ring out.

“The shoulder got infected.” Britta’s wrestled the phone away; I can hear the handoff happen. “After the surgery. They readmitted him three days ago, he’s on a drip for it, and they’re saying if it doesn’t turn around they have to go back in and clean it out, which is a whole other thing, it pushes everything later, and he just—” Her voice goes down the middle the way a sixteen-year-old’s does when it’s been brave too many days running. “He won’t talk to us, Sloane.”

“He talks to the nurses.” Liv again, having won the phone back. “He says all the right things to Mom. But he’s gone somewhere behind his face and we can’t get to him, and Dad keeps saying give him time, and Mom’s gone quiet, and it’s Christmas, and we didn’t know who else to⁠—”

“We thought of you.” Britta, from somewhere near the speaker. Plain, the way her brother says plain things. “Everybody wants something off him. You never did. We thought maybe you could get in.”

“How bad is he?” I’m asking a sixteen-year-old to put a number on her brother’s despair, which isn’t fair, but they called me at eight on Christmas, so fairness already left the building.

A silence with two people breathing in it. “He told us Merry Christmas this morning,” Liv says finally, “and he said it like a guy reading it off a card. Beau doesn’t read things off cards. He’s reading everything off cards now. That’s why we called.”

I should say no. I have a clean speech for it, a good one, I could read it cold off the page: I’m the one who left, I forfeited the chair, you don’t get to walk out of a person and then walk back into his worst morning like you kept a key.

It’s airtight. It’s true. I’m pulling my coat on over my pajamas while I rehearse it.

“Text me the room number,” I say.

Haven on Christmas morning is the emptiest a town gets — every shop dark, Margaret’s Books dark below me as I lock the street door, one strand of somebody’s lights still burning over the shuttered hardware store. I take Margaret’s Volvo, because the alternative is twenty minutes on foot to talk myself out of it, and I have learned the hard way this month that given twenty minutes I will always, always talk myself out of it. The radio is wall-to-wall carols. I turn it off and drive to the sound of the heater and my own bad nerve.

Annika finds me before I find the room. She comes out of it with two paper cups of coffee, and she stops dead at the sight of me at the end of the hall, and her whole face does a thing I’m not braced for, which is relief — plain, undressed relief, the kind people don’t bother to make presentable.

“Oh,” she says. “Oh, you came.”

And then she’s crossing the hall and she has both arms around me before I can assemble anything to do with mine, and I do the thing I do, the freezing, standing very straight inside a person’s kindness like it’s a coat cut for somebody else. Annika Sorensen holds on anyway. The whole family holds on like nobody ever taught them you’re supposed to be the one to let go first.

“He carries your coffee order around in his head, you know,” she says into my hair, not letting go yet. “The bergamot. The too-hot thing. He told me about it at Thanksgiving like it was a state secret — my son, who cannot reliably remember the name of his own dentist.” She breathes out. “I have not heard him say a true sentence in nine days. I am hoping he has one left in him for you.”

“Thank you.” She pulls back and keeps her hands on my arms and looks at me, and whatever she finds makes her mouth go soft and sad. “You’re not eating either, are you. The two of you. A matched set.” She doesn’t wait for the lie. “Liv. Britta. Come. We are going to go find your father something that resembles breakfast, and we are going to take a long time about it.”

The twins surface from the room and there’s a tangle of arms I don’t start and can’t get out of and don’t entirely want to. Britta’s eyes are wet; Liv’s jaw is set in the exact line her brother’s takes. Annika reads the hallway in one second flat and herds them toward the elevators, and at the turn she looks back.

“He’s angry, Sloane. Not at you — at all of it. Don’t let the angry fool you into thinking it’s the top layer.” Then they’re gone, and it’s just me and a door with his name in dry-erase on a little whiteboard, SORENSEN, B, and a lopsided heart drawn next to it that could only be Britta.

I go in.

He’s smaller. That’s the first thing, and it’s a lie — he’s exactly the size he’s always been, six foot three of him folded into a bed that wasn’t built with him in mind — but everything that makes him fill a room is switched off, and without it he’s just a big, tired boy with a line taped into the back of one hand and his arm strapped down across his chest. The gray light does him no favors. There’s a meal tray he hasn’t touched. The TV’s on with no sound, a parade somewhere warm and far away.

I stand in the door and the last wall I had goes over without a sound, the way a set strikes — one second it’s a whole room you believed in, the next it’s flat and dust and open air.

“Beau.”

His eyes open. It takes him a second to find me, and when he does, he doesn’t reach for a single one of his faces. That’s how I know how bad it is. Beau Sorensen has an expression ready for everyone who’s ever walked toward him, and he doesn’t put one on for me. He just looks at me like I’m a thing he made himself stop wanting.

“Hey.” Rough, unused. “What are you—” He stops, wets his lip. “What are you doing here, Sloane?”

Gentle. Not an accusation. That’s worse than an accusation.