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“You shouldn’t have to be good with him.” His jaw’s working. “I want—” He stops, looks at the strapped arm, the line in his hand, the whole useless wreck of himself, and the want goes nowhere, and I watch him learn in real time that there’s nothing he can do about Evan from a hospital bed, and I watch what that does to a person built to do something. “I hate this,” he says, quiet. “I hate that I can’t even⁠—”

“I didn’t tell you so you’d fix it.” I lean forward. “I told you because you asked the real version. That’s all. That’s the whole gift.”

He breathes out slow and lets the want go, which I know costs him, because letting things go is the one move he’s worse at than I am at staying.

“Your ex came into the shop too,” I say. “Bella. To get a look at me. And she told me the opposite of what Evan told me — she said you’d never have a problem keeping me, that the problem was I’d never let myself be kept. That I’m built to bolt.” I make myself hold his eyes. “She was kinder about it than my own friends have been. She said she hoped she’d called it wrong.”

“Did she?” It’s careful. He’s watching me the way he watches a play develop down the ice, waiting to see where I’m going to put the puck.

“She said you looked at me in the bar in October like the whole room could see it. That she watched you do it from the door.” I don’t know why I give him that part; it’s just the one that’s been lodged under my ribs for two days. “She said she’d have killed to be looked at like that.”

He’s quiet a second. “Didn’t know I was doing it.” Then, slower, the late way he arrives at things: “That’s a lie. I knew. I figured if I never said it out loud, you couldn’t use it as a reason to go.” A breath. “Worked great, that plan.”

“And my father got convicted.” I say it the way you read the last line off a page you’ve already decided not to feel. “Aggravated assault. Two to five, state, in Pennsylvania — parole at the two if he behaves himself, which he won’t. Danny called it in on a Wednesday. And I felt that the same as I felt Yale, Beau. Which is to say barely. Which is to say everything in me has gone numb except the one thing I can’t get numb about no matter how I try, and I’m looking right at it, and it’s lying in a bed with a heart its sister drew on the door.”

“Where were you when Danny called?” He asks it quiet. “Were you alone?”

“I was pricing a dead man’s paperbacks.”

“Sloane.” Something flinches in him that has nothing to do with the shoulder. “You found out your father was going to prison alone, over a cash register, and you didn’t call a single person.”

“Who would I have called?”

“Me.” Simple. “Six weeks ago you’d have called me before Danny got the next word out. You know you would’ve.”

The room goes very quiet. The parade rolls by without a sound.

“Beau.” My voice isn’t doing what I tell it anymore. “Leaving was the mistake.”

He goes still.

“Leaving you.” It comes out without the contraction and I let it. “I told myself I was protecting you. From the holding cells and the wreckage and the version of my life that backs into a good room like a truck and breaks everything in it. I built the entire leaving on that. And then your shoulder went and your life broke anyway, in a corner, with me two miles off keeping you safe from exactly nothing — and I finally understood I’d had it backwards the whole time. You can’t stand far enough from a person to keep the world off them. All the standing-far does is make sure you’re not there when it lands.”

And then it happens — the thing that has not happened in front of another living person since I was eleven years old. My eyes go and I can’t stop them. It isn’t loud. It’s just water, finally, after years of a dry well, and it frightens me more than anything Evan ever did, because I don’t know the mechanism and I can’t find the controls. I sit in the chair and let it come, and Beau watches me do the one thing he’s never once seen me do, and his own face goes with it — the jaw, the breath — and the hand that isn’t strapped down comes off the blanket toward me and stops halfway, because he’s not sure he’s allowed.

“Sloane.” His voice is wrecked. “Come here. Please.”

“I don’t have the right to the chair.” I get it out through the thing happening to my face. “I left. You don’t get to leave and then turn up and⁠—”

“Stop.” Not loud. Just finished. “You think I keep a list of who’s allowed in the chair?” He breathes out slow, the way he does before the things that cost him. “I’ll wait for you. However long it takes you to believe you’re allowed to stay somewhere good. I’m not going anywhere — shoulder made real sure of that, the universe has a sense of humor — but even if it hadn’t. You’re the only thing I ever chose for myself in fifteen years. I’m not going to un-choose it because you got scared and ran. You’re all I want, Sloane. You were the whole time. I just never learned how to say it out loud, and then you were gone, and I learned it talking to the dark.”

There it is. Said plain, no captain anywhere in it, the truest sentence anybody has ever handed me — and I’m crying in a hospital chair on Christmas morning with my entire life rearranged around the wrong fear, and the door is open, and his hand is waiting halfway across the blanket, and I haven’t taken it.

But I’ve stopped looking for the exit.

That’s the thing I notice, sitting there with my face wet and his hand open between us. For the first time in ten years I’m in a room that scares me down to the floor and I’m not counting the doors. I’m not measuring the distance to one. I’m looking at him. I’m just looking at him, and I’m staying in the chair, and staying isn’t the same as crossing the room — not yet, not all the way — but it is the first time in my whole life the staying has felt like the brave thing and the leaving has looked like exactly the small frightened cowardice it always was.

His hand stays open on the blanket. I reach out — not for his hand, not yet, I don’t have that in me this minute — and I close my fingers around the cold rail of the bed instead, the nearest solid thing, and I hold on to that, and I don’t get up, and I don’t run.

Chapter 33

Beau

They cut me loose the thirtieth of December, once the infection finally lost interest, with a bag of pills, a sling I’m supposed to treat like a personality, and a list of things I can’t do that runs longer than the list of things I can.

Sloane’s in the chair.

She’s been in the chair every day. I keep trying to make that sound like less than it is, and I can’t. Every day, somewhere between her shift at the shop and whatever finals the department let her push into January, the door does its thing and she’s there. Two coffees. A paperback she pretends she’s reading.