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Then: “Thank you for telling me.”

That’s all. Not I’m sorry and not that must have been so hard. Just thank you. Like I handed him something real and he received it.

“I built my whole life on that. The corkboard. The LSAT prep. The cheerleading and the pre-law and the color-coding. All of it is just — it’s the same reflex I developed when I was eight years old. Be perfect. Be easy. Don’t need things. Don’t make waves. And it works. It has always worked. My parents love me. My friends think I have my life handled. I have my life handled.” I exhale. “It’s just — it costs something. It has always cost something, and nobody has ever seen the bill except my therapist, and I’ve been — I’m very good at the bill. I’ve been paying it for years.”

Theo hasn’t moved. His heartbeat under my ear is steady.

“Maddison will never pay that bill,” I say. “She’s going to have a baby, and my parents are going to help her, and she’s going to say something at the wrong moment and hurt someone and not know she did it, and she’ll never once ask herself whether she’s being easy enough, or good enough, or — she’ll just live. She’ll just take up her space and live.” I pause. “And I know that’s healthier. I know, clinically, that’s a healthier way to be a person. My therapist and I have been workshopping it for two years. It’s just —” My voice goes quiet. “Tonight I really, really felt the gap between knowing that and feeling it.”

Silence. The house around us. The Atlantic.

“Sloane doesn’t know any of that,” I say. “Wren and June don’t know. I’ve never said any of it to anyone.” I pause. “I’m not sure why I’m saying it to you.”

“Because I’m here,” he says. Simple.

“Because you’re here,” I agree.

Another silence. Comfortable now. The lamp still on. His arm still around me.

“You don’t have to be the version of you you’ve had to be for your family,” he says. Quiet. Certain. “Not with me.”

I lie very still.

“I’m not going to ask you to be easy,” he says. “I’m not going to need you to be perfect. You can just — be whatever it is. In here.” A beat. “I mean it.”

I press my face into his chest. I don’t say anything for a long moment.

“I know you do,” I say finally. “That’s why I told you.”

He turns off the lamp. The room goes dark, the specific dark of a coastal room with no city light, only the faint luminescence of the Atlantic outside. His heartbeat under my ear. His arm around me. The ghost star on the ceiling that I can almost see now.

Neither of us says the other thing. The thing that’s been sitting between us since a hotel room in Burlington, since a glass study room, since he put his hand over mine on a plane and didn’t let go. We don’t say it. We’re still very good at not saying things.

But I think, in the dark of my childhood room, with his arm around me and the Atlantic outside, that we both know what it is.

And I think we both know it’s been true for a while.

Chapter 16

Theo

She’s still asleep when I wake up.

That’s becoming a pattern. Me, awake first. Her, breathing slow against my chest, one hand curled against my shirt. The pink room is quiet around us, the Atlantic doing what the Atlantic does at six in the morning, which is existing enormously and without apology outside the window. The ghost star on the ceiling is invisible in the daylight. I know it’s there.

Last night she told me things she’s never said to anyone. I held them the way I hold everything that matters — carefully, and without letting the weight of them show. The eating disorder. The performance. The specific cruelty of Maddison’s version of events, and the specific cruelty of a family that stayed neutral. She handed me all of it, in the dark, and I said you don’t have to be the version of you you’ve had to be for your family, not with me, which is the truest thing I’ve said to anyone all year.

I meant it. I mean it now, in the daylight, with her asleep in the crook of my arm.

She shifts, and breathes, and the house settles around us. Somewhere downstairs something moves — a door, a pan, Caroline Ashby starting her Saturday. I lie still and watch the light move across the ceiling, and I don’t examine what I’m holding too directly, because if I look at it straight it becomes the thing we haven’t said yet.

But I know what it is.

By eight the house is properly awake.

Breakfast is the full Charleston Saturday production — something catered or something Caroline has been assembling since before anyone else opened their eyes: biscuits, a breakfast casserole, fresh fruit, the good orange juice, coffee that’s been brewed properly. She sets it out in the dining room without ceremony, which is its own kind of ceremony. Maddison comes down glowing, because Maddison wakes up glowing apparently, and Michael follows her with the ease of a man who has been at home in this house long enough to pour his own coffee without asking where things are.

I watch Margo do the morning version of the performance.