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It was true that I’d thought of him every day, wished to see him just once, even from afar, wished for a phone call to tell me it’d all been an elaborate nightmare, wished for him. Now that he’d come, I’d sent him away. Any way I sliced it, it hurt.
I couldn’t let him stay after what he’d done, and I couldn’t bear to see him go, so I stayed right where I was, listening to the deafening silence of an empty apartment.
2
Lake
In my bathroom, a space I could barely do the splits in, the aftershocks of Manning’s visit reverberated through me. I was sixteen again, so giddy I was sick to my stomach, unsure of anything but my reaction to him. How could so many years of progress evaporate in under half an hour?
I finished fixing myself up. Corbin and I had breakfast plans, and I’d only come home from his place to change. I was supposed to be at the restaurant already.
I opened the bathroom door to throw on some jeans, but when I stepped out, I nearly tripped over a body. Manning was splayed on his back, a wrench in his hand as he worked under the radiator. “Hall closet,” he muttered. “I found the tools.”
The floor was as clean as it could get—I’d vacuumed and mopped the day before, all six-hundred square feet of it—but he was still on the ground of a New York City apartment. “You’ll get dirty.” Why did I care? I didn’t. I shouldn’t. “Why are you wearing that anyway?”
“What? A suit?” His eyebrows cinched together as he either tightened or loosened something, I couldn’t tell. He flicked his tongue over his lower lip. “I work for your dad now, out of the Costa Mesa office, selling pharmaceuticals.”
I let the information sink in. I hadn’t spoken to my father since I’d told him I wasn’t going to USC and he’d exploded with enough force to shift tectonic plates. It was a wonder he hadn’t caused the state of California an earthquake. Mom rarely mentioned Manning to me, but then again, that would’ve been hard to do in conversations that didn’t even last ten minutes. Tiffany had called me more in the beginning, but we were always interrupted before things could get too deep. I made sure of that. I’d assumed Manning was still doing some form of construction for my dad. Instead, he was pushing drugs at doctors’ offices on behalf of Ainsley-Bushner, a company my father had worked his way to the top of. “You’re . . . a salesman?”
“Pretty much.” His muscles strained his dress shirt as he worked. “You didn’t know?”
“No.” A tiny bit of my resentment fizzled. The job was all wrong for him. Manning needed to build things, if not literally, then in the sense that he was creating something to improve lives. He’d wanted to be a cop to help others, but since he could no longer do that with a record, I would’ve thought he’d have stayed in construction or tried some kind of social work. Even I could admit that despite how Manning had hurt me, his intentions had been good. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who’d suffered the past few years. “Why?” I asked. “That suit . . . it’s . . . I hate it.”
“Yeah?” he asked. “Doesn’t Corbin wear one?”
“How do you know that?”
“Your mom.” I rarely talked to my mom about Corbin, and because of that, she seemed to have fabricated some vision of our lives here. Or maybe it was Corbin who’d exaggerated things to his parents. He was always trying to convince me to visit home, to call or write, as if it was his duty. Our dads worked together, and although I doubted my father gave much thought to me or Corbin, it occurred to me that Manning might know Mr. Swenson from the office. “You work with Corbin’s dad,” I said.
“Yeah, but I don’t see him much.”
“Do you see my dad a lot?”
“Some days of the week. And Sundays for dinner.”
So they still had family dinner. Why shouldn’t they, just because I wasn’t there? “Oh.”
“He misses you,” Manning added.
Instinctively, I tensed, but I tried to calm my voice before answering. “He said that?”
“No, but I can tell.”
Of course Dad hadn’t said that. If he missed me, he had a funny way of showing it. He’d never once reached out. He’d probably removed all traces of me from the house. I assumed he’d taken down anything that reminded him of USC and turned my room into a gym or entertainment room or something.
“Do they know you’re here?” I asked. By they, I really meant Tiffany, but I didn’t want to talk about her at all.
“In New York?” Metal clinked against metal. “Yes.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
