Chapter 15

Sadie saves me the next morning, her knock at the door of my hotel room like the response to an SOS I never sent.

“Yes?” Magnolia calls. She and Camilla are sitting on the bed across from mine, side by side like they’ve been my entire life.

“It’s Sadie.” Her voice is muffled by the door. “Audrey and I need to leave for our Desert Winds appointment.”

Desert Winds: the mental health rehabilitation facility whose website makes it look more like a spa than a treatment center. Not at the top of my list, but I’ll take any excuse to get away from Camilla.

When Magnolia rises to open the door, my mother looks at me.

“I just don’t understand why you’d bring it up that way in public,” she says. We’ve been circling this drain for the last thirty minutes—her and Magnolia’s Big Intervention after I took my own rideshare back to the hotel last night and hid from them in my room. I was supposed to video chat with Ethan, but I told him I wasn’t feeling well and lay in bed with all the lights on instead. Dad has texted twice and called me three times, but I still haven’t responded. “If you’re upset, Audrey, you know you can always tell me.”

She says this like it’s a given. You know this. But I’ve tried to tell her, in all the ways I know how: turning down the tour in the first place, running off the stage in LA, turning down the tour a second time. I’ve told her, she just isn’t listening. She doesn’t listen unless we’re in public—unless the rest of the world is listening, too.

But she won’t understand that, so I stay silent.

“What can I do?” she asks as Sadie enters the room behind her. My mother doesn’t move her gaze from mine. “I can’t force you to want to be here, Audrey. It has to come from you. But tell me how to help.”

The truth is, I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know what the answer is, or that she’d hear me if I told her. I stand from the bed, smoothing my shirt. “I have to go,” I say. When she nods, she looks as close to defeated as I’ve ever seen her.

“I hope we can talk more when you get back,” she says, but I don’t want to talk more, so I don’t answer. When I look up at Sadie, she’s watching Camilla, something preoccupied and faraway in the set of her face.

“Are you ready?” I ask, and she nearly jumps.

“Yes.” She clears her throat. “Yes, yes. Let’s go.”

I hear the creak of the bed frame as we walk away, Magnolia sitting back down next to my mother. Their low, murmuring voices. Plotting how to iron me out, I’m sure. What shape to smooth me into next.

“Are you okay?” Sadie asks when I close the car door behind me. It’s chilly in the hotel’s covered garage, the desert sun not high enough yet to bake us. I’m looking down at my phone, at Ethan’s texts from early this morning.

Feeling any better today?

Had a hard night, I’d responded. But a little.

Think you’ll be up to talking later? Today’s the first microbio unit and we still have that last ethics lecture.

I haven’t answered him yet. The way I want Ethan feels primal and a little embarrassing: I want to hear his voice up close. I want to be in his single dorm room’s twin XL bed, curled together so tightly in the narrow space that my elbow’s pressed to the wall. I want to look at him and see myself reflected back.

The Audrey who Ethan knows isn’t the one creating a scene in public. She isn’t the one letting her ridiculous mother make her feel so lost. I want the version of myself Ethan knows—the one I am when we’re together in person, the one who’s felt impossible to find this summer. Video chat isn’t enough, but it’s all we have.

“Audrey?”

I look up, find Sadie watching me. She has both hands on the wheel, her hair loose around her shoulders. There’s a thin gold wedding band on her left hand—she has someone, too, somewhere else.

“What happened last night?” she asks when I still haven’t spoken. “I noticed you seemed nervous during the Sex Summit conversation in San Francisco, and then this.”

I feel a hot flare of shame. This isn’t what I want her to be noticing—the places I’m lacking, the mess of myself my mother makes me. I want to keep Sadie where I need her: in the silo of our visits, on the careful path that bends away from this disastrous summer toward my future.

“Nothing that’ll affect me today,” I say, pulling on my seat belt. “I promise.”

She drops her hands from the wheel and leans back in her seat. The car is still off. “That’s not why I’m asking.”

I stare at her. “Then why are you asking?”

Her eyebrows twitch together. “Because I want to make sure you’re okay.”

A pause. Beyond Sadie I can see out to the plaza, where artisans are setting up their booths in the morning sun. New Mexico feels like Mars, like another planet entirely—the perfect home, I guess, for this alien version of me.

“I’m okay,” I say finally. Sadie is my mentor—my tutor, my guide through the one part of my life that still makes sense. Camilla brought her here, but beyond that they have nothing to do with one another.

For a moment Sadie just looks at me. Her eyes are pale brown and nearly blue at the centers, seeming to change even as I’m watching. Then she blinks, and maneuvers in the driver’s seat to pull her phone out of her blazer pocket. She holds it up to me, photo illuminated on her lock screen: the slivered edges of two women’s grinning faces, a laughing toddler smashed between them.

“Elliott,” Sadie says, pointing to the kid. “And my wife, Cora.”

I eye her, waiting for the rest. When she doesn’t say anything else, I ask, “Why are you showing me this?”

Sadie exhales on half a laugh. “Because I have a family, too. I know it’s complicated sometimes. And we can talk about it, if you want to.”

I blink. Look forward through the windshield. “Thank you, but I’m good.”

“Okay,” Sadie says, carefully neutral. She turns the key in the ignition. “But I want you to feel comfortable around me. It’s a standing offer, if you change your mind.”

We roll out of the garage into the desert sun. I don’t tell her that I’m not really the type to change my mind.