Chapter 17

When we get back to the hotel, the interns are clustered out front with Camilla and Mags, peering through the window of one of the plaza’s art galleries. Silas is gesticulating wildly, his long arms practically grazing the glass as he points out something inside. Puddles sits panting at his ankles and everyone’s listening to him—even my mother.

I haven’t said anything to Sadie since she speared me with her for what it’s worth observation in the car, so when she leaves the parking garage in the group’s direction, my first instinct is to head the opposite way. But then my phone buzzes, and when I look down it’s Ethan again.

Are we going to talk? Starting to feel like you don’t want to go through the lecture together. I’m going to the library, but if you end up wanting to talk, maybe tomorrow.

I squeeze my phone until its hard corners bite into my bones. Sadie’s voice echoes: it was you pushing her away. And now—Ethan, too. Maybe I’m a mess of my own making, after all.

The week before I left for California, Ethan and I stayed in the Summit School’s library reading room until two o’clock in the morning. He had a calculus final at ten a.m.; I had an essay due at noon. The reading room was my favorite place on campus—its heavy oak tables spanned the room’s full width and reminded me of renaissance banquets, grand dining rooms in stone-hewn castles. The ceilings were cavernous and wood-beamed, so whispers rose upward before floating back down like dandelion filaments. Every wall was lined in bookshelves save for the two at the front of the room, where glass-doored display cabinets towered from floor to ceiling, stacked with marble busts and peeling globes and other relics from the history department. Everywhere you looked in that room, there was something old and beautiful—something that had persevered.

It was just Ethan and me left that night. Side by side in soft-cushioned seats at the very last table in the room. We liked this table because you could see the whole reading room from its vantage point, feel the vastness of it. I was half-delirious at the hour but so far past tired I’d rounded a corner into something else entirely—something soft and romantic that didn’t live inside me the same way in daylight.

“Ethan,” I’d whispered, passing my hand over the table to touch his. “I’ll miss you.”

He blinked up at me from his calculus textbook, the torchiere lights casting the shadows of his glasses onto his cheeks. “When?”

“This summer,” I said, angling my body into his. Ethan’s arm slipped off the table and over my knees, his warm palm framing the outer curve of my thigh. “Next year. The whole time.”

He dropped his chin to kiss me, that familiar press of his lips. It was always a little shorter than I wanted it to be; I could have fallen into Ethan until I found the impossible bottom of him, a limit that didn’t exist. But he was as careful and as studied and as thorough with me as he was with everything else. There was no falling at all for Ethan. He loved me in his own controlled way. If we were going to sleep together—anything other than the clothed tangle of limbs in his dorm room the few times I managed to sneak in—we’d plan for it. And we hadn’t planned for it.

I wanted more. And I’d thought that maybe this summer, together at Penn, I’d get it. That those months would make us different; bring us to a kind of closeness that wasn’t so controlled. Ethan and I would be all each other had there—surely, with so much time together, he’d turn toward me in all the ways I was too afraid to ask for.

“We’ll go through every Penn lesson together,” Ethan murmured, his mouth just an inch from mine. “You’ll tell me about every doctor you visit with Dr. Stone.” He kissed me again, and this time I lifted a hand to his face to hold him there. I was just starting to go tingly, unrooting, when he pulled back.

“We’ll talk every day,” he said. There was some part of me that knew, even then, with his warm hands on my body in my favorite place in the entire world. Something quiet but true, telling me that without Penn—without the summer we’d planned—things wouldn’t be this exact way ever again. “You won’t have to miss me at all.”

“It’s more about saturation,” Silas says as I reluctantly join the group in front of the art gallery. I don’t want to be around Camilla, around Sadie defending Camilla, around Silas and Cleo and Mick having their Great Adventurous Summer while I muddle stumbling and rejected through mine. But I really don’t want to sit alone in my hotel room for the rest of the day knowing Ethan’s mad at me. I texted him back right away—I do want to go through the lecture—but he must’ve already left for the library, because he hasn’t responded. “See how the turquoise here plays off the richness of this red?”

Silas sweeps a hand over the glass covering a painting inside the window, a horse that appears to be levitating in an aquamarine sky.

“How do you know all this?” my mother asks, looking at him admiringly. She’s wearing a pale pink dress, its fabric waffly and light.

“Well, that last part’s just the color wheel,” he says. He adjusts his green baseball cap, GG’s Gardenshare. “Pretty basic, really. Like most of my working knowledge.”

“Very modest for someone so talented,” Camilla says, reaching out to nudge his elbow. From the sidewalk, Puddles looks skyward to watch the movement of her arm. “I’m going to take a closer look inside.” She turns to scan the group. “Anyone interested in joining? Oh—Audrey, honey. I didn’t realize you were back.”

Everyone turns to look at me as Cleo says, “We were going to head to Taos for the afternoon, actually. Unless you need anything, Camilla?”

“Nothing I can think of,” my mother says, turning to Magnolia. “Mags?”

“Feel free.” Magnolia adjusts the purse on her shoulder. “Let’s just make sure we get those show posts up before this evening, yes?”

“Sure thing.” Mick holds up his phone, wiggling it a little. “I’ve got ’em all cued up and scheduled for three o’clock.”

“Audrey?” my mother says again, her eyes zeroed in on me across the group. “Will you join us?”

“Or you can come to Taos,” Silas says. I glance at Camilla—I can tell she’s surprised he’s contradicting her, but something about him has her charmed. She doesn’t say anything; they both just watch me, waiting for me to decide.

It sounded to me like she was trying, Sadie had said. But I’ve done my trying, just by being here this summer. And look how far it’s gotten us.

“Sure.” I glance at Silas, seal my fate. “I’ll come to Taos.”