Chapter 26

“Since when do you have a boating license?”

Magnolia looks up at me, adjusting her sun hat as she settles in behind the wheel. She’s wearing a gauzy sarong over a purple one-piece—the exact same style as the one my mother’s wearing, just in a different color.

“Since 2013,” she says. “Do you need to see proof, Officer?”

I feel my nose scrunch—the last thing I need is cheek from Magnolia Jones, busybody extraordinaire. But I can hear Mick laughing behind me, and when he nudges me with an elbow I turn in his direction.

“Grab these for me?” he asks, and I take the grocery bags he’s holding out. They’re full of chips and candy and trail mix—enough food to feed a small army for a whole weekend, decidedly overkill for six people with a four-hour boat rental.

“Think you bought enough?” I ask, and he jerks a thumb over his shoulder at Cleo, who’s still on the dock with Silas and my mother.

“Ask Cleo, she did the shopping.”

Which tracks, considering the three—yes, three—separate packs of Twizzlers I can see through one of the thin plastic bags.

“Don’t knock my shop!” Cleo shouts. She’s in a neon-blue bikini and a white bucket hat, wearing giant heart-shaped sunglasses. Next to her, Silas holds Puddles—her little sausage body stuffed into a bright yellow life jacket. “I didn’t hear anyone else volunteering for snack duty.”

The truth is this plan came together so last-minute I can’t believe anyone had time to prepare anything—Magnolia knocked on all our doors at ten this morning and told us Camilla had rented a boat beginning at noon. The show last night went off without a hitch—sold-out theater, enthusiastic signing line—and my mother wanted to celebrate with an afternoon on Lake Michigan. Sadie bowed out, citing seasickness, but the rest of us are here.

It does feel like the Letters tour has hit some kind of stride; even I can begrudgingly admit it. One of the women at Preeti’s book club in Winnetka turned out to be the Lifestyle Leisure editor at the Chicago Tribune, and the day after we met she published a piece about Camilla and me and what she called “the synergy of our summer together.” It detailed all my plans with Sadie, the fall shadowing position, the reasons I want to be a doctor (in my own words, for once). In taking her someday daughter on the road, she wrote, Camilla St. Vrain has set them both up for successful somedays.

It’s an overexaggeration, sure. The most successful setup for my someday would’ve been the Penn program, and that’s not where I am. But it’s the first press piece all summer that’s talked about me like anything other than my mother’s pet—like an entire human being with aspirations beyond appearing in the gilded social posts on her feeds.

And, for the first time, the questions I got at last night’s show weren’t all about self-care. They weren’t about how basking in Camilla’s glow has made me just the luckiest girl to ever live. No one brought up the Sex Summit. The article painted me as my own person, and in its wake I was able to step on the stage as myself, instead of as the character Camilla has made of me.

“Check it,” Cleo says, climbing onto the boat and sneaking a hand into one of the bags I’m holding. She pulls out a hot-dog-folded magazine, some glossy rag from the checkout aisle. There’s a picture of Camilla and me on the cover, seated side by side at last night’s show. Camilla St. Vrain’s Valedictorian Daughter Holds Court in Chicago, the headline says. “You’re famous.”

I take it from her, flipping open to the article as everyone else settles around me.

Camilla St. Vrain’s given us a lot, the article begins. Yoni eggs, life-affirming Inner Saint retreats, permission to love ourselves just as we are. But as she traverses the country on this summer’s Letters to My Someday Daughter anniversary tour, St. Vrain is giving us something she hasn’t before: an up-close look at the someday daughter we’ve heard about for so many years, a future doctor named Audrey. And if last night’s sold-out show in Chicago proved anything, it’s that Camilla’s eighteen-year-old daughter is impressive in her own right—not just someday, but already. After graduating at the top of her class from Colorado’s prestigious Summit School, Audrey is—

“Take a seat, honey.” I look up, find Camilla watching me from her perch behind Mags. “I don’t want you to fall when we start moving.”

“Come up here,” Silas calls, waving me toward the front of the boat. “Everyone’s in the back, we should balance the weight.”

Balance the weight, I think. Is that some kind of euphemism? But no—it’s just Silas being freaking normal, sliding over to make space for me next to Puddles on the leather bench seat. I think of him with powdered sugar on his lips and force myself to stop.

“Thanks,” I say, and Magnolia powers up the motor, and Silas holds out a hand.

When I look up at him, he wiggles his fingers. He has to shout over the noise. “Let me see?”

I pass off the magazine, feeling suddenly nervous as his eyes track across it. The thought of Silas reading the words yoni eggs and Audrey in the same paragraph makes me want to pitch myself off the front of the boat, but eventually he’s finished reading and hands it back to me.

“Can I ask you something?”

He slides closer when I nod, pulling Puddles into his lap. The Midwest wind whips around us, ripping curls loose from beneath his GG’s Gardenshare hat.

“Why’d you agree to this tour,” he asks, leaning in so we don’t have to yell, “if you thought it would be so horrible?”

I tilt backward, regaining space between us. “Why did you?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Silas grins, the wind wrenching his T-shirt tight across his shoulders, the planes of his chest. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone so comfortable in their own body, watched another person move through the world as easily as he does. “When your mom offered the internships to American, the three of us applied right away.” He waves a hand toward Cleo and Mick, who are already eating Twizzlers at the back of the boat. “A summerlong trip, eight weeks with my friends, work experience to put on my résumé—win, win, win.”

“Résumé for what?”

He shrugs. “Whatever comes next. Making documentaries, maybe.”

“Maybe?” I repeat. “You don’t know?”

Silas studies me. Behind his shoulder, Lake Shore Drive recedes, its high-rises growing smaller and smaller. “Does anyone get to know for sure?” he says. “It’ll be what it’ll be.”

I scoff. “It’ll be what you make it.”

Silas shakes his head, smiling, and looks down at his feet—big and bare on the floor of the boat. “Okay, Audrey. Your turn to answer the question.”

It’s out before I’ve thought it through: “I came because she wanted to spend time with me.” Something I never thought I’d say out loud and yet here I am, saying it. Silas looks back up at me; I know, in the same way I know I’ll draw breath, that he’s a safe place to put this. “Because she doesn’t usually want me with her.”

His lips part, but I look down at my hands. Keep talking so he can’t pity me, can’t tell me how sad that is. “But I’ve always been this pawn, and that’s really what she needed from me this summer. Someone to help bolster her image.”

When he’s quiet, I finally hazard a glance up at him. The high sun’s right in his eyes and he’s squinting at me—like our roles are reversed, like he’s the resting mathematician now. “Can both be true?” he asks. “She wants to spend time with you and do the public image thing?”

“Is that love?” I say, and his eyes don’t leave mine. “When there’s a transaction involved?”

He tilts his head, and Puddles shifts on his lap. We both look down at her. “Maybe. I think love can probably be a lot of things.”

We hit the wake from another boat, smacking so hard against the water that Cleo screams. We both turn to look back at her, watch her dissolve into a laugh as she leans hard into Mick.

“It’s my biggest weakness,” I say finally.

“What is?”

“The way I am with her.” I meet Silas’s eyes and then look away, out across the water. “Always hoping something’s going to be there.” I press my thumb to my pinky finger, not quite counting but ready if I need to. “I act stupid for her.”

“Doesn’t really sound like a weakness,” Silas says. When I look back at him he’s close to me, leaning in so I can hear him over the motor but also, it feels, so I know he’s there. Listening. “Sounds like you love her.”

I pull my lip between my teeth and we keep looking at each other and the wind lashes around us, somehow both warm and biting.

“Silas!” Mick shouts, and we both look away. “Where’d you put the—”

Mags cuts the engine, and suddenly Mick’s voice is ten decibels too loud. He dips his chin, quiets down, and finishes, “—sunscreen?”

“Under the seat,” Silas says, pointing.

“Yeah, I can’t find it.”

Silas sighs, holding Puddles’s leash out to me. She’s sitting between us, peering out over the water, and looks up at him when he stands. “Watch her for a sec?”

I take the leash wordlessly, and then he’s gone. I’m distantly aware of Magnolia talking to my mother, an anchor being drawn out from somewhere, a great splash as it hits the water. Another boat trawls by and Puddles leaps to her feet, suddenly on high alert. I’m still thinking about the fool I’ve made of myself—about everything that bubbles up out of me when Silas is around, unfiltered and embarrassing, never what he asked for, so much more than anyone should have to listen to—and Puddles is halfway down the bench before I realize she’s moving and think to tighten my grip on her leash.

But I’m too slow, and the leash is slick with lake spray, and it slips through my hands as Puddles climbs onto the boat’s back ledge. Faster than I’ve ever seen her move, spryer than her eleven years would lead you to believe. She’s hopping up, and she’s letting out a croaking bark, and she’s taking a great leap over the water in furry, wrinkly pursuit of the passing boat.

I scream. I move so fast I slip, my knee smacking the hard plastic of the deck. I think of what Silas said at that park in Austin—Puddles can’t swim.

And I’m in the water before my brain’s caught up enough to remember that I can’t, either.