Chapter 28

DENVER

“Ouch,” Sadie says, eyes on my leg as we step out of a rideshare onto the sidewalk. “You’ve got a whole rainbow happening there.”

I look down, clocking the gruesome bruise on my knee. I should’ve worn pants; I wore an ankle-length dress to last night’s Letters show even though it’s in the mid-nineties here in Denver.

In the days since Chicago, the side of my knee I smacked on the boat’s deck has phased through the entirety of the color wheel, transitioning from a maudlin purple to a pukey kind of green, and now to this hellish yellow bordered with pink splotches. It looks like I have some kind of flesh-eating disease. Like I’m being consumed from the inside.

Which isn’t so far off, really. The whole spectacle on Lake Michigan was so mortifying—so unthinkably idiotic—that it’s been licking through my insides like hellfire ever since. I almost didn’t tell Ethan about it at all. But on video chat that night, before running through a Penn lecture on emergency medicine, Ethan had interrupted my description of an idyllic and entirely fictionalized boat trip to say that my voice sounded weird. “Hoarse,” he’d said. “Are you getting sick?”

In the head only, I could’ve told him. But instead it all came pouring out of me—how Puddles made a break for it, and the intolerable thought of her tiny, old body sinking to the bottom of the lake, and how I’m fine, really, completely fine, just kind of shaken up, but that’s to be expected.

Ethan listened to the story with his mouth half-open, blinking rapidly. And then he said, “Why would you do something like that?”

The I’m so glad you’re all right was implied, I’m sure. But it was Silas’s voice echoing in my quiet hotel room as he said it—What were you thinking?—and the way he looked at me on the boat, terrified and accusatory, breath heaving out of him. What he’d said to me in Austin: I can’t do hospitals after what happened. And that I’d scared him, maybe.

“Because I thought the dog would die,” I told Ethan. It sounded defensive, and it was. I knew I was bristling; clearly it had been an idiot move, but was it really so hard to imagine a single reason I’d do something like that? The question made it sound like saving a dog from certain death was a choice completely off the table for someone like me. Like I was some kind of heartless monster. Ethan didn’t know Puddles had been wearing a life jacket, and I didn’t tell him.

“But you could have, too,” Ethan said, his brow furrowing. “Audrey, that’s so illogical. You can’t—”

“Okay but I’m fine.” It came out as one word, loud and graceless. The truth was it had been illogical. It had been completely instinctual, screaming from some primal part of me I didn’t recognize. I didn’t know how to explain that to Ethan; I didn’t think I even could. But I hated how he was looking at me, like I’d somehow let him down by doing something he couldn’t understand. I couldn’t understand it, either, and his reaction only made it worse.

“You feeling okay, otherwise?” Sadie asks now. We’re standing in the lobby of an obstetrician’s office in downtown Denver, surrounded by pregnant ladies. “Silas said you were pretty shaken up.”

Oh, just throw me back in Lake Michigan. Just pitch me off the top of the Willis Tower. The thought of Sadie and Silas discussing how shaken up I was, like a four-year-old on a Tilt-A-Whirl, is the most humiliating thing I can imagine.

“I’m fine,” I say stiffly, and when we drop into waiting room seats side by side, my open backpack slides straight onto the floor, fully upside down. Of course.

I’m reaching to collect my truly enormous collection of scattered pens when Sadie leans down next to me. She picks up the used copy of Letters to My Someday Daughter that I bought in the airport, somehow already a month ago, the last time I was in Denver. Between all the unpacking and repacking this summer, I’ve left it at the bottom of my bag.

I watch as if from behind glass as she stares at it. That picture of Camilla on the cover, the dedication—To her—all the annotations in the margins. Similar, maybe, to the secretive notes she was taking in her own copy at Dr. Bautista’s office in Chicago.

“Audrey,” she says softly. “Did you take all these notes?”

I snatch the book out of her hand, hating the way she recoils like I hit her. “Of course not.”

“Who did?”

“A criminally insane person, clearly.”

She hesitates, and my cheeks are burning too bright to look at her. How senseless of me to carry it around like this, like someone wouldn’t see. I feel like a teenager in a summer blockbuster, like my parents just found my porn stash or a giant bag of weed under my bed.

“I know that you do, but I don’t take this book seriously enough to take notes on it.”

Sadie’s cheeks go scarlet. Her eyes flicker down to her lap and stay there. Shame tugs my heart into my rib cage like a riptide, battering it. This is my mentor, the one person who’s buoyed my dream along all summer. I should apologize, but instead I shove the book into the very bottom of my backpack. When I look at Sadie she’s still staring at her hands, pink-cheeked, like she’s embarrassed to know that I saw her writing in Letters.

I should throw my copy away. There’s a giant trash can across the waiting room, but even as I stare at it my legs don’t move; my body won’t let me. I want that book like I want a weighted blanket—something rooting me down.

“Sadie?”

Thank god. Sadie and I both look up, find a serious-looking woman with dark hair in a sleek bun. Dr. Sun, her name tag says, next to a yellow illustration of a baby footprint.

“Alice,” Sadie says. When she stands there’s something shaken up about her, like now she’s the one on the Tilt-A-Whirl. It takes her a few tries to get a smile on her face, and when she waves a hand in my direction her voice stutters. “This is—um, this is Audrey.”

I stand up, taking Dr. Sun’s hand when she offers it. Shove down what just happened, push my mother out of my mind. “Thanks so much for having us, Dr. Sun.”

“Welcome,” she says, smiling. She leads us toward a back office, weaving past exam rooms. “Sadie told me about your big shadowing position this fall—very exciting. Nothing quite so fast-paced happening here, I’m afraid, but I hope we can still be of some help.”

Hopkins Hospital releases their ICU selection in four days. It’s been the only thing getting me through the aftermath of my unhinged behavior on the boat, knowing that in fewer than 100 hours I’ll be in contact with the hospital, planning my fall semester.

“Oh, I’m thrilled to be here,” I say when Sadie stays silent. I flit my eyes in her direction and she’s looking down at her shoes, her mouth pinched. “I have so much respect for obstetrics.”

Dr. Sun laughs, sitting behind her desk and motioning Sadie and me into seats across from her. “Respect for it,” she says. “But not an interest in the pursuit, yourself?”

I feel myself flush. “Well, I’m not sure yet, it’s still—”

Dr. Sun holds up her hands, smiling. “Obstetrics isn’t for everyone; it hasn’t even always been for me. When I started medical school I thought I’d be a cardiologist.”

She starts to tell me about it, how bringing new life into the world suits her better than fiddling with hearts, and when I glance over at Sadie she’s staring at the wall next to Dr. Sun’s head.

There’s a picture there, framed in matte white like everything else in this neutral office. In it, a woman lies on her side in a hospital bed, draped in a teal gown and smiling in a fully exhausted sort of way. She has one hand reached into the bassinet next to her—a newborn baby sleeps there, its eyes shut.

It makes me think, completely against my will, of Camilla knocking on my hotel room door the night of the Boat Incident. She asked if it was all right for her to take the spare bed beside mine, and I’d kind of just said okay, and we’d fallen asleep in the same room for the first time in more than a decade. When I woke up in the morning she was already gone, and she didn’t ask to do it again. It was so weird that I’m not entirely sure it actually happened.

Sadie doesn’t look away from that picture the whole time we’re sitting with Dr. Sun. Lips pressed together, hardly blinking. I think of what she told me about Elliott—he was eighteen months old when we adopted him. And I know that there are as many reasons people choose to adopt as there are people. But I wonder if that picture hurts her somehow. She stays quiet for the rest of our visit. I’m not brave enough to ask.