Chapter 29

Sadie’s still acting weird that afternoon, quiet and window-gazing in the back seat of the rental car we take to Silas’s grandma’s place. I’m too ashamed of my outburst at Dr. Sun’s office to look at her for the entire drive.

We take the road forty-five minutes from Denver at a different angle from the Summit School, a stretch of mountain-ringed highway I’ve never driven before. When Silas told me, back in Taos, that I should come meet GG, it sounded like the most ludicrous idea in the world. But then he saved my life, and when the interns knock on my door to round me up, he only has to look at me once to get me to cave.

Every time I come within twenty feet of Silas I hear it again—the hazy, half-alive way his voice brought me back from the brink. Oh, god, thank fuck. His hand between my shoulder blades. The betrayed way he looked at me.

We’re going to the mountains, Mick had said, and I’d closed my Penn textbook and that was the end of it. Magnolia was chauffeuring my mother between interviews, but the rest of us would spend the night at GG’s house in Switchback Ridge—a lake town halfway between Denver and Mount Blue Sky.

I texted Ethan that we were going to the mountains for a night, to which he’d said, Camping? You? And obviously not camping, me, but what if I did go camping? All the things Ethan thinks me so incapable of are starting to pile up, making me feel trapped by the idea of myself. Cabin, I’d sent. Just the one word, and still no reply. We lose cell service halfway through the drive, which feels just as well. For the first time this summer, I find myself grateful for the distance between us.

Silas drives, though apparently Sadie also knows the way. They’ve been here before, together—“Once, for Christmas,” Sadie says when Cleo asks. But otherwise, she stays quiet. Guilt grows in me like a seedling, unfurling one green leaf at a time. Guilt, and shame, and fear. Sadie feels like one more person I’ve managed to alienate—even after she’s done so much for me, even after she made room for me at Camilla’s shows. One peek into the truth of my messed-up relationship with my mother and I’ve bungled all of it. But there are three other people in this car with us, and what would I even say? And still, there’s a whispered question beneath the buzz of my regret: What’s Sadie been writing in Letters that made her so embarrassed?

When we get there, Switchback Ridge is the exact version of Colorado you imagine when you haven’t been here before. Thick with pine trees, surrounded by protected forest land, centered on a lake that’s ringed with a walking path and busy with paddleboarders. The weatherworn sign at its edge reads Gossamer Lake in faded white letters. When we roll past, Mick says Oooooooh like a kid at the zoo.

“This,” Cleo says, checking her lipstick in a palm-sized mirror, “is cute as hell.”

The Summit School is in Boulder, red-bricked against the backdrop of the Flatirons. Well-groomed, imposing, institutional. Boulder’s a college town full of tourists and beautiful people on mountain bikes. Everyone wearing the same brand of two-hundred-dollar windbreaker, applying the same tinted formula of Saint sunscreen. Switchback Ridge feels different: like the manufactured Denver–Boulder corridor hasn’t crept in quite as far. It’s a little wilder—gnarls of pine roots upending the edges of the asphalt, a tiny building at a lightless intersection with a hand-painted sign out front that says Yak meat—if yer brave!

“You should see it at the holidays,” Silas says, and I don’t want to picture it but I do. This small town covered in snow, winter light hitting the tree ice like glitter. And Silas in front of a fire, somewhere—wearing a sweater and laughing his low, easy laugh. My holidays are usually something catered at Dad’s or, last year, in New York City with Ethan’s family. A penthouse apartment on the Upper West Side full of first-edition books, formalwear to Christmas dinner, midnight Mass. That’s what lies ahead of me, holidays like that.

“Annnnnd,” Silas says, hand flat against the wheel as he turns us off the road, “here we are.”

The gravel drive is so choked with trees it seems to swallow us up: a tunnel of green with sunlight glancing through.

“Narnia,” Cleo whispers from the back, and Mick laughs. But when the car emerges from the trees it doesn’t feel like Narnia at all, or anywhere else I’ve ever been. This place is wholly its own: a stone-and-wood mishmash of a cabin with a robin’s-egg-blue door, curved at its top like a hobbit house. The whole thing thick with trellises, blooming vines arcing toward the sun. And the garden—spreading what must be two acres wide through the flat meadow surrounding the house. Groomed into careful rows, clutches of green radiating in straight lines like sunrays.

“When you said garden,” I tell Silas, “I thought you meant, like, five planter boxes in a backyard.”

He leans his head back, barking a laugh. “Clearly you haven’t met GG.”

“No time like the present,” Cleo says, and when I look back through the windshield there’s a woman waving to us from the cabin’s open door. She’s tall and wiry: tanned, muscled arms and faded denim overalls over a lavender T-shirt. When Mick opens the car’s back door, Puddles waddles toward her and GG crouches to the ground, reaching both arms out.

GG hugs Silas before saying anything to the rest of us, Puddles sandwiched between them.

“Hi, baby,” GG says, closing her eyes over the curve of Silas’s shoulder. It’s so intimate I find myself looking out over the garden, at anything but the two of them. No one’s ever called me baby in my entire life. But then GG turns her green eyes on me and says, “You must be Audrey.”

Must I be? Cleo could be Audrey. I glance at her, but I guess it’s obvious: the knockout Japanese girl in platform boots and neon-pink eyeliner isn’t Camilla St. Vrain’s daughter. And GG already knows Sadie, so that leaves me. I reach to shake GG’s hand but she pulls me in for a hug instead, squeezing me tight and quick like a chest compression. When we separate she studies my face like she’s looking for something there, eyes tracking over my cheeks and my mouth and my hair. She says nothing else, just lets me go and reaches for Sadie. I watch her murmur something in Sadie’s ear; Sadie closes her eyes and nods. Silas is watching them, too. But when our eyes meet he just smiles a little, rounds up Puddles, heads into the house.

A girl bounds toward him from the kitchen, all red hair and freckles. She’s maybe our age, in a white sun dress that slips off one shoulder as she throws her arms around Silas so forcefully he lets out an oof. Puddles leaps at the girl’s ankles.

“Maren,” Silas says breathlessly, laughing. “I didn’t know you were home.”

“Of course I’m home.” She lets him go and reaches for Puddles. The kitchen is full of white tile and wooden cabinets, flowers tied up to dry upside down over the sink. “It’s summer, dummy.”

“My cousin,” Silas says, gesturing at her. “We were born two days apart.”

“But I’m older,” Maren says, grinning at me. She thrusts out a hand and I take it, detecting some Puddles slobber. I wipe my palm on my jeans as soon as she lets go. “Cuter, too.”

She cackles as Silas rolls his eyes, reaching up to tug at his hair. He bats her hands away and everyone else files in from outside, Maren introducing herself around and then leaping over to crush Silas in one last hug.

“I’m meeting Ro and Miller at the lake,” she says. She casts a glance around the room, looking at each of us in turn. “You’ll all join later? You brought swimsuits?”

“Audrey, uh, doesn’t swim,” Mick says, half laughing. It’s not quite funny to me yet, but I force a smile anyways. And I did bring a swimsuit, just like everyone else.

“You can simply sun, then,” Maren says, shooting a smile at me as she walks backward toward the door. “I’m already late, anyway, Miller’s gonna throw a fit. I’ll see you over there. GG!” She lobs a dramatic wave in her grandmother’s direction. “Bye!”

“Take care, Mare bear,” GG calls, singsong, already filling a teakettle from the tap. And when Maren’s gone, “A freer spirit each time I see her.” She says it fondly. “She’s really coming into her own at that art school.”

“How are the boys?” Silas asks. “You still see them for Sunday dinners?”

“Of course,” GG says. She puts the kettle on the stove and turns to us, motioning everyone into chairs around the kitchen table. “Andrew starts high school this year, if you can believe that.”

“Barely,” Silas says, and GG laughs.

“He’ll be just like the rest of you soon,” GG says, then raises her eyebrows pointedly. “Gone.”

“GG,” Silas says warily, eyeing her. She shrugs, pulling open a drawer and rooting through it.

“I’m just saying, you could come see me more.”

“Called out,” Mick says, elbowing Silas, who sighs.

“I’m here now.” Silas waves a hand at Sadie. “And I brought your favorite person. Doesn’t that earn me some points?”

GG smiles at Sadie and Sadie smiles back at her, something passing between them. There’s a line of framed pictures on the table against the wall, a grinning woman with dark hair appearing throughout them like the thread tying everything together. She has Silas’s eyes, his nose. I know without having to ask that GG is Silas’s mom’s mom; that Sadie stepped in when all of them lost her daughter.

“A few points,” GG finally concedes. She drops tea bags into the kettle and then brings it over to the kitchen table, lining up a row of mugs.

“Not to be rude,” Cleo says, “but it’s like eighty-five degrees outside. Do you have anything colder?”

GG’s eyes flick up to her, but she just starts pouring in silence. It’s Sadie who finally speaks, for nearly the first time since we left Dr. Sun’s office this morning.

“Trust me,” she says, looking at Cleo. “You want this.”

“My homemade peppermint tea,” GG says, just as the smell hits me. Fresh and green. “Healer of all ailments.”

“We’re not ailing,” Mick says, and everyone turns to him. But GG’s looking at Sadie, and I think, Maybe not all of us.

“It’ll heal you anyway,” Silas says, reaching for a mug and passing it to me. I breathe it in, feel the steam all the way down to my lungs. I watch him take a sip and close his eyes, lashes fluttering just once before he opens them again. “GG’s been pushing this stuff on us my whole life. Cut to me being the only seven-year-old asking for herbal tea at his birthday party.”

Cleo snorts, but then she lifts the mug to her lips and I watch her eyes go comically wide.

“Oh my god,” she says, putting it back down. “This is amazing, Ms. G.”

GG shrugs, but the little smile on her lips is proud. She sits, wrapping tan hands around a mug of her own. “Well,” she says, looking at Silas. “Tell me all of it.”

His eyes flick, almost imperceptibly, to me. And for some reason I think of that first night, of counting my fingers in the back alley in Los Angeles, of Silas unzipping my dress. All of it. I keep quiet, let Mick and Cleo and Silas fill the silence. Listen to Silas tell GG about his freshman year at American, and Cleo regale her with the tale of their night out in San Francisco that I spent alone in my hotel room. Listen to Puddles lap at the water bowl in the kitchen.

And I think about my summer: studying for a class I’m not even taking, staring into the pixels of Ethan through my computer screen, sending one thank-you email after another to doctors who might not even remember me enough to write recommendation letters down the road. The word comes to my mind unbidden, all on its own: waste. A waste of the precious few months before college. I bite my lip, and when I start counting my fingers under the table I feel Silas look at me, like maybe he knows. I just have to get through these next few days, get to the ICU acceptance, get to planning.

“Sadie,” GG says, reaching to put a hand on her forearm. “What do you say you and I visit in the garden while the kids go have their fun at the lake?”

Sadie nods quietly, and we all stand.

“We’ll see you in a bit,” GG says, already guiding Sadie toward the back door. “I’m making meatballs for dinner.”

“Time to lake it up?” Cleo asks, raising her eyebrows and looking between us.

Mick points a warning finger at me. “You’re not getting in this time.”

As if I need a reminder.