Chapter 30

Maren’s gone by the time we get to the lake. When Silas texts her, she says they left to get ice cream. The beach is small, not quite Chicago’s North Avenue—just a sandy stretch along one little blip of the waterline, busy with spread-out towels. We brought some from GG’s house, a mismatched collection she seems to have acquired at Disney World. When Mick unfurls his towel, it has a giant cartoon ant on it.

“Just my style,” he tells Silas, who shrugs.

“Everything in that house is for the grandkids.” He shakes out his own towel, two tigers in a jungle. “Seven older than me, eight younger.”

Both my parents are only children, both the parents of an only child. I don’t have a single cousin or sibling. The only family I have that’s not on this tour is essentially Dad, who’s been so busy since Austin I’ve hardly heard from him—and Fallon and Ethan, if they’re allowed to count.

I pull out my phone and take a picture of the water, debate sending it to both of them before opening a text to just Fallon instead. Not our Colorado, but close, I send. Miss you.

“Can we all picture Camilla on one of these for a sec?” Cleo says. She sits on Rapunzel’s face, crossing her legs. “Imagine her dismay, if she were here.”

“The opposite of her aesthetic,” I agree, tucking my phone back into my bag. “All of her towels are neutral Turkish cotton.”

Cleo shudders. “The opposite of my aesthetic.” She’s in the same blue bikini from Chicago and a bucket hat covered entirely in rhinestones that makes it almost impossible to look at her—the sun’s reflection in it makes her blinding.

“I’m going in,” Mick says, and before I can even get my sunscreen out of my bag he’s hoisted Cleo over his shoulders and started running toward the water.

Silas shouts, “It’s cold!” But there’s no way they can hear over Cleo shrieking. When they plunge into the water her bucket hat flies off, floating on the lake’s surface like a beacon. I glance at Silas to find him shaking his head but smiling, Puddles bookended between his knees.

“I think I messed up,” I say, and he turns to me. His eyebrows draw together, head tilting to one side. He’s got his GG’s Gardenshare hat on and a pair of dark swim trunks and no shirt. I draw a steadying breath. “I kind of snapped at Sadie during our obstetrics visit and she’s been acting really weird ever since.”

“You snapped at her?” he says, and I fight my body’s urge to fold into itself. “About what?”

I bite my lip. Worry it between my teeth until it stings. I could lie, but I don’t. “My mom’s book. How she’s been writing notes in it.”

Silas hesitates, glancing at the water before turning back to me. I get the sense that he’s weighing something, that maybe he’ll push me away now, too. “What did she say?” he asks finally.

“Nothing,” I tell him. “That’s the problem. I think—I think I hurt her feelings? Or embarrassed her, maybe, about the notes? Do you know what she’s been writing in there?”

His eyes find mine, sun glancing across them. And for a moment he looks like GG when we arrived at her house. Like he’s searching for something in me. “Audrey,” he says quietly, but suddenly Mick and Cleo are back, and he’s standing to contain Puddles, and the moment is over. I curl my fingers into my palm.

“You absolute turd,” Cleo says, pulling her soaked-through bucket hat back over her hair. “My sunscreen hadn’t even set yet.”

“You loved it.” Mick grins wickedly, reaching for his ant towel and dragging it over his wet face. “Audrey, you next?”

“Very funny,” I say flatly, and Cleo nudges me with her foot.

“You going to at least take off your clothes? Or too scared to even be in a swimmie these days?”

I sigh and stand up, shimmying off my pants. They’re long and gauzy, specifically selected to hide my—

“Killer bruise,” Mick says, letting out a low whistle. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” I say, pulling the hem of my T-shirt over my head. “It looks worse than it feels.”

Cleo lets out a theatrical gasp. “What about those?”

I follow the line of her gaze to my rib cage, where—oh. Right. I try to lift my balled-up T-shirt to hide them, but Cleo’s quicker than me and bats my hand out of the way. For a minute all four of us stare at them in silence: the five mottled bruises pressed to my ribs. Blue-green and tender. I’ve been sleeping on my other side, wearing wireless bras. This morning, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and lifted a hand to line them up with my own fingerprints.

“Did I do that?”

When I look at Silas his lips are pressed together. He reaches a hand toward me and I imagine it landing on my skin, his palm in the empty space between the bruises, his fingers fitting them just right. But then he lets it fall and looks up at me, his eyes dark.

“Firm grip,” I say. He looks back at my ribs, and I spread the shirt around my torso so he can’t see. “Silas.”

“Does it hurt?” he asks. It does, but not as much as it hurts to imagine the bruising itself—the act of it, Silas dragging the dead weight of me out of Lake Michigan.

“No,” I tell him. He’s still staring at my side, like he can see his fingerprints on my skin even through the T-shirt.

“Jesus, Si,” Cleo says. “You really grabbed her, huh?”

He swallows, and when his eyes move to Cleo I hate how guilty he looks. “I mean, I really didn’t want her to die.”

Cleo snorts. “Fair.”

“Audrey,” Silas says, quieter, and when he takes a step closer to me his hand lifts again. Like a reflex, like he’s not quite aware of it. “I’m sorry.”

“Silas,” I say. “Without you I’d be at the bottom of that lake.”

“Don’t say that,” he tells me, and I know he means the lake part. That it hurts him, maybe, to imagine me underwater. But that’s not the part that scraped my throat on the way out, the part that felt painful to articulate. Without you. I make myself think it again. Like exposure therapy, like an idea I’ll maybe get used to if I think it often enough. The way I will need to be, after this summer. For the rest of my life. Without you, without you, without you.

When we get back to GG’s house, everyone smelling of lake water except me, Sadie’s at the kitchen table with a glass of wine. She smiles as we trudge in, everything about her easy and relaxed. Like the rest of this day didn’t happen; like GG flipped some kind of switch to bring her back to herself. Like maybe I won’t need to unearth that moment at Dr. Sun’s by apologizing to her after all. GG stands in front of the stove stirring a pot of pasta sauce.

“Showers!” she calls, hardly turning to look at us. “All of you. Dinner’s in twenty.”

It twinges in a way I’m not ready for, the expectation that I’ll be at a table at a certain time for a meal someone’s made me. At the Summit School dinner is from six to eight, three entree options and open seating and a conveyor belt that swallows your tray open-mouthed when you’re done. At my dad’s, dinner is takeout on a counter and maybe an overlap in our schedules but more likely me eating alone, forking lo mein while the Pacific sun sets through the living room windows. I can’t remember eating dinner at Camilla’s even once since going to school. The rare occasions I’m home we go to restaurants with Laz, with loud packs of her friends who fill up private back rooms and don’t ask me any questions.

“Audrey,” Cleo says, and when I look up I realize I’ve stalled out by the kitchen table. Mick and Silas are gone; she’s halfway down the hallway to the back of the house. “You coming?”

I nod, catching GG’s eye before I go. She smiles at me, like she knows.

By eight thirty Mick’s roped everyone into a loud game of Apples to Apples, which he inexplicably calls App-lays to App-lays. When he wins Cleo’s “Graceful” card with “Swimming,” I excuse myself to go to the bathroom. Ethan still hasn’t texted me, though we usually video chat around this time. Waiting for me, maybe, to reach out first.

When I leave the bathroom, Silas is waiting in the hallway.

“It’s his love language, you know.” He’s leaning against the slatted-wood wall, arms crossed, barefoot in shorts and a hoodie. At first I think he means Ethan, which of course he doesn’t, and what would that imply, even? That Ethan’s love language is silence?

“What is?” I ask.

“The teasing,” he says. The hallway is growing dark with the sunset and smells like shampoo, the same one from GG’s guest bathroom that both of us used. Our hair’s still wet. “Mick. You scared him, in Chicago. He has to make a joke out of it or he’ll just start crying.”

I pull one sweatshirt sleeve over my knuckles. It’s incomprehensible to me, that Mick could care so much after half a summer together. That Silas could. That I’m standing here, silent in this hallway, choking on how much I care.

“Can I show you something?” Silas says.

My voice comes out quiet. “What is it?”

“A surprise,” he says. “I know you don’t like surprises, but I think you’ll like this one.”

For a moment we just look at each other. When I finally nod he steps around me, the fabric of our sleeves touching and nothing else. I check my phone one last time, but Ethan still hasn’t reached out. I follow Silas toward the back of the house.

There’s a door there, pale wood with a curtained window in its middle. Silas holds it open behind him and I step through, the air cool with dusk. The garden is a storybook in the falling dark—moths moving through the rows of vegetables, the whole meadow ringed in trees that move gently in the wind. He steps into the grass and I hesitate.

“My shoes.”

He looks down at my bare feet, then his own. “You can’t go barefoot?”

Bare feet are for the beach, and even then—with sandals waiting on my towel. The garden is all dewy grass and rich-smelling earth. I showered not even two hours ago.

Silas laughs, a breathy noise that sounds like it’s at my expense. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

We look at each other, and it pops right out of me. “An earthworm touches my toe.”

There’s a short, surprised silence, and then Silas starts laughing in earnest. Head tipped back, mouth open so I can see that crooked canine. His whole face changes when he laughs, a version of him that looks even more like himself.

“I will personally ensure that no earthworms touch your toes,” he says, looking at my feet and then up at me.

“You can’t promise that.”

He smiles, soft, close-lipped. “I can promise, Audrey.”

“Okay,” I say then. And I step into the grass.