Chapter 33

We’re somewhere over Kansas when Sadie nudges my elbow. I have headphones in and my laptop open, scrolling through the Johns Hopkins course catalog. Aside from finger counting, nothing calms me down quite as quickly.

“Hey,” she says. We had to bump up our flight last-minute to accommodate some A-list book club visit in Nashville, so our seats are scattered all throughout the plane. Sadie’s in the window and I’m stuck in the middle next to an eleven-year-old who’s spent the whole flight loudly smacking bubble gum. The interns are in a row at the very back. I haven’t spoken to any of them since GG’s.

I raise my eyebrows at her, pulling out one earbud.

“You doing okay?” she says.

I feel myself stiffen, my spine arcing off the back of the seat. “Why?”

Sadie smiles a little. “Don’t be so suspicious, Audrey, you’ve just been quiet since the bookstore yesterday.”

I blink. I’ve been quiet since the bookstore, or Silas finally said something to her? I’ve been quiet, or she wants to talk about how I literally teared up during that bananas meditation situation like some kind of kombucha-drinking earth mother?

“I’m fine,” I say, and when she narrows her eyes I repeat it. “I’m fine.”

“You sure?”

I close my laptop, shifting a little to look at her head-on. “Can I ask you something?”

She waves a hand, like, proceed.

When I swallow it feels cartoonishly dramatic. “What do you take notes on, in Letters?”

I swear I watch Sadie’s pupils dilate in real time. She looks like I just asked her how recently she committed first-degree homicide. Why does this matter so much to her?

“What do you?” she says.

I tilt away from her. “I told you, I don’t. That was a used copy of the book. Someone else’s notes.”

“Why were you carrying it around, then?”

I blink rapidly. “I just, um.” I think about lying, about making something up. Telling her that I was holding on to it for Camilla, or that someone gave it to me at a show and I’d forgotten to throw it out. But I remember what my mother said, yesterday in that houseboat bookstore: Honor the feeling you’re identifying right this moment. And I feel like I want to tell Sadie the truth.

“I read it a lot,” I say finally. “Letters. To try and understand her.”

The plane hums around us. Sadie holds my eyes. “That’s why I’m reading it, too.”

Before I can ask what Sadie could possibly want to know about my mom, she says, “What are you hoping to find?”

The question settles in me like sand, not so heavy in itself but suffocating in its power to fill me. The way it blankets everything. A sign that I matter to her, I think. But I don’t say that to Sadie. Instead, I ask, “What’s your mom like?”

She stares at me. “My mom?” When I nod, she clears her throat. Looks down at her hands. “She’s, I mean. She’s an elementary school teacher in Grand Rapids. She has bangs and she thinks the only place worth vacationing is Mackinac Island. She’s sixty-five.”

She looks back at me, clocking my reaction like this is some kind of test.

“Okay,” I say slowly. “Are you close?”

The seat belt light plinks on, and Sadie glances up at it before answering. “Yeah,” she says. “I would say so, yes.”

I press my thumb to my pinky, counting down from four. “How do you know?”

“What do you mean?”

I draw another breath. “What does it feel like? How do you know you’re close to each other?”

Sadie’s eyes slant with something so close to sympathy I have to look straight down at my lap.

“I’m sure you’ve caught on by now,” I say. “That Camilla and I aren’t, exactly. Close.”

She’s quiet for so long that I finally look up at her. But she doesn’t look sympathetic—she looks uncomfortable. Like it’s as awkward for me to admit the truth as it’s felt for me to live it. Like she doesn’t want to hear this, just like the rest of the world. Like we’ll all be better off if we just keep living the fiction.

“Never mind,” I say quickly. The sear of rejection is hot and black, liquid tar over my shoulders.

“Audrey—” Sadie tries, but I stick my earbuds in and wave her off. What do I think I’m doing, anyways? I’m the someday daughter. No one wants to consider that I might be anything else.

We’re silent for the rest of the flight, for the wait in baggage claim, for the drive from the airport to our hotel in downtown Nashville. I keep my sunglasses on and my headphones in so no one will bother talking to me. I know I’m stewing, absolutely languishing in the mud pit of my own feelings.

I’m staring out the tinted window when we pull up to the hotel. When my phone pings with an email notification. When I get news that’s two days early.

Dear Audrey, the email begins. Thank you for your recent application to the Fall Semester Freshman ICU Shadowing Program. We sincerely appreciate your interest and regret to inform you that we’re moving ahead with another student at this time.

I’m going dark before I’ve even finished the first sentence.