Chapter 35

miss YOU!!!!

The text from Fallon wakes me up, the double buzz of the mattress next to my face. My eyes feel desiccated and sharp, like they grew thorns while I was sleeping.

where is this?? i miss CO so much it’s nutso

It takes me a few solid seconds to orient everything: dark hotel room, pink velvet drapes pulled across tall windows. Yellow glow of the desk lamp in the corner and the curve of Silas’s shoulder there, just blocking the light from the laptop he’s looking at. Puddles, warm and breathing near my feet. And what Fallon’s even talking about—the photo of Gossamer Lake I sent her two days ago in Switchback Ridge. Back before I’d made a failure of myself.

sorry i’ve been so MIA wifi’s a little all over the place but i have indeed birthed another beautiful well baby in the time since our last correspondence

My phone buzzes a few more times, photos coming through. And then: fill me in aud how you doing over there?

I close my eyes again. Where would I even start? I can’t believe I fell asleep here. I can’t believe this is my life at all.

There’s a knock on the hotel room door, and I keep my eyes closed so whoever it is will leave me alone. Puddles shifts, lifting her head, and we both listen to Silas’s footsteps track across the carpet.

“Ms. St. Vrain,” he says quietly, after the door clicks open.

“Silas, honey.” My mother sounds tired. “How many times? Camilla, please. Is she awake?”

The headache clustered at the front of my skull gives a dull throb. They talked about me at some point—she knew I was in here, sleeping. I feel like someone’s ward. Like I’m being babysat.

“I don’t think so,” Silas says, and Camilla says, “Let me check,” and I brace myself.

“I’ll give you a minute,” Silas tells her. When the door opens again I swallow the realization that I don’t want him to go. He’s not mine; he doesn’t owe me anything. But the room feels darker and more desperate without him in it.

“Audrey.” My name is accompanied by Camilla’s cool hand landing on my forehead, her body sinking the mattress next to my waist. I let the cold from her fingers seep through to my headache—it feels so good and for once I just let it be. “Are you still sleeping?”

I don’t know what makes me do it. Maybe the moment at the Bard on the Barge, the flicker of the secret person my mother might actually be. Maybe the memory of her sleeping in the bed next to mine that night in Chicago, wordless but watchful. Whatever the reason, I open my eyes and look at her.

“Hi,” she says. When our eyes meet I see it all: the Audrey she’s made me, the someday daughter. Captured contextless on her social feeds, all of my wins cataloged there for the world. The last time this happened and it turned into the Sex Summit instead of what it actually was. There’s no place for this version of me; I’ve let both of us down. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” I whisper. Her cool hand moves into my hair, brushing it off my forehead. It makes me feel very young.

“All right,” she says. Her hand keeps moving, rhythmic. “I’ll just say this, then. You can honor this feeling. Grieve the loss of something you wanted very much.” In this dim, unfamiliar room she could be a dream; a version of herself I’ve never known to exist. “But these feelings are like waves. We’re better for acknowledging them, for leaning in as they sway us. Allow this to move you but don’t let it drag you under, Audrey.” Her thumb traces a line between my eyebrows, up into my hair. Cool and centering. “It’ll pass, honey. And you’ll still be standing.”

I don’t believe her, but I nod anyways. Maybe so she’ll leave, maybe so she’ll see me as the person I want her to see me as: stronger. Still standing.

“And consider moving,” she says, her cool fingertips leaving my skin. “A walk outside, or something fun somewhere other than this hotel room. The world isn’t this job, though I know it feels that way now. You might need to see it with your eyes to remember.”

I nod again. I can’t imagine moving.

“What do you want to do?” she asks me. And I don’t quite answer, because what I want to do is disappear. I tell her what I have to do instead. The inevitable if/when.

“I need to call Ethan.”

It’s not something we do unprompted. Call. We always text first: Is now a good time? As if we are both something the other needs to prepare for. Calling Ethan feels like I’m ambushing him.

“Hello?” he says, and I close my eyes. The room is empty except for Puddles and me; she’s still at the foot of the bed, breathing steadily in the quiet. It’s dark. It feels like I’m occupying a different universe from Ethan, and hearing his voice in this space splits some kid of chasm right between my ribs. Like I am two Audreys: the one Ethan knows and the one in this room, a stranger and a failure.

“Audrey?”

I’ve been quiet for too long. I love the way Ethan says my name—I always have. He has the kind of calm, even voice that makes any word sound like it’s worth the world.

“Ethan,” I say softly. “How are you?”

A pause. It’s perfectly quiet where he is; maybe his dorm room. I picture him there alone and hate the way it makes me feel.

“I’m studying,” he says, and once that would’ve been answer enough. But it’s not an answer, really. “What’s going on?”

Everything’s changing, I think. That’s what’s going on, but if I say it it’ll be true. And I still want to be Ethan’s Audrey, reliable and sure of herself and right. Constant and constantly enough.

“I didn’t get it,” I say.

And Ethan does the worst thing he could do, which is that he makes me say it again. “What?”

I drag the words up like dead weight. “I didn’t get it, Ethan.”

Silence. It stretches and stretches and I can’t believe he’s doing this to me.

“Ethan, I didn’t—”

“I heard you.” I know him well enough to know that the way he says it means he’s thinking. That my words are actively processing through him, problems he’s already working to solve. “Did they say why?”

I realize then that I haven’t even read the whole email. But I can’t bear to look at it, so I just say, “No.”

“Have you tried calling? There might be someone in the admissions office who could help. Reconsider.”

It’s incomprehensible to him. He sounds like he did all the way back in Los Angeles, when I called him from Camilla’s backyard and he couldn’t believe Penn had given my place to someone on the wait list. For a brutal flash of a moment, I see myself the way he does: a shoo-in for this spot. And I know that this outcome doesn’t match his idea of me, and that my failure to meet this expectation is intolerable. He can’t even process it; his first reaction is to change it.

I don’t have it in me to talk him into what I know to be true, which is that they aren’t going to reconsider. One student gets this shadowing position out of an entire incoming class and it’s not me. They chose someone else. I don’t want it to be true, either, but it is.

“No,” I say. My voice cracks on the word and Puddles lifts her head, cocking it to one side like I’ve surprised her. In the silence before Ethan speaks she stands and pads toward me across the mattress.

“The office opens at nine o’clock tomorrow morning,” he says. Puddles sits beside me, leaning all her weight against my thigh. She’s so warm. “I’d call first thing, before they get—”

“Ethan.” He stops. “I didn’t get the job, okay?”

He’s quiet for an endless, endless minute. I don’t know what I wanted him to say when I picked up the phone but I should have known that it would be this. What did I expect? Ethan was never going to tell me it’s okay; in the world that we share, it’s not okay. I missed the mark and the only thing to do now is fix it.

“You’ll find something else,” he says finally. My nose burns with tears, and when I put my hand on Puddles’s back she leans into me even harder. “When I see you in Miami next week, we’ll find something else.”

“Okay,” I say. My voice is thin and absolutely pitiful. The thought of him seeing me like this feels impossible. The door opens and light floods in from the hallway, cut with Silas’s shadow. “I have to go.”

“Audrey,” Ethan starts, but I can’t do this—I can’t shoehorn something else into the hole where the ICU was, not yet. I can’t strategize this with Ethan, not while Silas stands ten feet away. Not while the waves are still this wild, threatening to pull me under.

“I have dinner,” I tell him, the lie coming so easily it scares me. “With my mom. I have to go, Ethan.”

When I end the call a sob hiccups out of me, painful, angry for being held in through that whole conversation. I feel worse than I did before we talked—just like I knew, somehow, that I would. When Silas sits on the bed across from me he sets something on the nightstand and turns on the lamp. He doesn’t touch me, not like before.

“Whatever he said,” Silas says quietly, “he’s wrong.”

I press my fingertips into my eyes, draw a steadying breath. When I push my tears across my cheeks and look at Silas he’s holding something out to me: a paper cup, watery green liquid steaming into the space between us. Thin string hanging from its edge with a Peppermint tea tag.

“GG would be horrified that I’m giving you this knockoff version,” he says. “But it’s all they have here.”

“Thank you,” I whisper, and when I take it from him my hands shake. Silas reaches to rub Puddles’s head, and the edge of his palm brushes my leg.

“What are you thinking?” he finally asks, eyes coming up to mine. His hair’s like it was that very first night in Los Angeles: pulled back, a few pieces loose around his face. I remember thinking he looked so wild, then. So unknowable to me, like we didn’t and could never have anything to do with each other. It’s just a summer, my dad told me when I called him from San Francisco. But here we are.

I take a sip of the tea and it’s so hot it dislodges something inside me. “What do I do now?”

He pulls his hand back into his lap, draws a breath. “Can we try something?”

I think of the tree house, his angry eyes in the dark. I nod.

Silas says, “Come out with us tonight.”