Chapter 42

The knocking wakes me slowly, distant but persistent. I open my eyes to the dark office, blue light just inching around the edges of the boarded-up windows. We slept on the floor, linens and pillows pulled from the bedrooms while we waited out the storm. It sounds quiet now, outside—but the knocking comes again.

There’s something heavy and warm on my stomach; as my eyes adjust to the light I clock it as Silas’s arm, thrown across me. He’s sleeping right next to me, much closer than the polite distance where we fell asleep, his chest rising and falling rhythmically. I stare at his arm: tan from summer, a few ropy veins racing up from his wrist to his elbow. His fingers are splayed over my hipbone and when I sit up his fingertips press into me for just a moment, a reflex. Puddles is wedged into the space between our bodies, her face buried in Silas’s neck. Mick and Cleo sleep a few feet away. Mom and Magnolia are gone.

When I check my phone, still without service, it’s 8:03 in the morning.

I slip out from under Silas’s arm as delicately as I can, and when he turns onto his back Puddles wiggles after him to keep her spot. Her big brown eyes track me out of the room.

The house is still dark, hardly feels like morning. The knocking continues, and I grab a flashlight from next to the office door and use it to make my way across the foyer. I wonder, briefly, where my mother is. But then I swing the front door open and every single thought drops directly out of my brain.

“Ethan.”

He’s standing on the front steps in khaki shorts and a rumpled Yale T-shirt cut by black backpack straps. A duffel bag rests at his feet.

“Hi,” he says. The one syllable sounds absurd, hanging in the humid air between us. It occurs to me, distantly, that the sun is out.

“You’re here.” Behind him, a landscaping truck sits in the driveway. There are at least four people picking up debris in the yard. My thumb is pressed to my pinky finger, silently counting.

“I took a bus,” he says. He looks exhausted: purple smudges under his eyes, dark hair uncharacteristically unkempt. “And then another one. And then, um, a cab.”

“I didn’t think you—” I break off. My brain is hardly working at all. “When your flight was canceled, I didn’t think—”

“You didn’t think I’d come?”

I shake my head slowly.

“Well, I did.” He shrugs, something so entirely defeated about it I feel tears gathering in my throat. “I think we need to talk, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I whisper. A black SUV swings into the driveway and Ethan turns around to look at it, giving me a chance to stare at him openly: the familiar curve of his shoulders, the dark-framed glasses I’ve slid down his nose so many times before. I think we should take a break. Space to think about what we both want from this.

My mother and Mags pile out of the back of the car holding trays of coffee. When my mom sees Ethan her smile falters, but only for a moment. No one, after all, knows how to pull it together quite like she does.

“Ethan,” she calls. “Honey, how did you get here?”

“Bus,” I say for him, and my mom’s eyebrows arch.

“I’m surprised they were running. We had to drive forty minutes just to find coffee.”

“Could have been worse,” Mags tells us as Camilla presses Ethan into a hug that looks, from his side, reluctant. “Fizzled out as a tropical storm before becoming a hurricane. Everything looks mostly okay out there, but who knows when the power will be back.”

My mother hands me an iced coffee and then, inexplicably, passes one to Ethan. I wonder whose it was supposed to be.

“Thank you,” Ethan says. “It’s nice to see you, Ms. St. Vrain.”

They’ve only met once before, at graduation.

“Oh, you too,” Mom says. Her eyes flick, nearly imperceptibly, to me. “Are you two coming in? It’s so dark with the boards up but cooler than this heat.”

“Maybe we should take a walk,” I say quickly. The thought of Ethan and Silas occupying the same space is untenable. Ethan looks like he’s thirty seconds from falling asleep. “Or maybe just sit outside?” I gesture toward the water, ten paces across the yard. “If you’re, um. Too tired.”

Ethan swallows, glancing out at the ocean before looking back at me. “Yeah,” he says. “Sure.”

“Go on ahead.” My mother touches the back of my arm. When she squeezes, gently, I feel a sharp pang of fear. “Mags and I will bring your bags inside, honey.”

Ethan slides off his backpack, handing it to Magnolia. She slings it over a shoulder, offers him a curt smile, and follows Camilla into the house.

And then there’s no one else to look at, and Ethan and I stare at each other for a moment that feels so long it’s torture. I draw a breath. He waves across the yard and says, “After you.”

There’s a seawall at the edge of the grass, and when I lower myself onto it Ethan hesitates.

“It’s wet,” he says.

The butt of my pajama shorts is already soaked through. I’m so overwhelmed by what’s going to happen next that I didn’t even notice. “Oh,” I say, making to stand back up. “Um, okay. We can just, we can—”

“It’s fine.” Ethan lowers himself gingerly next to me, setting his coffee on the ledge. He hovers for a moment over the wet grass and then finally gives into it, wincing like the moisture hurts. He’s me, I think. I’m like that, too.

“Thank you for coming,” I say. My bare feet are in the water, but Ethan tucks his sneakers flat against the seawall.

He looks at me, eyes as blue and dark as the ocean. “I was worried about you.”

The way he says it feels like an accusation. That I’ve given him something to worry about.

“The storm wasn’t so bad,” I say, and he shakes his head.

“Not that; everything else.”

“Everything,” I repeat.

His eyes cast over my face, like he’s looking for something familiar and having trouble finding it. “What you said when you were drunk in Nashville.”

My cheeks go hot. “I wasn’t drunk in Nashville.”

“You said you were.”

“I said I had a beer.”

“And a half.”

“Are you serious right now?”

“I don’t know, Audrey, are you?” His voice sounds frayed, like he’s holding too tightly to himself and something’s starting to rip. “Because this isn’t you. The partying and not caring about the ICU rejection after—”

“Not caring?” It feels like getting an IV, how fast the fury diffuses through me. Sprinting into my bloodstream. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Okay, then help me understand,” he says. “Because all I know is we had a plan, and then all summer you’ve been less and less committed to the Penn work. Then you get rejected from the ICU position, and you go out and drink instead of doing something about it. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“It wasn’t instead of,” I say, trying to keep my voice as even as possible. Something is clawing back up from the dark pit of my stomach, a familiar shame. He’s right, it whispers. You didn’t do anything about it. “I was really upset, and I needed to do something fun to get through that night. That’s it.”

“But that’s not how we have fun,” Ethan says. Our eyes meet and it’s so plain on his face, how confused he is. “We aren’t into stupid stuff like drinking or going to clubs.”

I feel stiff, like there’s metal shot through my bones. Maybe I do have fun like that. Maybe I’ve always had that in me. Hearing him use the word stupid in association with a choice I’ve made feels like a compound fracture. We’ve been on a break, and it’s so clear sitting here beside him that we really are broken.

“Would it be so bad?” I manage. Wind moves off the water, fingering through his hair. “If I had fun like that sometimes?”

“I don’t know,” Ethan says. When I rear back, he holds up his hands. “I mean, no. I don’t—no, I just feel like you’re changing and I don’t understand what you want. It’s not making sense.”

“Okay, well, I’m not a problem set, Ethan. You can’t solve me.” There’s no one here to protect me but me. I feel like I’m watching myself from above, propped on the seawall in my pajamas as I’m told by someone I thought was on my team that there’s no wiggle room between us. That I’ve fucked it all up by trying even one new thing. And it hurts, but it also feels untrue. I don’t know a lot, I don’t know what’s next, but I know I didn’t earn this. “It’s as I am or not at all.”

Ethan looks at me, draws a breath through his nose. “I guess it just feels like I don’t know who you are anymore.”

I blink at him, trying to find it. The feeling I used to get around Ethan, like he ordered the world for me. Like everything would make sense if I could just be next to him.

I’ve always thought he was helping me: editing my papers, encouraging me to apply for things, sending me links to research positions. But now, sitting by the ocean with a person who doesn’t recognize me at all, I wonder if Ethan actually just needed me to be a certain version of myself. If he was scared of what might happen to us when I finally fell short of his vision of me.

“I think we’re supposed to change, sometimes.” My voice is quiet, swishing into the tide. “I’m sorry if you don’t like the ways I’m changing. But you can’t force me to be the kind of person you want me to be.”

“I know,” Ethan says. He sounds sad, and it hollows me out. “I guess I’ve just always thought we were the same kind of person, until now.”

I reach for my coffee and take a long, bitter sip. It’s weak and watery. “You came here to break up with me.”

Ethan hesitates. “Yeah,” he says finally. If there’s one thing I’ve always been able to count on Ethan for, it’s the truth. “And I knew you would do it, if I didn’t.”

I nod, setting the coffee back on the ledge.

“Because of him?” Ethan says, and when I look at him I can tell that it hurts to ask the question. “The guy from that paparazzi photo.”

I think of Silas, asleep with his arm thrown across me. Drenched by Lake Michigan. Moonlit in that tree house overlooking the garden. “A little,” I say. I owe Ethan the truth, too. “But mostly because of us.”

He nods, tracing the seam of his shorts with a thumbnail. When he looks out over the water, his eyes narrow into a wince. “It’s probably my own fault, for encouraging you to stay this summer. That day you called me from California. Maybe it would’ve been different, if we’d been together at Penn.” He turns back to me. “But I told you to stay.”

He’s right—it probably would’ve been different. I wouldn’t have met Cleo or Mick or Silas and I wouldn’t have drowned myself like a dumbass and I wouldn’t have fallen so hard for that stupid dog sleeping in the office. I might have landed the ICU job. I wouldn’t have had that conversation in Nashville with my mom. I wouldn’t know so many things about myself that I know, sitting here, right now.

“I wanted you to want me to come,” I say. His eyes track over mine, liquid blue in the sun off the water. “And there were so many times early this summer, and last year at school, that I—” I swallow, make myself say it now when I never have before. “That I wanted to tell you I loved you, or to hear you say it, but we never did.”

Ethan hesitates, and I watch this process through him. I can tell, by how long it takes him to find words, that it’s the first time he’s thought about it. “I’m sorry,” he says eventually. “I didn’t think we—I thought we were focused on other things.”

“Yeah,” I say quietly. Focused, steady Ethan, who’s never pretended to be anything other than himself. “We were. And I’m glad you told me to stay on the tour.”

He looks at me, draws a deep breath before speaking. “Yeah?”

I nod. “Yeah.”

Ethan looks out over the water. The wind moves through his hair and he lifts a hand to rub a fist between his eyebrows, working out a headache. “Damn it,” he mumbles finally. “This feels like shit.”

I reach for him and he lets me do it, wrap both arms around his bicep and lean my head onto his shoulder. I’ve always wanted more of Ethan than he was willing to give to me, and now we won’t have any of each other at all. It feels awful and inevitable in equal measure.

“I’m sorry, Audrey,” Ethan says, when we’ve been sitting for a long time staring out at the water. He draws a deep breath that nudges my head with the rise of his shoulder. “You’re going to be a really good doctor.”

My eyes prick with tears, and I squeeze his arm. “So are you.”