Chapter 46

“What’s next?” Mom says. We’re in a hidden lounge at the Miami airport, all plush leather seating and built-in phone chargers. Cleo leans on Mick’s shoulder as he scrolls my mother’s socials, and Silas is at the enormous floor-to-ceiling window across the room, holding Puddles up to see the tarmac. Mags and Sadie stand side by side at the bar. I think of Sadie’s book, nestled against my laptop in my backpack.

I scrunch my eyebrows at my mom. “Our flight to Boston?”

“I mean with you.” She’s wearing a baseball cap low over her forehead, and so far we’ve only received a few lingering glances. “What do you have planned with Sadie in Boston?”

“We’re seeing an internist,” I tell her. When I don’t elaborate, she waves a hand in the space between us, like, go on. This is new—both her curiosity and my urge to satisfy it. Talking to each other is like a muscle we’ve let atrophy, and building it back up aches in a good way.

“I guess Sadie knows this person through Dr. Osman,” I say. Mom lifts a to-go cup of coffee and takes a sip. “The pediatrician we met back in San Francisco. They went to medical school together.”

“Does it appeal to you?” she asks. “Internal medicine.”

I study her face for the trap, try to suss out what she wants me to say. If she thinks a specialty would be more impressive—neurosurgery, maybe. If there’s an answer she’s hoping I’ll give.

“It does,” I say slowly—like if I draw out the words, I might have time to catch her reaction and course-correct before going too far. But my mother only nods, attentive and neutral. “I wouldn’t always get to dig as deep with patients, but, um.” I glance up as Silas heads toward us, Puddles tucked under one arm. “A lot of times internists are the first doctors people go to when they need help.” I look back at Mom. “And it would appeal to me, I think. Getting to be that person.”

She smiles. “You’d be wonderful as that person.”

“As which person?” Silas sits next to me, and Puddles clambers out of his lap onto mine. When he drops an arm around my shoulders, I lean into him like a reflex. Since that night in my bedroom I want to be close to Silas so desperately it leaves me breathless; already, I’m worried about August. About two short weeks from now—after Boston, after DC—when he’ll be out of my reach.

“An internist,” I say, looking up at him. He smiles, and when his eyes flicker to my lips it tugs deep in my belly. But my mother is three feet away from us, and he doesn’t kiss me.

“The intern and the internist,” Silas says. Mom laughs—a gusty, unrehearsed sound—and Silas turns to grin at her. “Sounds like a mediocre Broadway show.”

She lifts a shoulder, drops it again. Waves a hand toward us. “I’m enjoying it so far.”

Cleo, sitting next to me in the middle seat, finally falls asleep somewhere over North Carolina. Mick’s in the aisle, nose inches from his phone screen as he plays a game that shoots the occasional plink sound effect into the humming space between us. I confirm Cleo’s false-eyelashed eyes are firmly shut before reaching into the backpack between my feet.

I maneuver as inconspicuously as I can, working the dust jacket off Sadie’s copy of Letters before pulling it out of my bag. Without the jacket the book is plain maroon canvas, indistinguishable when you can’t see the spine. When I glance at Mick his gaze is still a magnet on his phone screen.

There’s the dedication, familiar to me as my own name. To her. But circled here—a solid navy-blue line, like Sadie wanted to remember those two tiny words.

I start flipping. Slowly, to savor it like sweet poison. And faster, when I realize how few notes she’s actually taken. They’re sparse—an underline of The fear of intimacy is the fear of ourselves in chapter three, with Sadie’s scrawled words beside it. My name, right where I’d seen it jotted down in Miami: Audrey uncomfortable during Sex Summit Q/A in SF. Later, penned in inexplicably next to the chapter five header: C discussion of private vs. public lives in Santa Fe.

The majority of the notes are in the book’s third and final section, which is about reparenting your adult self. About making choices with conviction. There’s a full page on deciding whether or not to have children—when I flip to it, my breath hitches beneath my ribs. The paper is filled edge to edge with pen.

It’s okay to not desire the lifestyle you’re told is desirable, Sadie’s underlined. It’s okay to accept your desires as they are. If that doesn’t include children, listen. Honor your own wishes. There is no one else to do it for you.

Next to it, Sadie has written: In Austin C mentions difficult “context” to her life while writing book. And beneath that, my name again. Asked C if her birth was easy she said “With Audrey?”

I flip the page, looking for more, but there isn’t any. The rest of the book is blank—nothing but its commercially letter-pressed lines, every word where it’s always been.

I look at Cleo, fast asleep. At Mick, who I haven’t seen blink in the last hour. And back down at the book—snapped shut in my lap. I spread my fingers across it, watching the contrast of my pale hands splay over its bloodred cover.

The notes read like a case file. Like Sadie’s compiling evidence. But what the hell for?