Chapter 47

BOSTON

Boston’s Letters to My Someday Daughter show takes place in a church just a few blocks off the Common. It’s enormous and ornate, all flying buttresses and stained glass. The pews are packed. Our voices echo from the great stone ceiling.

Today’s been our tightest connection—we left the airport in a shuttle that took us to the hotel just long enough to change our clothes. And then it was straight here; no time to pull my mother aside, no time to talk to Silas. He laced his fingers through mine on the ride from Boston Logan and I stared at the side of his face, words rising in me like acid. This person you think you know, I almost said. She’s up to something. But Sadie was right there on his other side, scrolling the news on her phone. And besides: Silas loves her. I don’t want to place myself like a wedge between them until I know what I’m looking at. Until I’ve processed it over and over. Worn its edges smooth.

But Silas already knows me, and when we parted in the dark beyond the stage curtain he trapped my wrist in the circle of his fingers.

“Audrey.”

I turned back to him, heart like a snatched firefly behind my ribs—flickering and afraid. He took a step closer, his other hand rising to my waist. Warm palm on my hipbone.

His eyes moved over mine. “Are you okay?”

I wanted to tell him. He was the first person I’d ever met who I wanted to give every single one of my truths to. “Sadie—” I started, but then Magnolia emerged from the darkness.

“Ready?” she said, and I wasn’t, but my mother had appeared beside her. “It’s time.”

“Wait.” Silas’s fingertips tightened into my dress. “Tell me what—”

“It’s okay.” I pressed a hand to his chest, dropped it, lifted my fingers to my lips instead. Stepped out of his arms to follow Camilla into the stage lights. “Talk after?”

His eyes tracked over mine, back and forth. “Okay,” he said. Black Henley, black jeans, dark hair tied back. Camera at his side. The exact way I’d seen him so many times, on nights just like this one, all summer long. “Talk after.”

Now I look over at my mother in the middle of the QA. It’s our penultimate show, and it’s not lost on me that we’ve survived it. That this summer is drawing shut—Camilla St. Vrain and her someday daughter are nearly off the menu. Soon we’ll be back to the way it’s always been: my mother in Los Angeles, me far away. I watch her smile under the lights and wonder how different it will be, now that this summer’s had its way with us.

“I’m curious about the early years,” a woman says, standing in the audience. She’s holding the mic too close to her face; the feedback crackles like static. “What it was like raising a daughter after writing Letters, and talking to so many people about it.”

Mom looks at me, smiling lightly, and clarifies, “The early years with Audrey?”

I think of Sadie’s note, scribbled in blue pen: Asked C if her birth was easy she said “With Audrey?” I look offstage, where Silas’s camera sits all alone with its recording light blinking into the dark. He never leaves during a show, but he’s gone now. My mother starts talking about me as a baby—precocious and alert—but I’m not listening. It’s the last question, and when she finishes answering I excuse myself to the bathroom mid-applause.

Cleo and Mick are leaned against the wall past the curtains, their faces illuminated by the glow of their phones.

“Nice one,” Mick says, smiling up at me. “If the doctor thing doesn’t work out, you could take a crack at motivational speaking.”

I look past him, scanning for Silas, as Cleo hums her agreement. “What did she say out there?” She nudges Mick in the shoulder. “‘We do ourselves a disservice by self-labeling as any one kind of person. We need our own permission to grow and change.’” Her eyebrows hike up as she looks from Mick to me. “Right? Something like that. Hit me right in the chest, Aud.”

“Silas taught me that one.” I look between them. “Where is he?”

Mick jerks a thumb over his shoulder at a closed office door. “With Sadie. I’m sure you can go in.”

I pad down the carpeted hall toward the door, carved wood with an elaborate metal knob. I can hear Silas and Sadie inside—when I tip my ear closer, I catch the tenor of Silas’s voice. Low and urgent, like he’s angry.

“—yeah, Sadie, but I told you she was acting weird before the show. Something’s going on.”

“Silas.” Sadie’s voice is soft, steadying. The voice of a parent consoling her child. “There’s no reason to believe she knows.”

“Even if not,” he says, voice rising, “it doesn’t even—things have changed, okay?” My body moves on its own, twists the doorknob. “You need to tell her or I’m—”

Silas breaks off, eyes widening when he sees me in the doorframe. Sadie, standing with her back to me, turns around.

“Audrey,” Silas says. “Hi.”

I look between them: Sadie’s pale face, the steadying way she swallows. And Silas—how he looks ruined and resigned. Everything inside me goes rigid, bracing.

“What’s going on?”

Sadie glances at Silas, and he says, “Tell her.”

This room isn’t an office after all; it’s for children. Sunday school, maybe. All the chairs are too small, the walls covered in colorful construction paper. Sadie glances at a box of crayons on a nearby table.

I clear my throat. “Tell me what?”

“Silas,” Sadie says, nearly begging. “Not here. I need to—”

“No,” Silas tells her. “You’ve waited long enough.”

Sadie looks up at me, drawing a deep breath. Her pause feels like torture, endless. “Audrey, there’s something we should’ve talked to you about a long time ago.”

We.I look at Silas, my safest place. Think of this afternoon, when I wanted so badly to tell him what I’d found. Of thirty seconds ago, how it felt to walk down this hallway and know he was at the other end of it—that no matter what was going on, it would be okay. It didn’t occur to me even once that he wouldn’t be on my side. But now, here he is: part of a we that’s kept something from me.

“Okay,” I whisper, so quietly it’s hardly a word at all.

Sadie steps toward me, arms out like she might touch me. She doesn’t. “I know you’ve had some hesitations this summer. About the tour, and the book, and your involvement in it.”

I feel my eyebrows twitch together. I’ve spent my whole life thinking Letters actually has nothing to do with me, but after Nashville and Ethan and these two months with my mom, it feels at least a little closer to true. And our show tonight was good—we fake it so well now that I’m not sure we’re faking it at all.

I press my thumb to my pointer finger. “And?”

“Well.” Sadie hesitates, then finally looks into my eyes. “Audrey, I think Camilla might’ve written the book about me.”