Chapter 50

The lobby of the hotel looks like an ER waiting room. Mags, Mick, Cleo, Sadie, Silas—all of them gathered in the carefully clustered armchairs like family hoping for news. Which is what I thought they were, in a way. My family of some kind.

“Audrey.” Silas is on his feet the moment my mother and I walk through the doors. Puddles isn’t with him, which is how I know he’s beside himself. He’s wearing the GG’s baseball cap and a thin T-shirt and sneakers. His eyes are bloodshot. The lobby is freezing, and when he gets close enough to reach for me, I can see the goose bumps on his forearms.

“Don’t.” I hold up a hand, and he stops. Drops his arms to his sides. Something tugs, like an iron hook, through my belly. I want to fold myself against him, close my eyes in the curve of his neck, and forcing myself not to leaves my insides a massacre.

“Please,” he says, so quietly, like it’s only the two of us. Like every other person in this lobby isn’t watching. “Audrey, I’m so sorry, if I can just expl—”

“Silas.” I’ve been so focused on the tremble in his voice, on the smudged half-moons under his eyes, I didn’t even see Sadie stand up. But she’s right behind Silas, hand on his shoulder. “Let me, okay?”

He looks at her, his lips parting. And something passes between them—unspoken, the wordless way people communicate when they know each other so well. Sadie nods. Silas looks at me, fevered and searching, and takes a step backward.

“Upstairs, maybe,” my mother says quietly from beside me. When her hand touches my elbow, I flinch.

“Camilla,” Sadie says, “do you mind if I talk to Audrey alone?”

Blood courses, frantic, to my face. I look at my mom and realize I don’t want to be without her for this. But when her eyes track over mine, she just nods. “Of course.”

“What?” I say, but Sadie’s already moving toward the elevators, arm reaching out but not touching me. My mother nudges me after her, silent and sure, like she and Sadie have already spoken. We ride the elevator in panicked silence. When Sadie lets me into her hotel room I stand, rigid, holding my own hands.

“Please sit,” she says, motioning to the chairs in the corner of the room. There are two, high-backed and overstuffed, a lamp standing between them like a mediator. I sit.

“Look, Audrey.” Sadie lowers herself into the other chair and runs a hand through her hair. I watch her wedding band catch the light. “I fucked up here. But there was no good way to do this.”

“There was probably a better way,” I say. I’m scanning her for similarities: she didn’t get Camilla’s blue eyes, like I did. She didn’t get her blonde hair, but I didn’t get that, either. The way they look at me is the same—that earnest, unflinching intensity. I assumed it was because they’re adults, but maybe it’s because they belong to each other.

“Yeah,” Sadie says softly. “There probably was. But I couldn’t figure it out in time.”

The AC kicks on, and I let out a wavering exhale. “Why did you come here?”

It’s a cruel thing to say, maybe. Maybe I shouldn’t be pushing her away, questioning her motivations, when half our blood’s the same. I have no idea what the right thing is now.

She rubs a thumb into the center of her palm. Studies her hands before looking back up at me. “To know you,” she says simply. “And her. It’s been this huge question, all my life. I mean, god, I chose to go to American just to feel like I was experiencing something she had.” Sadie blinks across the room before looking back at me. “Maybe that’s embarrassing, but it’s the truth. The two of you have always been unreachable to me. And I wanted to see if I could figure out why she’d pushed me away, when I contacted her all those years ago. To see whether this book was about me, like I thought it might be.”

I blink down at my hands. I know something about chasing Camilla in places she can’t see you; trying to experience her in ways she’ll never know about. My used copies of Letters, my stash of therapy reviews. She’s made a mess of us both.

I look up at Sadie. “But you could’ve told me sooner.”

“Yeah,” Sadie says quietly. “Before we came here, Silas and I talked about it—if we would tell her, or you.”

It’s torture to picture it: Silas, who I thought I knew so well, plotting how to keep my own history a secret from me.

“I’m sorry if that sounds insensitive,” Sadie says. She shakes her head. “Not if. I know it does. But I was operating under the understanding that Camilla knew her first biological daughter had reached out, and that she didn’t want to meet me. It didn’t feel obvious, that it was something I should share with either of you. It felt like a secret everyone wanted to keep.”

“I didn’t know it to keep it,” I say, and she nods.

“I know that now. But I didn’t, then.” Sadie twists her wedding band around her finger. “Back then, we both just thought this was an opportunity for me to get some closure. To meet both of you and see what this part of my past, this part of my DNA, felt like.”

“Well?” I say, and my voice has an edge that it didn’t before. “How did it feel?”

She sighs, slow and controlled. “Really hard. Audrey, for years I’ve thought that you and Camilla had this perfect relationship—that you were so close. That maybe she didn’t want to meet me because she’d had you by then. It hurt so badly to see how publicly she loved you when she didn’t even want to know my name.”

I shake my head, but I can’t manage words. All lies, every part of all of this, from top to bottom.

“But then I met you, and I could see that you were in so much pain.” I look up at her, and her eyes are full of tears. I think of those notes she took about me in her book—Audrey uncomfortable during Sex Summit Q/A in SF—and the way she’s been watching over me all summer long. “That the reality of your connection to her was so different from what I’d seen filtered through the media. I hated myself for holding such a false narrative of both of you for so long.”

“Yeah,” I say quietly. “The stories are better.”

“Not better,” Sadie says. “Both of you are so much smarter, and so much more thoughtful, and so much more impressive in real life. And before I knew it, I was completely in over my head, holding on to this thing that no one else knew, and I’d come to care about both of you so much, and I knew you were hurting and that the truth would complicate everything in this really huge way, and it—” She breaks off, catches her breath. When she reaches for my hand, I let her take it. I stare at our fingers and think, for the very first time, that I have a sister.

“Silas wanted to tell you from essentially the first time he talked to you,” Sadie says. “He knew right away, before I did, that we’d made a mistake. You didn’t deserve to find out this way, Audrey, and it was me keeping the secret.” I look up at her, and she squeezes my hand. “You have to know that it was me.”

I swallow, and it hurts. “So what do you make of us? Camilla and me.” My voice is tight and pitiful. “Not so perfect, after all.”

“No relationship between a mother and their daughter is perfect,” Sadie says. “Mine isn’t, but I love her so much. Yours isn’t, but—”

Sadie draws a breath, and it’s not Camilla I recognize in her this time. In the way she sets her shoulders and steadies herself and brings her focus to center. It’s me.

“But that doesn’t mean,” Sadie says, “that she’s not worth forgiving.”