Chapter 51

We’re talking about Elliott when Silas knocks on the door. About how Sadie and Cora didn’t think twice about adoption; that it was something Sadie always knew she’d do. I have the world’s best parents, she told me. I needed to be that person for my own child.

“Sadie,” Silas says, low and exhausted. He knocks again, once, a heavy sound like his fist is still pressed to the door. “Can I please come in?”

Sadie’s eyes flicker over mine. “It’s your choice,” she says softly. “But I think you should hear him out.”

I stare at the door, like I could see Silas through it. I’m so bone-tired. I want him to come in here so I can lean the full weight of myself against him, let him catch me. And I don’t want him here for the same reason: I don’t know if I have the strength to keep this up. But I let him see parts of me no one else has, and he didn’t even tell me the truth.

“Audrey,” he says. It wrenches through me, the fractured sound of his voice. “Please.”

“Okay,” I whisper, and Sadie’s eyebrows rise.

“Yeah?” she says, and I nod. Press my lips together. Count my fingers as she moves toward the door, as she opens it, as Silas finds my eyes over her shoulder. They maneuver around each other in the doorframe, Sadie casting one last look at me before she steps into the hallway and the door falls shut.

Silas stands three feet inside the room, one hand on the back of his hair. He says, “You didn’t answer my calls.”

I say, “You didn’t tell me the truth.”

He winces. Gestures to the chair opposite me that Sadie left behind. “Can I—?”

I just stare at him. Silas swallows before crossing the room and sitting down.

“Audrey, I’m so sorry.” His eyes are dark and devastated. I’m so sick of people apologizing to me; it makes me feel like a pawn on everyone else’s chessboard, with no choices that are my own to make. “I thought I was doing something good this summer. Sadie’s so important to me, and this has been a huge, hard part of her life for so long, and I just wanted her to get closure and meet the people she’d wondered about forever.” He takes a rattling breath. His voice comes out quiet. “I had no idea who you were. I had no idea what you’d mean to me.”

“Okay,” I say. The words bunch up in my windpipe, suffocating me. I force them out bite by bite. “And instead of telling me once you knew who I was, you waited until after I slept with you.”

His eyes widen sharp and fast, air punching out of him. His hands twitch toward me like a reflex. “No,” he says. “No, that’s not—”

“That’s what happened.”

“Audrey, I swear.” His words stumble together, his face flushing red. I hate what it does to me, how panicked he looks and the way I want to reach for him against every decent instinct. “Factually, yes, I mean, that’s what—that’s how the timing looks, but I swear, I would never— Audrey, I wanted to tell you that morning after Nashville. When I knocked on your door. I knew you needed to know; I could feel us tipping toward this thing, and—”

“What thing?”

He sucks in a breath, gesturing between us. I don’t think he’s blinked in a full minute.

“So you assumed we would get together,” I say, acidic. He was right, but it enrages me—especially after all of this. “That I’d break up with Ethan for you.”

“No,” he says again. “No, I don’t know, I just knew you’d shared something with me that meant something to you and I knew it wasn’t some small moment. It wasn’t a throwaway.” He swallows. “All I wanted was to be close to you. Having that secret between us was eating me alive.”

I press my thumb into my pointer finger so hard that my nail threatens to break the skin. It makes me think of my forearm in Nashville, Silas running his fingers over it in the dark. I close my eyes.

“Audrey,” he says softly. “I’m so sorry. I hate that I did something that hurt you. I’ve been dying to talk to you since the show, and to know how you’re doing, and—”

“I’m doing bad,” I say, opening my eyes. I’m so angry, and I know I’m being unfair, and I’m an absolute mess, but this is Silas. Silas, who’s never turned away from a single ugly thing about me. “I’m doing pretty shitty, actually.”

He swallows. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

“My family’s a joke,” I say, and my voice tightens pathetically. “My mom’s a liar and so’s my sister, apparently, and it’s not like you’d even understand, Silas, with your big, perfect family and—”

“My perfect family?” He leans closer to me, and I don’t move away. “Audrey, when my mom died, my dad totally quit on us. He couldn’t take care of anything. Not his kids, not himself. My family was a disaster and that’s the only reason I know Sadie at all.” His eyes don’t leave mine, like he’s serious and certain and he needs me to hear this. “My cousins are a full pack of menaces. I’ve never had a single family holiday without someone yelling at someone else. No family is perfect. Every family’s awful.”

I think of GG, folding Silas in her arms, calling him baby. Maren, a tangle of wild affection. The tree house, home to generations of memories on wooden walls. “But you love them so much.”

“Yeah,” Silas says. “They’re awful and I love them. That’s family.”

I look at him: his face tipped toward me, his tired eyes, his broad shoulders stooped in defeat. I can feel the last thread of resolve vibrating inside me—a guitar string plucked too hard, poised to snap. “I wish you hadn’t lied to me,” I whisper.

Silas closes his eyes, exhales through his nose like I hurt him. “I am so, so sorry,” he says. When his eyes open, they don’t leave mine. “I’ll never do it again. I’ll never stop apologizing, if that’s what it takes. I’m so sorry, Audrey.” He draws a breath. “I want to make it right so badly. What do I need to do?”

“Tell me what it looks like,” I whisper. My eyes are filling with tears—finally, finally I’m going to cry. “This fall, and school, and after. What happens?”

Silas’s eyes track over mine. Quietly, he says, “I don’t know.” A tear hops the dam of my eyelid and he reaches for it, thumbs it off my cheek before it drips into the space between us. “But you’re going to figure all of this out. I’m going to help you, if you let me.” Silas takes my hand, tentatively, in his. Looks up at me. “I don’t know what’s next, but I see us there together.”

“I’m scared.” It’s a relief to admit it, and when a sob hiccups out of me Silas squeezes my hand in both of his. “I feel like everything I thought I knew isn’t true anymore.”

“Not everything,” he says. “You’re still you. You’re still going to be so badass at school this fall, Johns Hopkins won’t know what hit it. Tropical Storm Audrey.” He runs his thumb over the back of my hand, and I watch the motion of it. “Mick and Cleo still love you, and so does your mom, even if she’s still learning how to show it, and so do—” He breaks off, swallows. We stare at each other, and I watch him wrestle with it, his jaw flexing.

“Fuck, so do I.” Silas rubs his forehead and then looks back at me, completely unguarded. “I’ve fallen in love with you five times just since I walked into this room.”

I laugh on a sob, and Silas smiles. It’s so good to see it—in spite of everything. I love his smile, that crooked canine, the unrehearsed honesty of it. How easy it’s come to him all summer long.

“Some things have changed,” Silas says. “Some really big things. And some things won’t, ever.”

I nod. Swipe my fingers through my tears. When I jerk out of my chair and into Silas’s lap, he wraps me tight as he did in Nashville, hand on the back of my neck, rush of air gusting out of him.

“I’m so sorry,” he says quietly. I brush my thumb over the ridge of his shoulder blade, close my eyes in the hollow of his throat.

“I forgive you,” I whisper. Silas kisses the top of my head, the curve of my ear.

I’ve been so many people just this summer alone—the Audrey Camilla painted me to be, the Audrey I became through osmosis with Ethan. And this one: honest and afraid. The real version of myself Silas made space for me to be.

“It’s going to be okay,” he says.

I close my eyes. I choose to believe him.