“She doesn’t want me, Will. It’s not as simple as all that, it’s?—”
“Did she say that? Were those her exact words?”
“No, but?—”
“Great. When you hear those, when she tells you she doesn’t want you…” he swallows hard, a fleeting sadness passing in his gaze. “Then you’ll know. Believe me.”
The emptiness that aches within me, that tells me that something belongs in all that space, that that something is Sloane, glows, painfully sears against me because he’s right. In the chaos, under that shattered sky, neither of us chose anything. We were torn apart by our circumstances, pushed into our own fractured pasts and away from each other.
“Prepare for the descent,” that clipped voice comes again.
“I’ll get you a plane,” Will says, all smug as his phone lights up in his hand.
“What?”
“I’ll get you a plane,” he says again, slowly, shaking his head with a grin. “Fuck the conference. Go get your girl, Spellman.”
42
Sloane
A voice rumbles in the hallway and, for a moment, I think it could be Andy. Blood rushes to my fingertips, floating flimsy hope to the top of my skin as I slowly roll to my side—until I realize it’s Grant.
“You’re sure?” he’s asking Evie, and I don’t hear her response, just her soft murmuring on the other side of the door. Eyes heavy, I drift in and out of sleep, only waking when something tricks me into thinking it could be him.
The winter I spent loving him is stretched wide when my eyes are closed like this, and I can almost forget that spring has thawed all of that away. In my dreams he’s in my doorway, in my car, in a seat at the conservatory, watching me make sense out of oily pigments; watching me piece myself back together.
It’s only when my back starts to radiate with pain from lying down for so long that I finally decide to move. Stretching my limbs in the cloud like sheets, I push up against the headboard and scrub my face as it throbs, the emotional weight of the past few days still pulsing against my bones.
I sightlessly reach for the freshly topped water on mynightstand, and of course it’s there. Evie would’ve refilled it while I was sleeping, the way she would when I was a mangy teenager, sneaking in and out of her windows at all hours of the night. I’d escape back into the careful polish of the room she and Beau’d built me and not even bother to shrug off my jeans or wash the night off my face. Just slump against the quilt and wait for daylight to break across my cheek, wait to start all over again.
And when I did, there’d be a glass of water. Sometimes a note.
Swinging my legs off the bed, I find it with my hand.
Just grabbing coffee. xx mom
A smile pulls at the corners of my mouth, has slow tears pricking in my eyes before I sniff them away and brush my hand across my face. Hope still flits through my veins, but it’s hesitant, scared that once I leave the sanctuary of this room, where I’ve let myself fall into Evie’s security for the first time since she tried to hug me on her wrap-around porch, I’ll fall back apart.
The door cracks open, effusive hotel light slicing through the darkness I’m still washed in before falling shut, Evie’s footsteps quiet against the carpet. She sets the coffees on the little table and slowly drags the outermost curtain open so the gauzy layer still filters the abrasive—I check the time—middaysun.
My arms reach high above my tangled hair, a yawn rolling out of me. “I wish you hadn’t let me sleep in so late,” I tell her, reaching for the paper cup withHCscrawled on the side. “Thanks.”
“Tried tellin’ me they don’t have heavy cream.” She takes hers,HCand a plus sign with the number two on it, and smirks over at me, perching on the chair opposite me. There’s a lightnessin her gaze that I’ve rarely seen; there was always concern swirling in her eyes, like storm clouds, always this angst that I felt could leap out and smother me at a moment’s notice. Right now, though, that almost feels like a fiction.
Evie looks at me and sees something she likes, and I consider that maybe it has nothing to do with how she’s looking at me at all. That maybe, this was always there, and that it’smewho’s just now seeing it.
“I don’t know how your brother does it up here,” she laughs, those exaggerated expression lines reminding me that she’s never shied away from feeling anything. Has always worn her heart right there on that sleeve.
I glance away from her, a knot in my throat forming anew the longer I remember the ways I denied myself her grace all these years. “What did he want earlier?”
“Just wanted to see him while I’m here,” she says behind a sip of her coffee. “He’s off to that conference game. Your daddy’s goin’, you know.” The smile she serves me is so sated, I envy it; it’s the kind of smile you give when love is working in everyone’s favor, and I know seeing Beau respect Grant’s choices, knowing he’s finally supporting him the way she’d always hoped, fills her with more joy than it fills me.
And it does—I can’t help that. I’ll want the best for my brother regardless of his impatience for me. My heart warms knowing he’ll see Gen and Beau in those stands tonight, just as it seizes on itself thinking of Andy on that court, looking up and seeing no one. Becs couldn’t get the night off and Carm’s not old enough to make that trek alone.
And I’m here. Every cell in my body yearns to find him, rejects whatever I’m supposed to feel about his deception. Hard as I try, I can’t make that news blast hurt the way it ought to, and I think it’s because I know his heart. Know that there isn’t a single thing he’s ever done that wasn’t done out of love.
“Can I ask you somethin’?” Andy’s absence weighs down on me as I watch her set her coffee down, see her give me her sweet attention.
