I rub my chin.He might be right, but the word worry is already warm in my throat.“They’ll worry.”
He rolls his eyes like I’m being theatrical.“They won’t.”
“They do,” I say.“They care in ways you don’t see.They message me on EchoZone.”
“Have they asked about Cleo?”
I nod.“A few times, I’ve told them the same as the others.Don’t believe the gossip.”I huff.“They do care even when they haven’t shown it.Those two are carrying a lot of grief, too.Adding more things when they find ...”
I don’t finish because I know it’s not Cleo that they’ll find, but there’s going to be a lot that’s going to happen when they discover the bodies of Caleb Wilder and Clara Vanderpool’s daughter.It’s going to be national news, people will be grieving and ...“You’re probably right, they don’t need to know until it’s necessary.”
“That’s all I’m saying.”Barret exhales.“You try to carry every single thing.”
I close my eyes and press the heel of my hand into the back of my neck.There’s a small, sharp picture in my head of a house with two mugs cooling on the counter, rooms that smell like busy lives that have slowed into something else.“There’s a world where this splits us.She’ll tell herself she can’t be the reason we fall apart.She’ll walk out to save us and leave us with cold mugs and a house that smells like something we won’t cook for ourselves again.”
Barret swallows.“Yeah.”
“I don’t want that world.”
“Me neither.”
“I want this one.”My voice frays at the edge, and I force it back into line.I look up and he’s watching me like he’s memorizing a line in a play.“The world where she wakes and sees us and doesn’t flinch.Where you and I don’t have to label things to make strangers comfortable.Where she isn’t forced to choose just so we can all breathe.Where your toothbrush is where it always is, because it always is.Where I complain about your socks in the shoe basket and you steal half my fries and Cleo laughs—like she did before, like she does now.”
Something in Barret loosens—relief, yes, but rawer than that, like the release after holding something taut for too long.He says softly, “Say that last thing again.”
“I want the world where she doesn’t have to choose—and neither do we.”My voice cracks.I press my tongue to my teeth until it steadies.“I want a world where we carry this together.All of it.Where your toothbrush is here because it always is.Where I complain about your socks in the shoe basket and you steal half of my fries, and Cleo laughs like she did before and after and now.”
Barret’s mouth finds the curve of a smile that is mostly grief.“There he is,” he murmurs, as if he’s finally found me in a crowd.
“I’m not hiding.”
“You were.”
“Shut up.”
He smiles, but it curves with grief.“I’ll shut up when you sleep.”
“I can’t yet.”
“I know.”
We both look at Cleo again—at the slow rise of her shoulder, at the textbook’s dog-eared corner peeking out—and then back at each other, and for a moment the room is only our breathing and the faint scent of baby lotion and coffee gone cold on the table.
ChapterTwenty-Five
Cleo
“You could’ve told me about Caleb,” Kit says.
We’re on the porch swing, the wood sighing every time we rock forward.Surprisingly, sunlight spills over the steps.Arlo is warm against my side, his socked foot peeking out from the blanket, kicking like he’s conducting some private symphony.He’s probably going to be a music genius like his parents.
“Julian needed blood,” I mumble, dragging a breath through my teeth.“I wasn’t a match, which was weird because our mother had always said that we all had our father’s weird blood type ...I requested a DNA test and turns out I’m just partially related to my brothers.”
I look at the horizon, not sure how to feel about it anymore.After this long it isn’t that much of a big deal, but I had tried so fucking hard to be like them so he would love me that it did affect me.
“That accident scared the hell out of all of us.In one way or another.”
“You think?”Her frown lines don’t soften.Like this is news.Like any of this makes sense out loud.
