"I'm just private," I'd said.
"Private is fine. Closed off is something else." She'd studied me with those sharp, assessing eyes. "Is there someone else? You haven’t fully let go of something."
I'd denied it, of course. But lying to a lawyer is harder than lying to most people. She'd seen right through me.
The truth was, there had only ever been one person who'd made the glass disappear. One person who'd looked at me and seen something other than the Cameron name, the predetermined future, the expectations stacked so high I could barely see over them.
Charlotte Huston.
And I'd walked away from her fifteen years ago because my father told me to, and I'd been too young and too afraid and too convinced of his wisdom to fight for what I actually wanted.
Pragmatic, he'd called it. Mature.
For me, it was the worst mistake of my life.
I pushed back from the desk, suddenly desperate to move. Sitting still made the tremor worse, or maybe it just made memore aware of it. Either way, the walls were closing in, and I needed to escape before they finished the job.
The kitchen was bright with afternoon light, dust motes floating in the sunbeams like tiny suspended questions. My mother's apron still hung on its hook by the door, a faded floral print that smelled, impossibly, like her lavender hand lotion. I didn't touch it. Couldn't.
On the counter sat the pile of forwarded mail I'd been ignoring for a week. Catalogs for gardening supplies my mother would never order. Credit card offers addressed to my father, who no longer needed credit. Junk, mostly. The debris of lives that had ended while the world kept spinning.
I sifted through it without interest, dropping most of it directly into the recycling bin. Then my fingers closed on something thicker, stiffer. Familiar cardstock.
I pulled it out.
RIVERSIDE HIGH SCHOOL
15 YEAR REUNION!
Come catch up with old friends and memories!Saturday, October 14th. Riverside High Gymnasium. 7 PM.
"No," I said aloud, the word immediate and visceral. "Absolutely not."
I could picture it perfectly: walking into that gymnasium, surrounded by people who'd known me at my peak. Valedictorian. Quarterback. The golden boy with the golden future and the judge's son pedigree. They'd all expected me to conquer the world, and technically I had: corner office, prestigious firm, clients who paid more per hour than most people earned in a month.
But they wouldn't see any of that. They'd see what I saw every morning in the mirror: a man holding himself too carefully, moving with unnatural precision, tension etched into every line of his face. They'd notice the way I kept my right hand in my pocket or pressed against my side. And then they'd start talking.
Did you see his hand? What's wrong with him? I heard he took a leave from his firm...
Small towns had long memories and even longer gossip chains. My return three months ago had already generated enough speculation to fuel a dozen coffee shop conversations. If I showed up at the reunion, visibly diminished from the person they remembered, I'd be giving them confirmation of whatever theories they'd already constructed.
I should throw this invitation away. Recycle it with the credit card offers and the gardening catalogs and pretend it never existed.
My hand, my traitorous, trembling hand, wouldn't let go of the cardstock.
Because beneath the dread, beneath the carefully constructed walls of self-preservation, a face was surfacing from memory. Not the smirking faces of former classmates or the curious gazes of people who wanted to see how far the mighty had fallen.
Just one face. One pair of green eyes. One smile that had made me feel, for the first and possibly only time in my life, like I was exactly enough.
The memory came unbidden, vivid as yesterday. Junior year. Charlotte's mother's cramped kitchen. Flour everywhere, on the counter, on the floor, somehow on the ceiling, and me standing in the middle of the chaos, holding a cookie cutter like it was a foreign object I'd never encountered before.
"Miles, that doesn't even look like a cookie." Charlotte's voice had been bright with teasing, her green eyes dancing with barely contained laughter. "That looks like a crime scene."
"It's abstract," I'd protested, gesturing at the misshapen blob of dough I'd just attempted to form. "It's artistic."
"It's a disaster." She'd leaned over to examine my work, her shoulder brushing mine. She smelled like vanilla extract and something else, something that was just her… warm and sweet and indefinably Charlotte. "What was this supposed to be? A circle? A square?"
"A star, actually."
