We lay in silence for a few minutes. I wondered why he’d come looking for me if he didn’t have anything to say. I kept my breathing shallow and tried not to move. Maybe he’d taken my comment about practicing sleeping to heart.
“Thanks for taking care of Greyson,” he said, breaking the silence. “And for not freaking out about the mess in your car and, uh... all over you.”
I relaxed, though I didn’t see why he’d gotten all weird only to thank me for helping his daughter puke in the bushes. “It was nothing, really.”
“No.” Alex’s voice was insistent. “It wasn’t.”
I’d never heard Alex so serious before, not even when he’d nearly sliced his finger off. I rolled onto my side and traced the lines of his profile with my eyes: the slope of his forehead, the strong line of his nose, the angle of his chin. He turned to face me, his eyes on mine setting off that fluttering in my chest again.
“Greyson being sick makes me anxious. I freak out. Even when I know it’s not a big deal.”
This surprised me. I’d always thought of Alex as immune to anxiety. “Why?” I asked.
He went quiet. Maybe I’d stepped into overly personal territory again. I was about to apologize, when he spoke.
“I’m assuming you remember what I told you about Greyson’s mom leaving.”
“Yeah,” I said. How could I forget?
Alex sighed and looked up at the sky again. “Greyson was sick when Maggie left. Just some childhood virus. High fever, vomiting, the usual. It was Maggie’s week with Greyson, and one night, as I was unlocking my apartment after a long shift at the restaurant, my neighbor came out into the hallway with Greyson in her arms. I was shocked to see her. I wasn’t supposed to have her back until the weekend. But Maggie just left her with my neighbor, saying there was some emergency she had to take care of. She didn’t tell her where she was going or that Greyson was sick. She didn’t even call me.” His brow wrinkled as he spoke. I fought the urge to reach out and smooth it with my palm.
“I called Maggie over and over, but she didn’t answer. You know the rest—we tracked her down, she said we’d be better off without her. Anyway, when I finally got in touch with her, I asked her what had happened. She said she’d been thinking about leaving for a long time, but when Greyson threw up on her carpet, she realized she was more worried about the carpet than Greyson. It terrified her. That was when she knew she didn’t have it in her to be Greyson’s mother.” He turned his facetoward mine, looking at me with an intensity I’d never seen before. “So what you did, it’s not nothing to me.”
I sat up, needing to move. “That sounds... hard.” What more could you say to a story like that? “I’m just glad Greyson’s okay.”
We looked at each other for a long moment, and then Alex stood suddenly, closing the space between us. He sat beside me on the limestone bed, and the air between us reminded me of the heat lightning that moved over the ocean on warm summer nights. I tensed, unable to look away from him, wondering what he was about to say or do.
But I didn’t get the chance to find out, because Greyson darted out from behind the Florida-shaped table and raced over, zapping all the electricity from the air as she wedged herself between us.
“Hi, Greyson,” Alex said, his tone measured.
“I said we were going to the tower!” Nina called. She emerged from the darkness with Mia at her side and looked from me to Alex, no doubt calculating the distance between us. “I have no idea how you’ve survived the last month, Josephine. These girls are wild.”
“But we totally forgot to give Dad his shirt!” Greyson said. “You’re going to die laughing, Dad. I’m not sure it’ll fit you, though. It might end up like a crop top, which is kind of gross.”
“I’m not sure I want to know what you’re talking about,” Alex said.
I laughed. “Trust me, you don’t.”
When we returned to the grotto, Nina tossed Alex the shirt she’d brought him. He rolled his eyes when he read it but put it on anyway. He looked ridiculous, but weirdly good too. The shirt stretched over his arms, hugging tight to his torso. Greyson was right, though, it was basically a crop top, not that I minded.
“Only for you would I wear this,” Alex said, nudging me with his shoulder. He posed with Mia, Kitty, and Nina for a photo without too much pestering.Only for you, I thought, searching his face for a clue as to what he was thinking. But goofy Alex was back, and his face wasimpenetrable. He reached into the cooler and passed out gourmet s’mores he’d made earlier that day. Apple and chocolate s’mores. S’mores dipped in caramel or rainbow sprinkles. Some even had bacon layered beneath the marshmallow.
“Who knew s’mores could be so fancy?” I said after I’d devoured one of the bacon s’mores.
Mia stretched out on her back beside Greyson and Kitty. “It’s kind of romantic, isn’t it?”
“Fancy s’mores?” I said, though I knewexactlywhat she was doing.
Mia rolled her eyes. “This place, duh.”
“Think about it,” Kitty said. She rolled onto her stomach and propped her chin in her hands. “He loved that girl so much he built all this for her.”
I unstuck a string of marshmallow that was hanging from my chin. “This place is creepy, and she never saw it. Not exactly romantic. He built all this for love and died alone, so what was the point?”
“I’m with the girls,” Nina said. “It’s a testament to the power of love. What do you think, Alex?”
I narrowed my eyes at Nina. Were she, Mia, and Kitty in on this together? Part of me hoped this place would awaken some latent psychic ability I didn’t know I had so I could send her my annoyance telepathically.
