“You’re supposed to be helping me with my classes,” she bit out, “not managing my social life.”
“I’m not trying to manage anything,” he countered. “I’m just giving you some friendly advice.”
“Advice?” Her voice climbed an octave. “Fine. Let’s hear it, then.”
Colton hesitated, his throat working in a swallow. “Nate Schiller isn’t someone you should trust,” he said finally, with the slowness of someone cherry-picking his words. “He’s dangerous.”
When Colton first came home after the ice, his mother called him unnatural.
Unnatural, for a little boy to spend several nights alone in the winter wood and come back whole. Unnatural, the way he stared all day without speaking. The way he sat up all night without sleeping.
She kept away, leaving Colton to the maid, to the nanny, to the house packed with boxes. For weeks, he sat alone in his room and tried to rub away the cold in his skin. Tucked beneath a blanket. Shivering hard enough to chatter his teeth. In the mornings, he watched cartoons. In the evenings, he read. In between, he watched letters from the divorce lawyers pile on the kitchen counter.
One Saturday morning, when the silence grew too sharp, he made himself a peanut butter and potato chip sandwich on rye and took himself to the cemetery. A lonely little boy in the back of a lonely yellow cab, suffocating under the smell of cigarette smoke.
The April day was bold and bright and he wept on the dirt where his brother lay buried. The puck he’d carried with him sat wedged against Liam’s headstone, an angry spot of black amid a bundle of yellow asters. His sandwich, twice bitten, lay forgotten in the grass. That scooped-out feeling persisted in the hollow of his chest. A vital piece, gone from the place between his ribs. He’d never felt so sorry in his life.
***
He’d learned, in his twenty-one years on earth, that he was the sort of person people left. And yet here was Lane. She was standing in his house. His mausoleum youth. His reliquary of ghosts. Hers was a world of coffee shop mornings and late library nights. Warm and structured and bright. It felt too cold for her here, in this empty house with its empty walls and its empty boy.
He hadn’t expected her to come back. Not after last night. Not after the way they’d left things. But there she stood, her lavender hair wound in a bun and speared with a slender paintbrush. On the wall of his father’s study, the broad, kaleidoscopic wings of a butterfly unfurled.
For the first time in a long time, the house didn’t feel like a grave.
“I let myself in,” she said when he continued to hover in the doorway. “I hope that’s okay.”
There was a smudge of gold under her left eye. A fleck of red on the bridge of her nose. He couldn’t think of anything he was more okay with.
“It’s fine.” He pulled at his fingers until his knuckles popped. “It’s not every day someone breaks into your house to paint butterflies on your wall.”
“I didn’t break in,” she protested. “You told me I had a standing invitation.”
He propped his shoulder against the butted frame. “Did I say that?”
She screwed up her face in response, scraping excess paint along the tray. “You did. I thought I’d surprise you. I figured this was the right room—I saw all the supplies piled outside the door last week.”
In his pocket, his phone rang for the third time in an hour. He ignored it, too preoccupied in staring up at the wash of golds and reds and browns flooding the space where his father’s framed accolades used to hang. Everyone else had gone and stayed gone. But Lane had come back.
Paintbrush in hand, Lane began to fidget beneath his silence. “Unless this isn’t actually what you wanted at all,” she said, backpedaling. “In which case I can paint over it.”
“It’s perfect,” he assured her. “I don’t want you to change a thing.”
She stood back and examined her work, hands on her hips. Spatters of vermillion dripped onto the drop cloth. Quietly, he joined her at the wall. For a long time, they stood side by side without speaking. Pinioned in the spotlight of a yellow painter’s lamp. Colton studied the butterfly and thought about metamorphosis. About slow sinking beneath the water, cold and cocooning, and coming back as something new. Something strange.
Something a mother might be capable of leaving behind.
“I’m sorry for last night,” Lane said, her voice a welcome intrusion on his thoughts. “I feel like I might have overreacted.”
“Don’t worry about it. I was out of line.” He didn’t mention Schiller, though he desperately wanted to ask whether or not she’d seen him again.
“You weren’t.” Lane knelt down and gathered up a second brush. “You said that you and Nate used to be close. Did you guys have a fight?”
The question set him immediately on guard. “Not exactly.”
Wedging open a new can of paint, Lane peered up at him. “Whatever it was, I’m sure you just felt like you were looking out for me. That’s what friends do, right?”
His chest gave a violent twist. “Are we friends?”
