Piper is still asleep with one hand under her cheek. Her hair is still damp on the pillow.
She’s been carrying all of it. Three years of being told who she is by someone who just proved he doesn’t know a single true thing about her.
I sit back in the chair.
I’m not going to sleep for a while yet. That’s fine.
Outside, Opal Creek is quiet.
I stay where I am.
∞∞∞
I wake up at three in the morning, and the lamp in the corner is on.
It takes me a second to place the room.
Right. The Opal Inn.
Piper is curled up in the armchair by the window, her feet tucked underneath her, a hotel notepad resting on her knee. Her pen is scribbling rapidly, scratching across the paper. Tears are falling onto the page, but she doesn’t bother to wipe them away. Her hand is too busy trying to keep up with everything pouring out of her.
She’s wearing the oversized shirt she bought today, her hair a mess, one knee pulled up to her chest. No makeup or performance—just a woman with a notepad and a pen, trying to clear something from her mind.
It knocks me back, the way it does sometimes, the sheer distance between who someone is now and the kid you first knew.
I was eleven the first time I met Piper. She was the skinny kid sister who opened the front door with a violin bow in her hand. She didn’t smile. She just looked at me, looked at Noah behind me, and said,“Shoes off,”before disappearing back into the house.
I’d looked at Noah. He’d just shrugged.
She was just a kid then, but she’s not a kid anymore.
Tucking a stray hair behind her ear, she writes another line, then stops. Her pen starts tapping against the margin in a rhythmic pattern.
I know that tap. I’ve watched her do it for years, working through a melody or a thought while the conversation moved around her. Donna used to reach out and touch her shoulder when she did it, and Piper would surface. They’d share a look, and she’d come back to us.
Donna always knew how to bring her back.
Ezra, on the other hand, seems to have spent three years trying to lock her away. I think she’s currently trying to find the key.
She’s quiet for a minute, then a breath catches in her throat. She leans her head back against the chair and stares at the ceiling.
“What do I do?” It’s just a whisper to the ceiling, to the room, to the ghosts of the decisions she made today.
She doesn’t know I’m awake. If she did, she’d fold it all up. I know that about her, too. I’ve seen her composure snap back into place the second someone looks her way. She learned somewhere how to make her distress disappear the moment it risked being witnessed.
The question still hangs in the air.
What do I do?
I could answer. I’m good at the practical. I could give her a framework, a list of structural repairs, a sequence of steps to move her from this wreckage to stable ground. That’s what I do with complicated things.
But there’s nothing I can tell her that she doesn’t already know, and I have a feeling she’s spent a long time with someone else answering every question for her.
What to wear. When to speak. What to want.
The last thing she needs is another man with a ready-made answer.
So, I close my eyes.
