My fist tightened, and my mouth worked for a moment before eventually muttering, “Oh, right, yeah. I didn’t know if that was still happening.”
Katie fingered the dainty gold links of her bracelet. She wasjust sitting there, surrounded by scribbled-on notepads and glittery pens and what was now a fly-swarmed tray of leftover tea sandwiches. “I mean, I wasn’t sure, but then his deal closed last minute, and I think there’s a situation with a boat, and...”
“Right, well.” Now it was me, winding the tiny silver dial on my watch for no goddamn reason. “Who can say no to a boat?”
She nodded, then shut her computer and rose to her feet. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t completely realize you were staying, and we’re just getting to know each other, and...”
“Katie,” I said as she began to walk away in reverse, explaining herself in a mint green bikini and a giant straw hat. Our afternoon was clinging to her glistening skin, gathering in all the curves and angles and freckles and flesh that made her her, and I knew, by the time I got back from the library, that she’d have rinsed it all away. That our week would be over. That she’d be gone.
“Yeah?” she said.
“You never did anything wrong.”
She nodded. For a split second, I saw it—what I’d done, what I’d broken, what I’d left behind—slip across her pretty face. And then it was over. She’d disappeared into the house, and I reminded myself, for the millionth time, of every good reason I’d had to let her go.
Tortured Poet on a Nightmare-Induced Tangent
Henry, that night, barely slept a wink. And when he finally closed his eyes, all he saw was Willa. She was on some sort of raft. No, a kayak. No, it was a canoe. It was a canoe, and it was docked, and the night was dark, and the water was still, and her body was low and relaxed in the hull, and that landscape architect was pulling her closer, learning her skin, kissing her neck and peeling back things, and Henry couldn’t stop it because he’d started it.
Years and years and years ago, he’d started it.
33
Tyler
I gasped for air.
I grabbed for something, for some sign of where I was, but everything was hot and wet and dark and... I was in bed. I was in the cottage, and I was clutching my walkie-talkie, and Katie’s voice was changing, and my pulse was banging, and I needed to breathe. I needed to get out of this place—I needed earth and sky and fresh fucking air.
I crawled out from under the sheets, my shirt drenched and muscles clenched, and reached for the door. That first hit of night, cool and still and enough to push me farther. Enough for me to keep going—to keep chasing relief from the scraping pangs of my pounding heart.
I started on the pool deck: a damp plain of rough stone illuminated only by flickering cyan and the humming sconces of Meredith’s sleeping home. I continued, one step after another, until I was in the garden, until the dew-drenched grass beneath my bare feet had calmed my breathing and cooled my body. I was pulling back lavender and ivy and all the other lush and unruly things that grew here, wading deeper and deeper through it, desperate for distraction. Desperate for any scene but the one I’d just dreamed.
The earth, by now, had changed again. Had given way to hard gravel, to loose dirt, to an endless tangle of wayward roots and cross-eyed branches. I twisted through a hazy maze of trunks, ofcobwebs and moss, of wet and fallen leaves. Every step forward, hollow. It went on like this for acres: the hard snap of my fists, the soft tread of my feet. I pulled back branch after branch of forbidden forest. A metallic slice of canopy-cloaked moon, my flashlight.
And then, all at once, I saw it.
Dark shingles.
Crooked shutters.
The glow of a single upstairs window.
My chest was heaving, and my mouth was dry, and there was nothing but the crickets chirping and the ocean churning and my own stomach turning.
I gripped the twisted trees and breathed.
The carriage house looked just like the main house, but old. So, so old. The window frames, rickety. Their glass panes, not quite right. On the porch, a hanging swing creaked in the breeze. I toed the line of the clearing, drawn to it—to that stoop, to that swing, to answers to questions I knew weren’t mine to ask. I wanted to run my fingers across that bench’s wood, to know how badly it had weathered. To know if its metal chains had turned to salted rust. I took another step. And then another.
More and more detail, mine.
The rotting violets.
The empty bottles.
The handprints—three sets of them, mom and dad and baby, it must’ve been—stamped onto the top step.
I wanted those too. To know them. To explain them. But just when I pressed my palm to the concrete, a gust of sand—a howl of oak, a rush of blinding ocean air.
