Family.I’ve been running from that word my whole life, but it sounds like something I want when Easton says it.
ChapterForty-Eight
Hadley
Honor is already seated when I push through the door, both hands wrapped around a coffee.She looks up and the smile she gives me is real but doesn’t quite reach her eyes.
She rises up, but I shush her back down with my hand, hugging her from behind.“How are you?”
I slide into the chair across from her and see she’s already ordered our faves.
“I ordered you the iced one,” she says.“And an everything bagel with cream cheese because I figured you’d say you weren’t hungry and then eat half of mine.”
We laugh.“Thanks.Next time it’s on me.”
She looks terrible, and I love her too much not to say so.“You look…”
“Like shit.Thanks.”
“I was going to say exhausted.”
“That’s just a kinder way of saying like shit.You look incredible, as always.It’s very annoying.”She sips her coffee.“Sorry.It’s been a week.Hospice is so unpredictable.She’s on oxygen now, and nobody told me what that meant, so I Googled it at two in the morning like an idiot, which I do not recommend.”
“Honor—”
“I’m okay.”She puts her hand up.“I promise.Her friends have been incredible.Mrs.Papadopoulos has basically moved in, and between her and the hospice nurse, Mary, I feel useless.”The corner of her mouth tips up.“And she keeps calling me by my mother’s name, which Mary says is normal, but it’s—” She shakes her head.“Anyway.I didn’t come all the way into the city to talk about that.”
“We will absolutely talk about that.”
“No.”She points at me.“We can’t, because if I start, I’m going to cry, and I already did the whole way on the train.The barista gave me a free muffin out of pity.”She nods to the pastry bag in the middle of the table.“Take it home to Easton.”She wraps both hands around her mug.“Speaking of…”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”The last thing I’m going to tell her is how things are changing.How my life is going great while she’s about to lose her grandma who was more of a mother to her.
She stares at me.
“What?”
Without a word, she reaches into her bag and pulls out her phone, turning the screen toward me.It’s a picture taken from a distance, grainy the way fan pictures always are.Easton and me on the Riverwalk, our ice cream cups abandoned on the bench beside us, his arm around my shoulders and my head tipped back, laughing at something he said.
“Here we thought we dodged the pictures?”
“It was on three different baseball fan accounts.”She sets the phone face down on the table.“I’ve been watching your life unfold on my phone screen like some kind of hit reality show for months.So tell me what is going on?Because from out here”—she gestures at the phone—“it doesn’t look like swapping favors anymore.”
I pull off a piece of bagel, and the seeds go everywhere on the table.
“It’s complicated.”
“It doesn’t look that complicated.It looks the opposite of complicated.”
I stare at her, unsure how to tell her.
She waits.I’ve never once been able to outlast Honor’s silences, and she’s playing it to her advantage right now.She just looks at me with that unhurried expression she’s had since the third grade, waiting for me to crack.
And of course I feel like an egg that’s just been tapped to the edge of a bowl.
“It’s going well,” I say.“Better than I thought it would.”
“Better how?”
