“Not today.” He looks at me like he’s trying to force a smile, but he’s all hard edges and cold glances.
We leave his home on the hill and drive back across the county line, his truck chugging up the last rise on Swamp Wells Road, the silence growing wider between us.
I want to ask him what’s wrong, what’s changed, why talking about his dad made him turn to stone. But I sense theaskingwon’t fix anything, and he’ll cinch the armor even tighter around his chest.
We come to a stop at the end of my driveway, the truck engine still running, and I sit for a moment, waiting for him to speak, but his hands only twist against the steering wheel, his eyes unblinking, staring through the windshield.
“Thank you for today,” I say, but my mouth tastes like metal. My heart is shrinking closed.
He nods but won’t look at me.
I watch him for a half beat more, my bottom lip hanging open,like the right words might fall out, but nothing does. I open the door and step onto the driveway.
He backs away before I’ve even reached the porch, and I hear the roar of the old truck accelerating up Swamp Wells Road, back to his side of the county line.
And I start to doubt, to fear… that I’ll never see him again.
ELEVEN
So that’s why you haven’t left town,” Archer says as I walk past him on the front porch. “My little sis found a boy to torment for the summer.”
“I’m not tormenting him.”
“Well, it sure as shit isn’t the other way around. You’re a Goode—we’re the thing they break their hearts against. We leave the shattered remains of their weepy lovesickness in our wake.”
I roll my eyes at him, opening the front door. “Youdo that,” I say. “Not me.” I step into the house and shut the door before he can answer.
In my room, I blink down at the suitcase, clothes now spilling out onto the floor.
I should go.
I should walk to the train station, wait for it to open in the morning, buy a ticket, and leave this place once and for all.
But my whole body feels numb, vibrating with a tiredness unlike any I’ve ever known. I kick off my sandals and sink between the sheets of my bed. I let sleep pull me under, and I dream of the river, of fireflies buzzing in the air between Oak and me.
I dream of his lips touching mine, faintly, carefully. I dream he doesn’t let me go.
Not for anything.
Archer must see the strain in my face when I emerge from my room, the morning sun spearing through the trees, slanting into the old house, and he hands me a cup of lavender-and-lemon tea, nodding silently. He doesn’t ask again about the boy. He doesn’t ask if I’m leaving Cutwater.
He gives me the quiet I need to reassemble my thoughts.
Three days pass.
I should leave Cutwater. I don’t know why I stay. Why I move numbly through the house, while my brother paces at the windows, the useless shotgun resting beside the front door. When a car slows down along the road, or someone strolling by pauses to stare up at the house like they’re considering making the long walk up the drive to ask for a tulip, Archer grabs the gun and rushes out onto the porch, shouting at them to “get the hell away from our house.”
He’s doing the thing he does when he feels like our lives are out of control: he assumes the role of parent, guardian, protector. He takes the helm of our lives as if he could steer us back on course. But I know it’s already too late for that. This family has been sinking for generations—all we can do now is abandon ship, scramble aboard a lifeboat, and run for our lives before we’re swallowed up by the wet dirt.
But maybe this is why I stay.
My brother is anxious, fidgety, not himself, and it feels wrong to leave him right now.
I tell myself I’ll wait another day.
I tell myself it has nothing to do with Oak. That I’m not waiting for him to walk up the driveway, to knock on the door and tell me he’s sorry. Tell me why he turned cold and quiet that night on the river.
I’m not waiting for a boy.
