I sit on my bed, uncap my moisturizer, and smooth it across my cheekbones, my forehead, and down the bridge of my nose. “It was a party. There’s nothing else to analyze.”
“It wasa party,” she repeats, like this is a new show she’s excited about. “And how are we feeling about the party?”
“Fine.”
“Sloane.”
“I’m fine, Ivy.”
She points at me. “You have yourrealfine voice, and that wasn’t it. That wasfine.”
I look at her, and she looks at me, neither of us trying on the next word.
I know she’s waiting for me to speak.
But I can outlast Ivy.
“Okay, but can I ask you something?” Ivy huffs, and her voice is different. This is the other Ivy, the quiet, caring one. “Are you okay?”
I keep my face exactly where it is. “I’m okay.”
“You’ve refused to talk to me about it, but I saw what Mason did… and then Rowan stepping in… and then I saw you get upset and leave.” She’s watching me carefully. “And Itotallyget it. He’s a bull in a china shop. But that’s just what he does. He goes where the problem is and fixes it. He’s done it since we were kids.”
“Ivy.”
“And I’ve been talking about Seb for three days because you let me,” she says, like she’s talking about the weather, “which means you didn’t want to talk about whatever?—”
“Ivy.” I say it pleasantly, which is the version that meansstop. “I’m fine. I’m good. Can we eat? I did fifty laps and I’m dying, okay?”
She holds my eyes for one more second, looking for the crack.
I don’t give her one.
“Okay,” she says, then she pulls out her phone to order breakfast.
But Ivy’s words are doing something I didn’t ask them to. When I replay the party now — his hand on my arm, the way he stepped back the second I pulled away — he wasn’t trying to own the moment, he was trying to end it.
But there’s no time to figure it out, because Ivy’s phone rings.
She answers it, and I know immediately that something is wrong.
“Mom, hi — wait, slow down, what—” She’s off the bed in one motion, pacing. “What do you meancardiac? When did she — okay, okay, which hospital?”
She’s overwhelmed, trying to track everything at once while figuring out what to do. And when she hangs up and stands in the middle of the room, phone at her side, she looks at me, stricken.
“Ivy?” I look at her, unsure whether I should go to her and wrap her in my arms, or if she wants space.
“She’s okay,” she says, like she’s reminding herself. “My aunt. She’s okay, they said she’s — it was a cardiac episode, not a — she’s stable.”
“Come sit down,” I say.
“I don’t know if I should?—”
She’s cut off by a knock at the door.
I open it and find Rowan standing in the hallway holding three coffees. He has rain in his hair — the first cold rain of the season, fine as static — and he looks past me toward Ivy’s side of the room. He catalogs where his sister is and the state she’s in with a glance.
Then he looks at me.
