She doesn't get to finish, because my mother's already doing the walk, a floaty, casual, I-just-happened-to-be-here walk that fools precisely no one, Marie trailing behind her like a bridesmaid.
And I watch Josie's shoulders climb up toward her ears, the lie-panic setting in, the exact same rising tide I watched through a craft-closet door two months ago. I know with the certainty of a man reading his own obituary that whatever she says in the next ten seconds will be catastrophic, because she cannot lie. It is a documented medical condition. Small children have caught her.
“Just be normal,” I tell her, under my breath.
“I don't have a normal. I have a panic and a fish funeral voice.”
So I do the thing I have spent all night not doing.
I reach across the table and take her hand.
It's not for me. That's what I tell myself, fast, on the way there. It's damage control. She's about to come apart and my mother is twenty feet out and closing, and the fastest way to sell something is to do it before you can think about it, so I do it before I can think about it, my hand over hers on the laminate, my thumb settling over her knuckles like it's done this before.
Her scent shifts the second I touch her, the panic-sharpness in it easing into something warmer, and the alpha part of me hums low and pleased that I did that, that a touch from me settled her. I do not examine the size of how much I like it.
She goes still. Stops mid-panic. Looks at our hands, then at me.
And here's what I wasn't ready for. She turns her hand over. Under mine. Palm up, fingers lacing through fingers, holding back, and her scent shifts, warm, brown sugar gone soft at theedges, and the thing I shut behind a door two months ago and have been bracing shut ever since just walks right through it like the lock was never there.
“Finn,” my mother says, arriving, vibrating at a frequency only dogs and disappointed mothers can produce. “AndJosie.” She says my name and then Josie's like the second one is the prize at the bottom of the box. “Iknewit. Marie, didn't I say. Spring Fling, this one,” she says, aiming a manicured nail at Josie, “goes the color of a fire truck telling me some story about a craft table, and I thought, that girl is hiding something, and I wasright.I have been right sinceApril.” She presses a hand to her chest. “I am not going to make this a thing. I want you to know I am choosing, right now, not to make this a thing.”
She is absolutely going to make this a thing.
“Mom,” I start.
She isn't listening. She's already pulled out her phone, ostensibly to check the time, in the universal mother gesture forI am documenting this.
“Marie,” she says, not lowering her voice at all, “look at them. Look at his face. When have you ever seen his face do that.”
“Never,” says Marie, who I have known my entire life and who I will be remembering this from at her funeral. “It's like he's a different boy.”
“He isholding her hand,” my mother informs the diner.
“I can see that, Mom.”
“I'm just saying it. Out loud. Once.” She presses her lips together and blinks fast, like a woman accepting an award. “Then I'm leaving you two alone. Marie, come on. We're leaving them alone.” She does not leave. “Is it serious?”
“Mom.”
“I'm going. Look at me going.” She backs away one entire step. “Josie, sweetheart, you come to the shop, I'll do your hair for nothing, we'll talk.”
“Okay,” Josie says faintly, and her hand tightens in mine, and I squeeze back before I know I'm going to,I've got you, I've got it, don't,and she steadies.
And I sit there with this small impossible omega's hand laced through mine, holding on like she means it, my mother dabbing her eye twenty feet from the pie case, the whole diner pretending not to watch.
And I understand, with the cold clarity of a man who has just lost an argument he was having with himself, that I am in enormous trouble. That I have been since the buttons. That no amount of telling myself it's the favor is going to fix what just came loose in me when she laced her fingers through mine and didn't let go.
I told myself it was about my mother.
I am such a liar. Worse than her, even. At least she's got the ears to show for it.
Chapter 11
Josie
Here is something nobody tells you about a lie. The dangerous ones aren't the lies that fall apart. They're the ones thatwork.
I panicked into this thing weeks ago at my kitchen table. The diner dinner with Finn was supposed to be one careful little brick in it. Instead I've apparently built something the whole town now wants to come look at.
