Page 49

“Hey, sugar,” he says. Into my hair. Just that.

“Hi, Daddy.”

And then we both step back, because Theo is standing on my parents’ front walk, and my parents are looking at him, and this is the part I’ve been running in my head since Logan Airport.

He’s holding both our bags. He picked them up from the Uber without being asked. Exactly him. He’s standing there in his dark jeans and a navy Henley and his boots. I watch my mother take in the tattoos with the specific face she keeps extremely neutral when she sees things she’s noting for later. I watch my father clock his height and his build. Theo has four inches on my father, and a different kind of broad — the kind you get from physical work rather than a gym membership. My father does the quick read that men do. Adding things up.

Theo meets my father’s eyes and nods. Not deferential. Not performing ease he doesn’t feel. Just — present.

“These are my parents,” I say. “Richard and Caroline Ashby. This is Theo.”

My mother smiles. My father extends his hand and Theo shakes it, clean and direct. “Good to meet you,” my father says, which is the standard opener, and Theo says, “You too, Mr. Ashby”, which is the correct response in Charleston and which I had absolutely not briefed him on.

My father is a corporate litigation attorney. He reads people for a living — the quick inventory, the tell buried in posture or eye contact, the thing a person doesn’t know they’re giving away. I watch him do it to Theo in about four seconds, and I watch Theo hold it, steady and direct, not performing ease he doesn’t feel. My father does the slight nod that means the read came back okay.

My mother does her own version — warmer, slower, the assessing that looks like nothing but covers everything. She takes in the tattoos, the boots, the fact that he’s been holding our bags this whole time without making it a thing. She tilts her head in the way that means she’s slotting Theo into a more interesting category than the one she started with.

My mother turns to me with the look. The one that means she’s collecting information while appearing simply to smile. “And how do you two know each other?”

Here is where I have the whole cover story ready. The ethics seminar. Dr. Adler. The six-week project. We’ve been partners for the assignment, very collegial, very academic, practically strangers who happened to be on the same flight south.

Here is what I say instead.

“He’s my boyfriend.”

There’s a beat. A small one. The salt air moves.

My father decides to like him. I can see it happen. It’s quiet — Richard Ashby doesn’t do anything loudly — but it’s real.

I store that for later. In the margins, with everything else.

“— I mean, we’re —” I start.

“He’s your boyfriend,” my mother says, with the specific warmth of a woman who is going to be telling Bitsy Calhoun about this by Sunday brunch.

“It’s — we’re not — it’s complicated, we have a —”

“Margo.” My father, mild, with the ghost of a smile. “It’s all right.”

It is absolutely not all right. What it is, is irreversible. I look at Theo.

His face is doing the nothing-face. Not the scowl. Not the wall. Something I have spent months learning to read and cannot read right now — something new, a version of the nothing-face I haven’t seen before, something behind the neutral that isn’t alarm or amusement or any of the things I was bracing for. Something I can’t name. Something that scares me in a way I don’t have a procedure for.

And here’s the thing I understand, standing on my parents’ front walk with the word boyfriend still in the salt air and Michael’s car at the curb: I didn’t plan to say it. I intended to say friend. I had friend loaded and ready and everything was going to be fine. And then my mother asked. I looked at Theo standing there with both our bags like he just lives in my life now. Somewhere in that house is the man I thought was my forever. The man my sister took. The man I cried over for months and will never fully stop being angry about. And Theo is every physical thing Michael isn’t. Bigger. Quieter. The kind of solid that doesn’t announce itself. Not my type on paper, and more mine than anyone I’ve ever let close, and I looked at my mother’s question and I cracked.

I claimed him.

I didn’t plan to. My chest did it for me.

“He seems lovely,” my mother says, to me, like Theo isn’t standing right there.

“He speaks English,” I say, because someone has to.

Theo, to his enormous credit, says absolutely nothing. He just looks at me with the unreadable face and shifts the weight of our bags and waits, and that stillness — the particular stillness of a man who has decided to let you run — is somehow the most expensive thing about him.

My father clears his throat. “Why don’t we —”

The door bangs open.