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Now the island disappears behind us. The Ben Sawyer Bridge. The marsh. The causeway. Charleston opening up ahead and then the highway, the airport.

She’s looking out her window. I’m looking at her.

Then she reaches over, without looking, and she finds my hand. She laces her fingers through mine and she holds on, and she keeps looking out the window, and I keep looking at her, and we don’t say anything.

She doesn’t do this for cover. She doesn’t do this because the arrangement requires it or because someone’s watching or because it fits a rule on a list. She does it because she wants to.

I hold her hand the rest of the way to the airport.

Chapter 17

Margo

The corkboard looks exactly the same.

That’s the first thing I notice. I’m home from Charleston — bags still in the hall, coat still on — and the board is exactly as I left it. LSAT prep. Nationals schedule. Ethics project deadline, upper right corner, red marker, underlined.

My life. Pinned and color-coded and waiting.

I stand in front of it for a long time.

Everything looks the same. I don’t.

I take my coat off. I sit on the edge of my bed. I look at my hands, which is a thing I do when my brain is running faster than everything else and I need to give it something to land on.

Here is what happened in Charleston. Not the dinner. Not the announcement, not Maddison’s face when she said we’re engaged, not the sound of my cutlery hitting the plate. That part I saw coming from the Uber. I braced for it. I survived it the way I survive all the things I’ve spent my life practicing to survive.

Here is what I didn’t see coming.

Theo on the back porch with my father.

I heard some of it from upstairs. Window cracked — February cold, but I’ve always needed air in this house — and their voices came up low and clear. Richard Ashby: corporate litigator, thirty years of being correct in rooms where that counted, the man who has never once in my memory been told he got something wrong by someone he had to take seriously. And Theo, twenty years old, on a scholarship, tattoos visible on his forearms, a dent in his truck he hasn’t fixed.

She deserved better than neutral. His voice. Quiet. Even. When things happened in this family. She deserved someone to choose her, and nobody did.

I sat down on the floor of my childhood bedroom. Legs just stopped. Just for a second. The carpet was the same pale pink it had always been. I looked at it. I breathed.

Then I got up because I’m Margo, and I smoothed my dress, and I finished getting ready for dinner.

But I heard it.

Nobody has ever said that. Not to my parents. Not in this house. Not about me. I’ve said versions of it to my therapist — careful, clinical, with the proper terminology to keep it from feeling too raw. I’ve said careful softened versions to Sloane, over wine, once, and immediately steered the conversation somewhere easier. I’ve lived with the shape of it for years. The specific ache of two parents who love you completely and still couldn’t find it in themselves to choose you when it counted. I’ve never said it out loud in this house because saying it out loud means making waves.

I don’t make waves. It’s the central organizing principle of my entire personality. Maddison makes waves. Margo makes dinner pleasant.

Theo Mercer walked into my family’s orbit for forty-eight hours and said it plainly. To my father’s face. Because someone needed to, and he wasn’t intimidated enough to stay quiet about it. Not by the house, not by the money, not by the very specific weight of a Charleston family that has been correct about things for generations.

My father didn’t argue. He said I should have asked her why. He said she deserves someone who sees her. And Theo said I see her. Three words. Quiet. Like a fact that had been true long enough that announcing it was just reporting.

I heard that too.

I sat in the pink bedroom where I grew up being the easy one and I heard a man tell my father that he sees me. The real version. Not the one I hand the room.

First moment. There. That’s when it changed.

Then there’s Michael.

Six years in various configurations — boyfriend, ex, my sister’s person, the name I brace for at family events. Easy. Charming. Smart in a specific narrow way. I thought he was my future once. I know now he wasn’t.