Page 226

I’m looking at him. I’m not trying to hide it.

“She bought me equipment,” he says. “Not like flashy stuff. Second-hand, most of it, things she found in thrift stores. She’s the reason I have a career. Heck, she’s probably the reason I am who I am at all,” Cal says. “I owe her everything.”

“So, when she got sick.” He takes in a deep breath. “She called me. She’d had the scan, she knew what it was, and the first thing she said to me—the first thing, before she’d even told me the diagnosis—was I don’t want any fuss, Callum. I don’t want people treating me differently. I just want to keep living my life without everyone knowing. And she asked me to promise her. And I promised.”

“Is she why you walked off at Cascade?”

“Her neighbor texted me,” he says. “She’d gone in to check on Mabel and found her on the floor. She’d called an ambulance. I saw the message just before going on stage, and I realized I couldn’t perform without seeing her and knowing she was ok. I know she hadn’t told many people and I didn’t know how serious it was. I couldn’t stand the thought of her being alone if she—” He stops. “She couldn’t be alone.”

My heart aches for him.

“Of course,” I say. “You were looking out for her.”

He looks at me then. Fully, for the first time since I got in the car, his icy blue eyes searching mine.

“I should have told you. I know that. But she asked me not to tell anyone, and I made a promise, and I—” He stops. His eyes close briefly. “I’ve spent so long keeping this so tight, Bea. Making sure nothing leaked out, making sure it couldn’t become a headline, because that’s what seems to happen to everything in my life—it becomes a headline, and then it becomes the story people tell about me, and Mabel doesn’t deserve that. She doesn’t deserve to be someone’s news.” He exhales. “But I think I got so used to not telling anyone that I couldn’t stop. Even when it was you. Even when I really, really wanted to. I’m sorry.”

“You should have told me.”

Chapter Forty-Nine

Bea

“Ishould have told you.” He repeats.

“Even if just something, Cal. Just that there was someone close to you who needed something and you were trying to help them, but instead you let me theorize and wonder.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I know. I just—” He looks at the steering wheel. “I felt like I couldn’t risk telling anyone anything really. I thought everyone would sell me out. But I’d gotten so used to the cost of telling that I stopped being able to consider what not telling would cost instead.”

I look at Cal.

He’s not doing the easy voice or the lazy grin or any of the other things he deploys. He’s just sitting there, in a gray hoodie, in a parking lot, telling me the truth.

And I hear my mom in the booth at Dora’s, hands wrapped around her tea. I chose it. Every time. I used to think that would have been the saddest sentence in our family, if she’d ever said it out loud. Sitting here, I finally understand it wasn’t a confession. It was the whole point. She wasn’t dragged through those cities.

I’m not her. And there’s something I’ve been thinking about since the song came out—his world found my front door in nine hours, and I survived it. Sure, I didn’t love it, all the attention and paranoia, but I walked into the biggest exam of my life anyway. They got my name, but if I shut my phone off, they don’t get anything else.

“Cal, before you say anything else, you need to hear the actual shape of it. Not the version where it’s difficult and we’re brave about it. The real one.”

He turns in the seat to face me.

“I apply in June. To about twenty schools, because fewer than half of us get in anywhere and that’s just the math. Colorado has one.” I hold up a finger, a stupid thing to do, and put it down again. “So the rest of that list is Ohio and Michigan and wherever else will look at me. Sixteen months from now I go wherever says yes. And then that’s four years there.”

He’s very still.

“And then residency, where a computer decides where I live. You put your cities in an order, and an algorithm reads it and tells you. That’s another three to seven.” I make myself keep going. “And you’re in LA recording, and then you’re on a tour bus nine months of the year. So show me the version of that where I’m not sitting in an apartment in some city that took me, waiting for a man with a guitar to come home.”

Cal puts his head back against the seat and looks at the roof of the truck for a second.

“I can’t give up the stage,” he says. “You’re right. I tried to want to, and I don’t, so I’m not going to insult you by pretending I might.”

“I know.”

“But, Bea, the stage was never the problem.” He brings his head down and looks at me. “Your dad didn’t hurt anyone by loving music. He hurt people by not giving you another option. It was the choices he made on his own instead of with you.” He leans forward. “I can love the stage and still never once make you the woman who has to move for me. You tell me the city, Doc, and I’ll learn the way to the fucking airport. You get into medical school in Ohio? I’ll get up to speed on Ohio. You get sent somewhere I’ve never fucking heard of? Fine. I’ll learn my way around that place oo. I’ll fly to LA for the things I need to, and then come home to wherever you are. I am never going to make a decision about your life without you in the room.”

I look at him for a long moment.

My head spins. I’ve been getting it all wrong for ten years. I thought the choice was stay put or be dragged. But my mother wasn’t dragged. She looked at a complicated man and a life that was never going to be simple, and she picked it, eyes open, over and over.