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“I’m telling him an hour.”
“Tell him no, Sloane.”
“I’m telling him two, and that he owes you a real milkshake, and that Wyatt can come home because Wyatt’s never done anything to anyone.” She types it one-handed, her other hand flat on my chest where the thing under it is doing what it’s allowed to do now — out loud, with a witness — and sets the phone face down, which she’d know means something if I ever told her, which I will, eventually, badly.
Two hours later the front door bangs and the house fills back up the way it does, all noise and cold air and Cash announcing himself like weather. Sloane’s at the counter in one of my shirts when they come through, and there’s a half second where everybody clocks it — clocks her, here, staying — and then Wyatt just says, “Hey, Sloane,” easy, like she’s been furniture in this room for years, and Cash sets a milkshake down in front of me and one in front of her without being asked, and Theo turns the game on, and that’s the whole ceremony. That’s it. She’s in.
Cash clocks the shirt — my shirt, on her — and opens his mouth, and I give him the look, and for once in his entire life he shuts it and grins into his milkshake instead, which from Cash is a toast at a wedding.
I watch her not look for the door. She’s standing in a loud house full of my people, in a shirt that’s mine, and she is not counting the exits — I’d know, I’ve watched her count them in every room we’ve ever been in together — and she catches me watching and gives me the dry look, the one that means don’t narrate me, and for once I don’t.
Out the window it’s doing the snow thing again, slow, no sound to it. I hold the only thing I ever picked for myself with the one arm I’ve got that works.
And I’m not, for the first time I can remember, performing being happy for anybody.
I just am.
Epilogue
Sloane
New Year’s morning, the Raven House looks like a crime scene a fun crime committed. There’s a folding table on its side in the front room, a boot on the mantel that belongs to no one anyone can name, and a truly upsetting amount of glitter, which is Margo’s fault, because glitter is always Margo’s fault. The whole house is asleep. I’m not, because I’m never, because some people wake at six no matter how the year turns over — and this one turned over with Beau’s mouth on mine and Cash detonating something in the backyard that was almost certainly illegal, and now it’s morning and I’m the only one vertical.
I make coffee in a kitchen I live in now.
That’s the sentence I keep turning over while the machine does its work. I live here. Not the room over Margaret’s — I kept that, because some habits you retire slow. Not until the Sailmaker’s fixed; the Sailmaker’s been fixed for weeks, and I didn’t move back, and nobody made me explain it. Here. My coat’s on the hook beside Beau’s. The coconut shampoo’s in the shower, the one Cash keeps threatening to drink. There’s a shelf in the front room with my books on it, between a trophy and a framed photo of the four of them looking criminally young, and Beau gave me the whole case and said he doesn’t read them so they might as well be mine, which is the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me, and I’m never telling him so.
My mug’s back in the rotation, too. The good one, with the chip, that somehow nobody used the whole time I was gone — I found it shoved to the back of the cabinet, clean, waiting. I didn’t ask. Wyatt didn’t explain. He just took it down my first morning back and handed it to me like it had been holding my spot. They all do versions of that. Cash saves me the chair with the working springs and parks himself on the broken one like he prefers it. Wyatt makes too much breakfast and calls it habit. Theo doesn’t do anything, which is how Theo communicates; he simply stopped scowling at me sometime in December, which from Theo is a ticker-tape parade.
I’m two sips in when the stairs creak, and Margo comes down them.
Heels in one hand. Last night’s dress. Her hair, which is a discipline Margo does not permit to fail, is doing something it was not engineered to do. She’s coming down from the third floor, and there is nothing on the third floor but Theo Mercer’s room.
She sees me. She stops on the landing like she’s walked into glass.
“Don’t,” she says, before I’ve said a word, before I’ve done anything but hold my chipped mug. “Whatever you’re about to do — don’t.”
“I was going to offer you coffee.”
She comes down the rest of the stairs at a careful, dignified pace that fools exactly neither of us, sets her heels on the counter, and accepts the mug I pour her with the face of a woman accepting surrender terms. Margo Ashby is never not put together. She irons things I didn’t know could be ironed. Right now she’s put together so hard it’s splitting at the seams, and I know that particular over-correction from the inside — it’s the face you wear when your insides are doing something your outside hasn’t signed off on.
“It’s not a thing,” she says into the coffee.
“Okay.”
“It’s the opposite of a thing. It’s New Year’s. People do. It’s practically tradition. It means nothing.” She takes a sip too hot, the exact way I do, which I clock and file to think about later. “It’s Theo. You understand. Nothing happens with Theo, Theo is a wall with tattoos, last night was a clerical error. A one-time, isolated, clerical error.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re saying it with your entire face.”
“This is my regular face.”
I don’t push, because I know what it is to come down a staircase you don’t want clocked, to leave a room before the room can mean something. I know the choreography from the inside out. So I do the only kind thing on the menu, which is hand her the cover she’s already reaching for. “There’s a back way through the mudroom. Comes out by the side gate. Nobody’s up to see.”
She looks at me, and for one second the put-together drops all the way down, and there’s just a girl in last night’s dress holding a stranger’s coffee, and she says, quieter, “Thank you,” and means something other than the coffee.
“It means nothing,” she says again at the mudroom door, mostly to herself.
