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“We’re the least organized organized people I’ve ever met.”

“Speak for yourself. I have a list in pen.”

“Yeah,” he says, and looks at me a second too long, the look that has nothing to do with the plan and no audience to justify it. “I figured you would.”

And I go out into the cold with Margo’s hand at my elbow and the night air sharp in my lungs, and I do not look back at the door, and the not-looking-back costs me more than it should, and somewhere on Cobble Street I admit the thing I’ve been not-admitting all evening, the thing the warm room and the easy noise and the Sondheim and the exits I stopped checking have been circling all night:

I know his whole family. He knows nothing of mine. And the gap between those two facts is exactly the size of everything I’m not telling him — about the town with no name, about the father who doesn’t call, about the rule in pen that I’m getting worse at obeying, about the playlist of show tunes a dying woman is building because she decided, two years ago, that I belonged to people I hadn’t met yet.

Margaret knew before any of us.

I’m starting to think she was right, which is the most frightening sentence I’ve thought in months.

Chapter 18

Sloane

The text comes in while I’m closing the shop, and I know who it is before I look, because my body knows things my mind would rather it didn’t.

Evan

saw you with him at the football thing. holding hands. cute.

Evan

you really think a guy like that keeps a girl like you past Christmas? be serious Sloane

Evan

I’m the one who actually knew you. remember that when he’s done.

I stand behind the counter at Margaret’s with the lights half-down and the brass bell still and I read it three times, which is two times too many, and the thing about Evan’s particular cruelty is that it’s engineered — a girl like you, the knife of it, the way he’s reached past everything and found the exact sentence my own worst nights have been whispering at me for weeks. You really think a guy like that keeps a girl like you. I have thought that. In my own voice. At three in the morning. He didn’t invent the fear; he just found it and mailed it back to me with his name on it.

I don’t reply. I’ve learned not to reply. Replying is oxygen.

But my hands aren’t quite steady when I lock up, and I notice I’m cataloging the dark street out of habit, and the walk that should take me toward Sailmaker Lane takes me toward the Raven House instead, because Beau texted earlier that the guys are out and he’s icing his shoulder and door’s open if you want quiet, and quiet is suddenly the only thing in the world I want.

I tell myself its strategic. There’s no audience at the Raven House tonight. Going there serves no part of the plan.

I go anyway.

Beau opens the door before I knock — he must have seen me coming up the walk — and he’s in sweats and a soft black shirt with his hair wrecked and a bag of half-melted ice in one hand. He takes one look at my face and doesn’t say what’s wrong, doesn’t say are you okay, doesn’t reach for any of the questions that would make me have to perform an answer.

He just steps back and holds the door wider and says, “Come in. It’s cold.”

And that — the not-asking, the door held wide, the way he reads that I’m carrying something and decides the kindest thing is to not make me set it down where he can see it — that’s the thing that gets under the wall. Evan reached for the exact sentence to wound me. Beau reaches for the exact silence to not. The two of them, the same week, aiming at the same target, and only one of them knows where it actually is.

The house is quiet and warm and dim. He drops back onto the grey leather couch with the ice and I sit at the other end of it, the careful tier-one feet of air, and for a while neither of us says anything, and the not-saying is the most comfortable I’ve been all day.

“You want to talk about it?” he says eventually. Not a question. An offer with an easy exit built in.

“No.”

“Okay.”

And he lets it go. Just like that. Doesn’t push, doesn’t pry, doesn’t make me account for the thing on my face — and I sit there in the warm dim with this enormous unfamiliar feeling rising in my chest, which is what it’s like to be left alone in exactly the way you need to be left alone, which is a kind of being cared for I have no idea how to hold.

“Evan texted,” I hear myself say.