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“All in,” I say. Testing the words in my own mouth.

“All in,” he confirms. “For good.”

Chapter 35

Margo

Theo’s quiet on the flight down, which tells me more than anything he could actually say.

“You okay?” I ask, somewhere over Virginia, his hand tight around mine on the armrest between us.

“Yeah.” He doesn’t look convinced by his own answer. “Just thinking about the last time I was in that house. Different circumstances.”

“Very different.” I squeeze his hand. “You’re not on trial this time. Neither am I, actually, even if it might feel that way once we’re there.”

“I know.” He looks out the window at the clouds, jaw tight. “I just don’t like watching people be unkind to you. I’ve gotten used to it happening in theory. I don’t love it happening in person.”

I don’t have a good response to that, so I just hold his hand tighter and watch Charleston get closer through his window instead of mine.

I run through what I’m going to say for the hundredth time since we booked the flights, the specific rehearsal I’ve been doing in my head for two weeks — plain sentences, no cushioning, no managing the room’s reaction before I even give them anything to react to. I told myself I was done doing that. I meant it when I said it to Sloane and Wren and June. I meant it when I said it to Theo. I need to mean it in the one house where meaning it has always been hardest.

“Whatever happens in there,” Theo says, quiet, like he can read exactly where my head’s gone, “I’m not going anywhere. You know that, right?”

“I know that.” I lean my head against his shoulder for the rest of the descent, watching the coastline come into view below us, green marsh giving way to the specific manicured order of Charleston proper. “I just need you to know I might not be okay in there. Not right away.”

“That’s allowed.” He kisses my hair. “You don’t have to be okay in there. You just have to be honest. I’ll handle the rest.”

I don’t fully understand what he means by that until later. In the moment I just nod, and hold his hand, and let the plane carry us both toward a conversation I’ve been avoiding for four years.

We land, collect the rental car, and drive the familiar route toward the Battery in near silence, both of us saving whatever’s left of our nerve for the house itself instead of spending it on small talk in a parking garage.

The house on the Battery looks exactly the way it always looks — white columns, the specific manicured perfection of a place built to be photographed, palmettos swaying out front like they’re posing for a magazine spread that never actually runs.

My dad meets us in the driveway, alone, before we even reach the door.

“Everyone’s here,” he says, quiet, just for us. “Your mother, Maddison, Michael. I didn’t tell them why. I just said it was important and you wanted the whole family together.” He looks at me, steady. “This is entirely your conversation to run, Margo. I’m here if you need me. I’m not going to run interference unless you want me to.”

“Thank you, Daddy.”

“You don’t have to thank me.” He glances at Theo, something warm and approving passing between them. “Ready?”

“No,” I say. Honest. “But let’s go anyway.”

He leads us up the front steps and through the door himself, and we follow him inside toward whatever’s waiting in the parlor.

They’re all in the front parlor when we walk in — my mother on the settee in something expensive and pressed, Maddison beside her looking radiant in the specific way pregnant, engaged, thoroughly celebrated women look, and Michael standing near the window, visibly uncomfortable the second he registers Theo walking in behind me.

“Margo.” My mother rises, air-kisses my cheek, the specific performed warmth she reserves for occasions rather than genuine reunions. “And you brought your — “ she pauses, searching for the word, landing somewhere careful and noncommittal “ — friend.”

“Theo,” I say. “My boyfriend.”

“Of course.” She smiles, thin. “Well. Sit, both of you. Your father said this was important.”

I don’t sit. I stand in the middle of the parlor, Theo beside me, my father a few feet away, and I say the thing I flew four hundred miles to say.

“I’m pregnant.”

The silence lasts exactly as long as it takes my mother to compose her face into something appropriate.