Page 142
“I’m so happy for you.” I mean it completely, the specific joy of watching your best friend build something solid out of something that used to feel uncertain. “Beau’s good for you.”
“He is.” She glances toward the door, where I can hear Beau’s voice mixed in with Cash’s ongoing commentary. “It’s funny — Theo’s room opening up because he’s moving in with you, and then Beau and me filling it right behind you. Like the house just keeps passing love forward instead of losing it.”
“That’s very poetic for someone holding a box of picture frames.”
“I contain multitudes.” She grins. “Speaking of the room situation — Beau’s been talking about River Callahan. The freshman. Says he’s been keeping half an eye on him all year, thinks he might be a good fit for the house once there’s actually space.”
“River.” I turn that over. I don’t know him well — a freshman who’s mostly existed at the edges of things for me, Beau’s protégé in the specific quiet way Beau takes people under his wing without making a show of it. “That tracks. Beau’s got a type. Rescues the quiet ones.”
“He rescued you, in a manner of speaking.”
“I wasn’t quiet. I was managed.”
“Fair point.” Sloane laughs. “Anyway. Nothing’s decided. Beau’s just floating it. But I wouldn’t be shocked if River’s living in that room by fall.”
I tuck that away — a small, warm thread for a future that isn’t mine to write, the specific pleasure of watching a house keep making room for whoever needs it next.
Wren and June find me a few minutes later, and the three of us stand together in the empty living room one last time, the specific quiet of people who know exactly what this house meant and don’t need to say most of it out loud.
“You were the first people who ever really saw me,” I tell them. Quiet. True. “Before Theo. Before any of it. You two just — let me be a mess in your kitchen and didn’t flinch.”
“We didn’t just let you,” Wren says. “We were honored to. There’s a difference.”
“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Don’t get used to it.” But she’s smiling, the small rare one that means more than most people’s biggest smiles.
June hugs me first, quick and fierce, and Wren follows, and for a moment the three of us just stand there in the empty room holding onto each other, three years of shared kitchen table conversations and late-night crises and ordinary Tuesday dinners compressed into one long, wordless goodbye.
“You’ll visit,” June says, pulling back, wiping her eyes. “Constantly. I refuse to let this be the end of anything.”
“Constantly,” I promise. “I’m twenty minutes away, not the moon.”
“Feels like the moon.” June sniffs. “Feels like everything’s ending and starting at the exact same time.”
“That’s basically what senior year is,” Wren says. “For all of us.”
The new apartment fills up fast once the truck arrives, the whole crew moving through it with the specific efficient chaos of people who’ve done this exact thing enough times to know how to make it fast.
The couches are already exactly where the delivery crew left them, but Cash insists on personally supervising a slight repositioning anyway, an authority nobody actually granted him, and somehow it works out fine regardless. Boxes get unpacked in waves, the kitchen coming together first, then the living room, then, slowly, carefully, the nursery — two crib frames still in their boxes for now, waiting for a day months away, but the room itself starting to take shape around them. Soft yellow paint on one wall that Theo picked out himself, insisting he wanted to do at least one thing with his own hands before the babies arrived instead of just watching everyone else build this life around him.
By early evening the apartment looks like an actual home instead of a collection of boxes, and the crew starts thinning out — Cash and Wyatt heading back to Raven House first, Priya, Kara, and Delaney not long after, Sloane and Beau lingering a while longer before they, too, head home to start their own move into Theo’s old room. Wren and June are the last to leave, both of them hugging me one more time at the door, promising to visit soon, and then it’s just me and Theo, standing in the middle of our new living room, completely alone for the first time all day.
“Hi,” Theo says. Quiet. Just for us.
“Hi.” I look around at the space — new couches settled into place, boxes broken down and stacked by the door, the whole apartment finally starting to feel like it belongs to us instead of just holding our things. “We did it.”
“We did it.” He pulls me into him, and I let myself sink into the specific stillness after a full, loud day, the quiet that only comes once everyone else has gone home and it’s just the two of you left standing in the life you built together.
“Senior year,” I say, into his chest. “That’s insane. We’re seniors now.”
“We’re seniors with an apartment and a pool and two babies on the way.” He rests his chin on top of my head. “I don’t think either of us pictured this exact version of senior year.”
“No.” I laugh, a little disbelieving. “But I wouldn’t trade it. Any of it. Even the hard parts.”
“Even the hard parts,” he agrees.
We stand there a while longer, not talking, just existing in the quiet of our own home, and I think about everything that got us here — Charleston, the secret, the fear, the rupture, the reunion, the specific long road from a girl who managed everything alone to a woman standing in her own apartment with the father of her children, unafraid for possibly the first time in her entire life.
