Page 22 of Give In to Me
“Yes.”
Julian opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. The words were there, twenty-eight years’ worth of them, stacked up behind his teeth like a dam about to break:Thank you for stealing me. Thank you for giving me to Tita. Thank you for guarding me from a distance and never asking for anything in return. Thank you for answering the phone.
What came out was: “Thank you.”
“You don’t need to thank me.” Luciano’s voice was quiet. Rough at the edges, in a way that told Julian his brother was holding himself together with the same white-knuckled grip Julian had been using for a month. “You never needed to thank me.”
The line stayed open. Neither of them hung up. For thirty seconds, two brothers sat in the dark on opposite ends of the country and breathed into the same silence, and the silence wasn’t empty. It was full. It was twenty-eight years of love expressed through distance, and it was enough, for now, to hold them both.
Julian hung up first. Set the phone on the nightstand. Lay back on the bed and let the ceiling blur above him and waited.
Luciano called back in thirty-six hours.
“Rhode Island,” he said. “A non-profit flower farm outside Providence. She’s been there for three weeks. Reid Jamieson’s family foundation funds it.”
Julian closed his eyes. Rhode Island. Three thousand miles. A flower farm. Of course it was flowers.
“I have the address,” Luciano went on. “I’ll send it to this number.”
“Luciano.”
“Go get her.”
The line went dead. Julian sat in the dark with his brother’s voice still in his ears and an address glowing on his phone screen and the first clear thought he’d had in a month:
Don’t be your father. Don’t be the man who had the power to find what he lost and chose not to.
He booked a flight for the morning.
Chapter 7
THE FLOWER FARM SATat the end of a dirt road three miles outside Providence, behind a stone wall covered in climbing roses that hadn’t bloomed yet. Early June. The canes were green and thorny and full of tight buds that would open in a week, and Katy knew this because she’d been counting. Counting buds. Counting days. Counting the small, visible things that made the invisible ones survivable.
She’d been here for twenty-six days.
The farm grew cut flowers for farmers’ markets and local florists. Zinnias, dahlias, sunflowers, sweet peas on trellises that caught the morning light. The owner asked no questions and paid cash and let Katy sleep in the converted potting shed behind the main barn, a room with a single bed and a window that faced east and a shelf where someone had left three paperback romance novels that Katy hadn’t been able to read because romance, at the moment, felt like pressing on a bruise.
Reid had arranged everything. One phone call from the prom parking lot, Katy rigid in his passenger seat with mascara on her face she didn’t remember putting on, and within forty-eight hours she’d had a bus ticket, a prepaid phone, and an address in Rhode Island. The Jamieson family foundation funded the farm. Reid’s grandmother had started it thirty years ago as a workforce development program. Nobody there knew Katy’s last name, and nobody asked.
The rows kept her sane. Six to two, weeding, watering, deadheading, harvesting. The work was physical and repetitiveand required exactly enough attention to keep her brain from circling back to the gymnasium doorway, to the charcoal suit and her sister’s hand on his arm, and when it circled back anyway she pulled another weed and another and another until her fingers were stained green and her back ached and the image faded to a thing she could hold without her hands clenching.
Amy got a call once a week from the prepaid. Short conversations. “I’m okay, Mom.” “I know, baby.” Amy didn’t push. Amy understood disappearing. Amy had done her own version of it, years ago, with chemicals instead of geography, and she recognized in her daughter the animal need to go somewhere quiet and bleed in private.
Reid called every few days. Never long. “You eating?” “Yes.” “Sleeping?” “Some.” “Need anything?” “No.” He didn’t ask about Julian. He didn’t ask when she was coming back. He asked about the flowers, and she told him about the dahlias, how they grew from tubers that resembled dead things and turned into blooms so vivid it hurt to face them, and he listened, and the listening was enough.
The tears didn’t come for the first two weeks. They finally arrived on day fifteen, in the shower, standing under lukewarm water with her forehead against the tile, and once they started they didn’t stop for forty minutes. She sat on the shower floor and cried with her arms around her knees and her face hidden and no one to hear it.
After that, the crying came in waves. Unpredictable. She’d be harvesting zinnias and the orange of the petals would catch the afternoon light and turn copper and the copper would remind her of his voice, and she’d have to stop and put her hands on her thighs and wait until it passed.
And she missed him. That was the part she couldn’t forgive herself for. After everything he’d done, the destruction speech and the fixation and the prom and her own sister on his arm, she still missed him. Not the cruelty. The other thing. The man underneath the cruelty, the one who’d asked her to walk with him and gone rigid when he touched her and put his forehead on her shoulder and stayed there like someone who’d been lost for a very long time and had just found the only place that felt like home. She missed that man. She hated that she missed him. She missed him anyway.
On day twenty-six, she was kneeling in the sweet pea row, tying tendrils to the trellis, when she heard a car on the dirt road.
Cars came down the dirt road twice a day: Marguerite at six, the delivery driver at noon. It was three o’clock. The light was golden and the sweet peas smelled like sugar and the air was warm and still, and the car slowed, and stopped, and a door opened and closed.
Footsteps on gravel. Heavy. Male.
Her hands kept working, tying a tendril to the wire, and her heart was doing something she couldn’t name because it was too early and too impossible and her brain refused to process what her body already knew.
