Page 28 of So This Isn't Love
To the west is my penthouse and the gear room and a city where nobody has ever once asked me to read anything aloud. Board meetings where my assistant pre-briefs every document. Restaurants where I order the special without looking. A whole gleaming life engineered, brilliantly, expensively, around one nine-year-old's secret—and it works, been working for me for years. Yet an hour ago it started feeling less like a fortress and more like the world's most successful hiding spot.
Behind me to the east is a town I fled a long time ago and thought I’d never return to. Now, there’s a sharing circle full of kids who watched me fail today and a teacher I wounded when she was their age and had every right to revel in watching me spin out. There’s a family with my bed made up waiting for me in that direction too. A brother who covers for me at kitchen counters and another one healing on a couch. A mother whose love language is food and fussing over her sons despite the fact that they’re full grown men.
The calculated plan says keep going west, away from all of this. The plan has never once failed me. I have never once, until tonight, wanted it to.
A text comes through while I'm sitting there.
Colton:You eat yet? Mom wants to know.
Fuck.
I look at the message for a long time. Then I answer the way I answer everything longer than a sentence—voice-to-text, slow and careful, no words I have to fight.
"On my way back. Save me a plate."
Then I pull out of the gas station heading east, back toward the vineyard, toward town. Toward Darcy.
Toward everything I shouldn’t want, yet can’t seem to walk away from yet.
CHAPTER 12
DARCY
Aknot of guilt has been sitting in my chest all Monday morning.
Through first period Fitzgerald and dramatic irony, through thesis-statement workshops, Finn's voice from the parking lot yesterday keeps finding me. Not the performer's voice. The voice I'd never heard from him before, stripped down to its studs, the one that ran out of jokes and bravado and just said the truth:Not the brains. Not the charm. The disappointment.
Now it's lunch break, and I'm alone at the back table of the school library with my laptop and half a granola bar I don't remember starting, reading an article about adult dyslexia accommodations as though it will do me any good. The man it's meant for is probably in Manhattan by now. Probably relieved to be rid of the vindictive bitch who spent a weekend engineering his humiliation and then, as a final act of generosity, handed him a page to read in front of a bunch of kids and smiled while he drowned.
A chair scrapes somewhere near the circulation desk. My hand goes to the laptop lid, half-closing it before I've decided why.
"There you are."
Annie rounds the biography shelf already on a mission. She has been texted back in monosyllables since yesterday afternoon and she has come to collect. Two coffees, her bag over one shoulder, and the prosecutorial opening I recognize from every school play she's ever directed.
"You sent me a photo of a man in pink kitten scrubs yesterday morning," she says, setting a coffee down in front of me. "The caption read, and I quote, 'justice served.' And then what did you do? You went completely dark on me. I had to hear the rest from Jules, who heard it from Cathy, who gave a detailed blow-by-blow of a billionaire, a bulldog's backside, and nuclear-grade secretions that's going to haunt my sleep for weeks." She drops into the chair across from me, grinning as she searches my face for a reaction. "Darce. Why are you back here hiding like a fugitive instead of letting me buy you a victory coffee?"
"You just brought me a coffee."
"That's a search-party coffee. Completely different category."
I should be returning serve. This is what we do. She prosecutes, I annotate, we meet somewhere in the middle over whatever contraband pastry she's hidden in that bag. But today the volley dies in my hands before I can lift it.
"I'm not hiding. I'm working."
Annie tilts her head. She has directed a decade of teenagers who believe they can lie to a woman who teaches lying for a living, and whatever she sees in my posture, shoulders up, screen guarded, serve unreturned, it isn't victory.
"You're sulking. You also look like you haven’t slept. Come on, what's wrong?" She leans forward, straining toward my partially opened laptop. "What are you actually doing?"
I close the lid the rest of the way. The click sounds louder than it should.
Because just for a second, behind my eyes, the whole thing is there. Finn's finger under the line of text, dragging. The sweat at his hairline. The jokes deployed faster and faster until they stopped working and there was just a grown man going under in my share circle, one word at a time.
And after, in the parking lot, his voice stripped to nothing, his arm under my hand, the heat of his skin through the sleeve and the pulse I felt jump against my fingers, and the way every thought I owned went quiet at the point of contact. I'd meant the touch as comfort. My body took it as an introduction.
I could tell Annie all of it. She would listen carefully and understand.
But I spent eighth grade watching my family's worst year become the town's favorite dinner-table story, my father's abrupt departure whispered about in every kitchen in Mattichogue. I know what it costs when someone's worst hour stops belonging to them.
