Page 42 of Holding On

I shake my head.

He sits in the sand and slips on a brace that he swore he’d never be caught dead in last year. It’s for scrambling around in these in-between moments. It’s cumbersome and doesn’t hide the fact that he’s missing a leg. But Laurel and Cory have changed him in this way. The guy can walk without a limp, and with long pants, no one knows. But he can also just be himself, and this has opened him up.

We trudge through the beach sand back toward The Inn. We’ll use the oyster sink in the back of the kitchen to rinse off. He’ll go back to the cottage up the mountain, and I’ll return for the afternoon shift next door.

“I can’t afford to freeze like that.”

He claps me on the shoulder. “You didn’t freeze, bro.”

“I didn’t perform well, and I know that’s mental training.”

He grins. “It’s all mental training.” He taps his head. “But there are techniques. If you can reach air, you can always give air. We don’t exhale a hundred percent carbon dioxide. But that situation the other night? That’s probably not going to ever happen again, so you can relax.”

That’s exactly what I can’t do.

Even though my sisters and friends and Geo probably don’t notice, I’m always on alert. Ever since my parents were killed. Ever since I watched my sisters dissolve in grief. Ever since I gave up trying to understand why it happened, there is this foreboding feeling that something malignant might happen.

There seems to always be a rough, raw, and burning worry in the back of my heart and in my mind. As a result, I try to listen, to do the right thing and to be there for my sisters.

But it’s never enough.

And now Maya has become part of that circle of worry.

I know she’s up to something. I know she’s in over her head.

***

I’m checking messages in the ten minutes before the clinic reopens, when Devon let’s herself in through the side door.

She’s freshly showered, her straight dark hair still wet and looking like black cellophane. All of my sisters used to use the same hand lotion, and she still does. Jean Nate—all lemony and reeking of the eighties, but no one can tease her because it’s what our mother used.

“Hi,” she says.

If Devon’s available and Claire’s not in surgery, this is when they have a coffee together.

“Claire’s out on a call,” I say, trying to focus on my phone message that keeps either breaking up or fading in and out. Coverage here is so sketchy.

“I know. Her car was missing. That’s why I came over.”

Oh boy, here we go. Devon is the big matchmaker. She claims to have called it for Finn and Claire and then Bryce and Chloe. When she found out Mateus and Laurel had already met, she was pretty disappointed she couldn’t claim that victory too.

And then it turned out that Luke and Devon were already married before they even told anyone, so she even robbed her sisters of that glory. She’s already sniffed out me and Maya.

This, I don’t need.

“Listen, Devon.” I glance up so she sees I’m serious. “I know you have this need to match people up, and I appreciate that, but you know Maya and I will figure things out. You don’t need to feel responsible for anything. And if things do work out—which I’m not saying they will because I don’t even know if there’s something to work out—but if it does, I’ll let you take all the credit. How’s that?”

I’m instantly sorry for my hurried delivery. Her mouth opens and closes.

“I’m sorry. It’s just that the four of you, as a force, are sometimes a lot for me to try to handle. As a man, as a Black man, you guys ran interference for me almost my whole life, and now that I’m grown . . . It’s why I don’t tell you about my girlfriends or any of my personal stuff. I just need to figure some things out on my own.”

“Okay,” she says slowly.

“I love you. Hey, don’t cry. What are you doing? You never cry. Why are you welling up?”

She wipes a tear, sniffs, and then digs her hands into her back jeans pockets and looks right at me. “I think I may have overstepped, then. Apparently, again.”

I stand up from the counter. “You can never overstep, Devon. You’re my sister. But you can trust me to take care of things.”

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll back off it, then.”

“What did you do? Does this have to do with Maya?”

She looks genuinely surprised. “Oh God no. No. This is—well, it’s not important now.”

She slips an arm around me, and we quickly hug before she lets herself out the door again.

It suddenly occurs to me that whatever she’s dabbled in, she thinks it’s much larger than anything between Maya and myself.

I’m not certain there is anything more important to me right now than Maya.

And this scares the shit out of me.