Page 5 of What Maple Heard

I had run from my father’s house at seventeen years old. I had run with River on my hip, and I had boarded the first bus I could find because it was going somewhere that wasn’t there. I had spent three years in Vegas dancing in a club, in heels that hurt, for men who thought they knew what I was worth. And I had saved every dollar, every single one, to move us here.

And I had spent the last three months convincing myself that Cade Sonnenberg was different.

He was not different.

He was just better at the smile.

I picked up a disposable cup from the coffee table and dropped it in the trash. Then another. Then another.

I was a fighter. I had always been a fighter. I had fought my father, I had fought a customer in Vegas who thought buying a lap dance meant buying a fuck, I had fought every version of the world that tried to tell me I was less than what I was, and I was going to fight this too, which in this case meant not letting Cade Sonnenberg take up one more square inch of space in my head than he already had.

He had been a distraction. A very handsome, very well-dressed, ‘very good at walking you home under the fall leaves’ distraction.

I was done being distracted.

River was fourteen and clearly needed more of my attention than he’d been getting, and Happy Steps had its busiest season running right now with the fall tourists. I had twelve foster kids to get ready for the Fall Festival performance, and I had a life, an actual built-from-nothing life, and I was not going to let one man’s opinion of what I deserved hollow it out from the inside.

Girls like her don’t belong here.

I turned off the kitchen light.

I went to bed.

I did not cry.

I told myself I was not going to cry and I meant it and I kept it, which was more than I could say for certain other people’s promises.

***

Chapter 2

Maple

For a week, I’d been reading Cade’s texts and not answering them.

I hadn’t blocked him. Blocking him would have meant he couldn’t reach me, and I wanted him to be able to reach me. I wanted him to see those two little ticks turn blue and know that I had read every single word and chosen, deliberately and with full information, to say nothing back.

His texts were all singing the same song. Where are you. Are you okay. Can we talk. Maple, please.

The please ones were my personal favorite. Very committed to the please. Hundred and twenty pleases in seven days, which worked out to nearly eighteen pleases each day, which suggested a man who had done some calculations about the appropriate frequency of pleading and had landed on a number that projected the right level of sincerity without tipping into desperation.

I read all of them.

I answered none of them.

It was a Tuesday. Tuesdays were my back-to-back tourist salsa class nights — four o’clock couple, five-thirty couple, seven o’clock group — and I had come home with a tiredness that had crept up through my knees and had spread across my face. The face tired was from smiling. I had been smiling at strangers for eleven hours because they were paying me to teach them to salsa and smiling was part of the service. Come to think of it, I had been smiling through things since I was old enough to understand that smiling was easier than explaining. I was very practiced at this.

But after coming to Chestnut Ridge, the fake smile was gradually replaced by a true sense of joy and belonging. And after meeting Cade, that joy had only multiplied. I had completely forgotten the fake smile. But now it was back.

The pasta water was on. I was cutting vegetables at the counter — the mindless kind of cutting zucchini into rounds, the same motion over and over — when I made the mistake of letting my brain go quiet. And when my brain went quiet, it went straight to Cade.

About a month after Cade started showing up at my dance classes, we had gone on our first real date. He had made a reservation and told me three days in advance and I’d spent two days trying to talk myself out of going.

I told him about River on that first date. All of it — the four-year-old on my hip, the bus, Vegas, the years of pole dancing, the move to Chestnut Ridge. I told him about River’s love for soccer and how he was slowly losing interest in it because of the company he was keeping. I put it all on the table in the first hour because I had learned the hard way that there was no point in waiting, no point in letting someone get comfortable before you showed them the parts that made them leave, because they always left eventually and it was better to know sooner.

He listened to the whole thing without flinching. Then he asked me what River’s favorite soccer team was.

Not that must have been so hard or you’re so strong or any of the things people said when they wanted credit for sitting through a difficult story. He asked about River’s soccer team, and then about River’s position, and then about whether River had a good coach, and by the end of dinner I had talked about my brother for forty-five minutes and Cade had looked, the entire time, like he had nowhere else he’d rather be.