Page 7 of What Maple Heard

After the game, we stood in the sidelines and Cade asked River about soccer. Methodically, like he had prepared for exactly this, which knowing what I now knew about him, he absolutely had. He asked River about the defensive formation of one team. The transfer window decisions of another.

River’s determination to avoid Cade lasted about twenty minutes before his phone went down.

At the pizza place after the game, River talked straight about soccer tactics while Cade listened and asked exactly the right questions. I sat across the table and watched my closed-off, suspicious, nobody-gets-in fourteen-year-old brother lean forward in his seat to explain something about a corner kick.

Oh no, I had thought.

Oh no, because it was good.

Oh no, because I was falling for this man.

Now, as I was dwelling in the aftermath of an overheard conversation that had shown me exactly how the last three months had been a facade, the front door opened and River came in. He dropped his backpack on the floor by the door, which I had asked him not to do eleven hundred times.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” he said.

He went to the cabinet. He got a bowl. He poured cereal. He took it to the couch and picked up his phone.

“How was school?”

“Mm.”

“Anything happen?”

“Mm.”

I looked at the pasta water, which was almost boiling. I looked at the zucchini, which was cut. I looked at River, who was staring at his phone with zero acknowledgement of another person present in the room with him.

Two weeks ago, he had slammed his bedroom door and told me he hated me. Yesterday, he had eaten dinner in his room. Today was a cereal-and-mm day. That was fine. I was cataloguing the data, building a map of who he was becoming, which was the only reliable tool I had.

I went back to the pasta.

And then the doorbell rang.

***

Chapter 3

Maple

I knew before I opened the door.

I don’t know how I knew. Some kind of cellular memory that had developed over three months of him showing up — at the studio, at River’s game — always at exactly the moment I hadn’t braced for him yet. My hand was on the doorknob and I already knew, and I opened it anyway because what was I going to do, hide in my own kitchen?

Cade Sonnenberg. On my porch.

“What the hell, Maple?”

I blinked. Shouldn’t I be asking him that?

“What?”

“Are you okay?” He was looking at me with genuine worry in his eyes. His eyebrows were knotted together and his mouth was closed in a frown. I looked at me directly and without blinking, and I needed him to stop doing that immediately. “I went to the studio but you’d already left. What’s going on Maple? Why weren’t answering your phone —“

“I’m fine.”

“And River?”