Chapter 3 Charlotte #2
Miles Cameron, standing against the wall near the refreshments table like he was trying to merge with the cinderblocks and disappear. Fifteen years older than the boy I'd loved, but unmistakably, impossibly him.
His face was sharper now, the softness of youth carved away into something more defined, more interesting. His dark hair was shorter than I remembered, neatly styled, but I could see silver threading through it at the temples even from across the room.
He wore a simple navy button-down and dark jeans, and he looked profoundly, utterly out of place—his posture stiff, his arms crossed over his chest, his whole body radiating a quiet discomfort that made my heart ache.
Then his eyes found mine.
The room dissolved. The terrible music, the forced laughter, the streamers, the punch, and the fifteen years of silence, all of it faded into meaningless static.
There was only the clear, direct line between his hazel eyes and mine, a connection that felt physical, like a thread pulled taut across the crowded gymnasium.
I couldn't move. My feet had apparently decided this was an excellent moment to root themselves to the floor.
What if he was waiting for someone who'd just stepped away? What if he looked at me and felt nothing but the mild awkwardness of running into an ex he'd rather forget? What if I walked over there and discovered I was the only one still carrying the weight of what we'd been to each other?
"Charlie." Beth's voice came from somewhere far away. "Go."
"I can't."
"You can." Another gentle push. "Go."
Miles uncrossed his arms. He didn't smile, but something in his expression shifted: a softening, a recognition, a question. He pushed himself off the wall.
He was walking toward me.
My legs started moving without my permission, carrying me forward through the crowd. I wove past Kevin Marsh and his boat stories, past Lisa and her gifted children, past a decade and a half of silence and regret and wondering what might have been.
We met in the middle of the dance floor, where no one was dancing. The space around us felt suddenly vast and private, like we'd stepped into a bubble that separated us from everyone else.
"Hi," he said.
His voice was deeper than I remembered, but the timbre was the same: that low, warm vibration that had always made me feel like I was the only person in the world worth talking to.
"Hi," I managed, the word coming out breathless and strange.
We stood there, just looking at each other.
Taking in the changes, searching for the familiar.
The lines at the corners of his eyes that hadn't been there at twenty.
The new gravity in his expression, like life had added weight he was still learning to carry.
But his eyes, those hazel eyes that had always seemed to see right through me, were exactly the same.
"You look..." he started, then stopped, shaking his head slightly as if discarding inadequate words. "It's really good to see you, Charlotte."
"You too." The understatement of a lifetime. "I wasn't sure you'd be here."
"I wasn't sure I'd come," he admitted. His eyes moved over my face like he was memorizing it. "Green still suits you."
The observation, so specific, so connected to us, broke a barrier I hadn’t realized was there. "You remember that?"
"I remember everything." His words were quiet, weighted with something I couldn't name.
A silence fell between us, but it wasn't awkward. It was full, like a held breath before a confession.
"So," I said, grasping for solid ground before I drowned in the intensity of his gaze. "Law. You're a lawyer now."
"I am. Family law, mostly. Custody disputes, estate planning." He winced almost imperceptibly. "Sorry, that's probably not the most—"
"It's fine. I'm intimately familiar with the divorce process these days." The joke landed flatter than I'd intended, and I immediately wished I could take it back.
"I heard," he said quietly. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be. It was... it needed to happen." I took a sip of punch I didn't want, just to have something to do with my hands. "So. The weather's been warm."
"Unseasonably," he agreed, and we both almost smiled at how terrible we were at this.
"We're very bad at small talk," I observed.
"Catastrophically bad. We always were."
"I don't remember it being this painful."
"That's because we usually skipped straight to the real conversations." His eyes held mine. "We were never very good at pretending to be strangers."
"We're not strangers," I said, and the truth of it hung in the air between us.
"No," he agreed softly. "We're not."
Something shifted then… an invisible wall crumbling, something akin to freedom.
"Do you remember Mr. Greeley?" I asked, desperate to find solid ground. "The vein?"
Miles's face transformed. The careful tension dissolved into something that looked almost like the boy I remembered. "The actual, visible vein in his forehead. I thought he was going to have a stroke during that pop quiz."
"The one we missed because of the fire alarm?"
"The one someone allegedly pulled to get out of the quiz. They never did find out who did that."
I kept my expression innocent. "A mystery for the ages."
His eyes narrowed. "Charlotte Huston. It was you?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"You called the fire department to avoid a calculus quiz."
"Allegedly. There's no proof. The statute of limitations has definitely expired."
His laughter was warm, and the sound of it went through me like sunlight after a long winter. "You hid in the bleachers for an hour. I found you pretending to study."
"We hid together," I corrected. "You were my accomplice."
"I was a concerned citizen ensuring your safety."
"You were ditching calc with me."
"Those things aren't mutually exclusive."
And just like that, the wall between us crumbled.
The words started flowing, tumbling over each other like we were picking up a conversation we'd paused fifteen years ago.
We talked about the old diner that had finally closed, the river path where we used to run together, the truly terrible school play senior year where he'd been cast as a tree and had exactly one line that he'd somehow managed to forget.
"I did not forget," he protested.
"Miles. The line was 'the forest grows quiet.' You said, 'The forest goes quiet.' And then you just stood there."
"There was a long pause. It was dramatic."
"It was forty-five seconds. I counted."
"Art is subjective."
"Art is not standing frozen on stage while Mrs. Patterson whispers your line from the wings loud enough for the entire audience to hear."
He was laughing again, and I was laughing, and somewhere in the past hour we'd migrated away from the dance floor to a quiet corner near the old trophy case. Beth had given me a thumbs-up at some point and then disappeared, probably to the tacos she'd promised herself.
The DJ played a slow song, then a fast one, but we stayed in our bubble, talking.
I told him about nursing: the parts I loved, the parts that drained me, and he told me about law, about the cases that kept him up at night, about his parents' house sitting full of boxes he couldn't bring himself to open.
"I'm so sorry," I said softly when he mentioned his parents. "About your mom and dad."
For a brief moment, I saw a tinge of sadness flood his features before he smoothed it away. "Thank you. It's been... It's been hard. Being back here, in their house. Everything's the same, and they're just... not."
"How long has it been?"
"My mom, two years. My dad, three. I just..." He trailed off, looked away. "I haven't been ready to deal with it."
I wanted to reach out, to touch his arm, to offer some comfort. But the distance between us, fifteen years of silence, felt too vast to cross so casually.
"Grief doesn't follow a schedule," I said instead. "You deal with it when you can."
He looked at me with something that might have been gratitude. "When did you get so wise?"
"I've always been wise. You just never appreciated it."
"That's entirely possible."
At some point, he went to get us water, since our fruit punch had gone from suspicious to actively concerning, and I watched him walk away.
There was something careful about his movements, a rigidity in his shoulders that seemed at odds with the athletic ease I remembered.
He moved like someone conscious of being watched, each step deliberate and controlled.
He returned with two bottles, handing one to me with a small smile.
"Thanks," I said.
He twisted off the cap, his movements precise, almost mechanical.
As he lifted the bottle to his lips, his right hand, the one holding it, gave a sudden, sharp tremor.
Water sloshed against the plastic sides.
He jerked his hand down immediately, recapping the bottle and setting it on a nearby ledge in one quick motion.
His face drained of his previous joy, and he shoved his hand into his pocket with the practiced ease of someone who'd done it a thousand times before.
I saw it. And I couldn’t stop myself from cataloguing it automatically: resting tremor, possibly intention tremor, the careful compensating movements. The signs were subtle, but they were there.
But the look on his face, that flash of raw frustration followed by a carefully constructed wall of normalcy, stopped any question before it could form. This wasn't a patient in bay four. This was Miles. And whatever was happening, he clearly wasn't ready to talk about it.
I took a sip of my own water, keeping my eyes on his face instead of his pocket. "It's so loud in here."
The tension in his shoulders eased slightly. "I was just thinking that."
"Want to get some air?"
The relief in his eyes was almost painful to witness. "Yes. Please."