8. Kevin #2
Stephanie cleared her throat. “We did. Also with your mother.” She lifted her eyes to mine for the first time since I’d set her down in this room. “I just told them to keep the secret. That’s why they didn’t tell you.”
The information settled over me and kept settling, layer on layer, heavier the longer I held it.
Three years of believing Stephanie had severed herself clean from everyone I loved. Three years of picturing her alone in some city apartment, isolated, drowning in the same grief that had been drowning me, the two of us suffering the same wound in parallel silence.
She hadn’t been alone at all. She’d had my mother. My sister. My own family had spent three years wrapped around her, loving her, holding her upright, and keeping every bit of it hidden from me.
I should have been angry. Some small, mean part of me reached for the anger and found the grip. But the far larger part of me just went loose with relief.
She hadn’t been alone. Somebody had been there to hold her hand. That was the whole of what mattered.
I thought about all the times over three years I’d sat across a table from my mother and my sister and asked, carefully, casually, whether either of them had heard anything.
Whether Stephanie was okay. And both of them had looked me dead in the eye and given me nothing, protecting her from me, keeping their promise while I bled quietly into my coffee.
They’d chosen her. Of course they’d chosen her.
If I’d been anyone but the man who caused it, I’d have chosen her too.
“I’m happy you’re still friends, Steph,” I said.
She watched me, wary, waiting for the catch. For me to raise my voice and demand to know why I’d been cut out, to turn it into one more thing that was about my pain.
I didn’t. This was the thing she’d needed to survive me. Distance from the man, without losing the people. I’d already taken a child and a decade and her faith in her own judgment. I wasn’t going to reach out and take this too.
“Thank you,” she said, low.
“Nothing to thank me for.”
She held my eyes a beat longer than she needed to. And in that beat the air between us changed. I couldn’t have named it under oath. Recognition, maybe. The faint outline of the two people we’d been before I ruined them.
Then she turned to Hugo, who was still fixing me with a stare full of open hatred.
“So.” Her voice snapped into command. “This is Tris’s big weekend. We’ll ALL behave.” She jabbed a finger square into her brother’s chest. “You hear me? NO fighting, NO scandals. We’re fucking adults!”
Hugo’s jaw flexed. For a second I braced for him to swing on me right there in the bathroom, mother’s weekend or not. Then the fight went out of him on a long, disgusted breath.
“Fine.”
Stephanie rounded on me. “Kevin?”
I lifted both hands in surrender, gauze scissors still hooked on one finger. “I will. Whatever you need.”
She let out a breath, and her shoulders came down out of her ears. The pressure in the little room bled off a few degrees.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Nothing to worry about. Let’s go.” She started toward the door, planting each foot with the tender care of someone negotiating with her own body. “We still have dinner left.”
Harry sprang up and offered an arm. Stephanie took it, and the two of them went out together into the blue evening, Hugo shouldering after them and firing one last look of murder back at me over his shoulder.
I stood alone in the bathroom of Stephanie’s cabin, the ruined sandal on the floor between my feet, the smell of burn cream and smoke still on my hands.
She’d kept my family. She’d stayed folded into the lives of every person I loved, even while she’d carved me out completely, and I couldn’t even resent it, because it meant she hadn’t been drowning by herself while I drowned in mine.
And when she’d found out I was on the property, she hadn’t packed her bag and caught the last ferry off the island.
She’d told me to stay.
For my mom, which wasn’t for us. I understood the distance in that. But she’d said it anyway.
It was more than I deserved. More than I’d let myself hope for on the flight I never took.
I sat down on the edge of the tub for a second and just breathed.
My hands still smelled of her, of antiseptic and the coconut thing she’d always put in her hair.
On the flight over I’d promised myself I’d keep my distance all weekend, be gracious, be small, take up no space in her line of sight and let her enjoy my mother’s party in peace.
Ten minutes on the island and I’d already carried her across the lawn in front of the entire party and knelt at her feet.
So much for distance. So much for the calm and mature man I’d rehearsed being.
The truth was simpler and worse than any of my rehearsals had let me admit.
The second I saw her crouched in the grass cursing at that torch, every plan I’d made had gone straight out of my head.
I gathered the kit, snapped it shut, and walked out into the night air.
The party had recovered itself. The torches burned properly now, every last one of them, and music drifted down from the open windows of the main house.
Somewhere in that crowd Stephanie was leaning on my sister’s arm and laughing and keeping her weight off her burned feet.
Three years ago, she’d signed the papers and walked out of my life without looking back.
Tonight she’d told me to stay.
It wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t within a country mile of forgiveness. But it was a door, cracked open the width of a hair, and light was coming through it.
I stepped onto the stone path toward the music, ready to spend the next three days proving I’d become someone worth letting back through that hair-thin gap in the door.