Chapter 23
The sound of a rooster crowing wakes me up from a foggy dream.
Christopher.
I open my eyes to look out the window from my bed. The yarn-covered tree I’ve always known has a layer of snow clinging to it. It’s beautiful and peaceful …
And wrong.
I sit up and look around the room. My room. I’m in my bedroom at Grandee’s. Not where I’m supposed to be.
All at once, last night comes crashing back to me.
Max’s lips against my throat, my hands on his hips, pulling him closer. Max moaning against my chest.
I slept with Max.
Panic, hot and acidic, makes its way up my throat. “Shit.”
How many glasses of champagne did I drink?
Not that many, something whispers in the back of my mind.
Kissing Max for the first time felt like …
The smell of his skin so close, champagne and mint balm on his lips. He exhales and my body just reacts. I pull his bottom lip into my mouth as I kiss him and grab hold of his shoulders and—Max goes stiff.
What am I doing?
I pull back to look at Max, but his eyes are still closed.
“Max—” I’m getting ready to apologize, but he opens his eyes, his pupils blown wide.
“You kissed me.”
“I … I know. It was midnight—” I take a step back, but he follows me.
“You kissed me.”
“It’s what people do at midnight.”
“You kissed me, Nieve.” He repeats it.
“I know.”
“Why?”
I open my mouth to answer, but he stops me.
“Don’t say because it was midnight. You don’t kiss people like that because it’s midnight.”
“I … I just did.”
He looks at me, his eyes on mine, not on my lips or my body. Not anywhere I want them. They stare back at me like he’s trying to figure something out. Like he’s waiting for permission.
“Do it,” I whisper.
And a second later, Max is kissing me this time.
Not like before. It’s not cautious or convenient. It’s hungry, and the railing digs into my back as he presses me against it, but I ignore the discomfort. I ignore everything except for the feeling of Max, his hands pulling up the hem of my—
I reach for the glass of water on my nightstand and look over at Linden’s bed. It’s made, so she either didn’t sleep there or …
How did I get here?
I rub my forehead as if I could make my memories appear. The last thing I can remember is …
Max sliding the straps from my shoulders with soft fingers.
“Linden!”
Last night, Max felt all-consuming, and I remember wanting him closer, wanting more. Wanting his hands on every part of my body.
“Should we go back to my room?” I asked.
“Mine’s closer.”
I feel like I can’t breathe fully, because each step toward his room is a choice. At any point I can turn around. I can stop this. But … I don’t want to.
At the door, he looks at me, his pause giving me the opportunity to say no, to leave. Max is telling me that I don’t have to do this.
And that choice lights something inside my belly and has my lips crashing against his again.
We are a tangle of limbs and teeth and hands.
He touches me everywhere, but unlike my fevered fingers, his are soft and almost reverent.
When my dress falls from my body, Max inhales.
It makes me feel beautiful, and it’s something else I don’t want to consider.
Reaching for the buckle of his belt, I begin to undress him hastily. My hands slide over his skin as I pull up his shirt.
We move to the bed. Max takes his hands and runs them over the sensitive parts of my body. When he settles over me and looks me in the eyes, I—
“Linden!” I stand up and have my hand on the doorknob when it opens.
“Why are you yelling!” Grandee stands with a roving of yarn in one hand and a dish towel in the other. “You’re going to wake up the goddamn neighbors.”
Grandee doesn’t have neighbors, but I don’t say that.
“Where’s Linden?” I ask, already moving around her to head downstairs.
“Linden? How should I know?”
I turn around, my foot on the first step of the stairs. “She left?”
“Left?” Grandee looks confused. It matches how I feel. “Left from where? She’s been with her boyfriend all break.”
I can feel my world spinning.
“Wait. No.” I walk back into the bedroom and grab my phone. “What time did I come back last night?”
“Last night? Did you go somewhere?”
No. Oh no. No. No.
I’m already FaceTiming Linden. The phone rings. And rings. When she answers, the room is still dark and her eyes are barely open.
“Hello.” It’s spoken mostly into her pillow.
“Hey. Did you bring me home last night?”
Linden’s head lifts off the pillow, and her eyes open a little more. “Did something happen last night?”
“Yes. I think I might have had too much to drink. Someone must have slipped something in my champagne—”
“Someone drugged you?” She sits up, pulling the sheet with her because she doesn’t have a shirt on.
“I don’t know. I was with Max—”
“Max? Max was here last night.”
“Exactly.”
“Did you leave Grandee’s last night?”
“Yes! I—” But before I can finish my sentence, Grandee pulls my phone from my hands and tells Linden that I just had a weird dream and ends the call.
“Why did you do that?”
But Grandee looks pale as she nods. “Come on. Let’s go get some tea and talk.”
We sit in the kitchen at the tall table. She puts the kettle on, and I watch her gnarled hands take out two delicate teacups from the cabinet. When the enamel pot whistles, she sets a cup in front of me and adds the tea bag before pouring the steaming water on it.
On instinct, or habit, I wrap my fingers around the porcelain.
Grandee leans a hip against the table. “Why don’t you tell me what you remember.”
“About last night?”
“Sure. Let’s start there.”
I clear my throat and tell her about the party. I leave out Max and kissing him, but even though I don’t speak the words, I feel the memory of his hands on me. And somehow, I think she knows anyway.
“And before that?”
It feels strange reminding her of Christmas and the eve Max and I spent watching movies. She was here for all of that.
“And what about before that?”
“I was at school because everyone except Max left to go to Carter’s lake house.”
She nods like she finally understands. With a sigh, she takes the bottles of dye that are sitting on the table and places them in a straight line.
“For most people, this is how time is. She moves forward, uninterrupted.” Grandee takes a blue bottle and moves it into different places and different orders. “For us, time can be like this, always rearranging itself. Moving and shifting.”
This is insane. “Grandee.”
“Let me finish.” She continues to move the bottles.
“Now, each one of these bottles has its own purpose, its own relationship to time. If you make a small change here or there, it’s only a tiny ripple.
A little thing. It doesn’t change things for the other bottles.
They all shift so subtly they are close enough to the same.
” She looks up at me. “You understand so far?”
I nod, but I’m not sure I do.
“But now and then, something bigger gets changed, a massive boulder falling right into the water with massive ripples … and it rearranges the pieces in such a way that everyone’s personal … let’s call it destiny … is fighting to stay on its own individual course.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
She takes a deep breath. “Because your change was big. And now, every time you try to do something too different, time gives you a different version of herself.”
At first, I think she’s speaking about last night with Max, and the way she says it makes something inside my heart burn. It almost feels accusatory. As if I’ve done this.
As if it’s my fault.
But then I understand.
“You’re the one who made a big change!” I throw her words back at her. “You threw my yarn in the fire!”
Her eyes flash with panic before they settle into the cool and collected eyes I’m used to. “You’re angry.”
“You told me not to do anything major. Nothing big. I didn’t do anything big.”
“Well, obviously, that’s not true.”
“You pulled out my yarn. You sent me back here, and I’ve been trying to follow all the rules and keep him alive—”
“Alive? Who died?”
Her arm is resting on mine, just like Max’s did before, as if she’s trying to calm me. And that’s when I realize she thinks I’ve become unhinged.
And I have. “Carter!”
“Carter? Linden’s boyfriend?”
I want to scream.
But instead, I cry. “Everything feels so messed up. I feel like I’m losing my mind.”
Her mouth sets into a firm line, and she motions for me to head into the living room. I sit in my chair, and Grandee brings me my peppermint tea and my blanket.
I can’t help but think of Max on the couch, asleep. I finger those stitches. It would be so easy to pull them free. Erase them.
Erase him and start over again.
She puts her hands over mine. “Small changes,” Grandee says. It’s not a request or an order, more like admitting she’s ready to hear what I have to say.
I feel alone. Like I’m screaming at the sky and no one can hear me. I’m losing everything. And the worst part is, I don’t even know if there’s anything to keep.
“I still feel the same as before,” is all that comes out.
Grandee’s fingers trace the three stitches in my blanket.
I pull it away, afraid she’ll tear the stitches out, and I’ll be left even more of a confused mess than I already am.
Instead, she pats my hand before bringing over a basket of yarn scraps I’ve made over the years.
“What do you want to do with this yarn?” she asks.
I look at the yarn piled there, varying sizes of balls here, a few random bits there. Half of a scarf I was making, left over from my pink phase I went through in junior high.
“I don’t know, Grandee.” I’m not sure what she’s trying to get at. “Why would I use old yarn?”
She sighs, like I’m not understanding something. “This is the stuff you made in your past. It’s your past. Would you use this on your blanket?”
She knows my answer. It’s a truth like all the others in this house. Leave your shoes at the door, wash your hands before supper, don’t touch the garden, and don’t use old yarn.
“I’m not the same person I was when I made that yarn.”
Her face is kind when she says, “So stop trying to use it.”
She believes she’s being helpful, but I want to shout at her that this isn’t the same thing. That there is yarn only I can see. Threads of colors that no one else even knows exists.
“This isn’t about yarn, Grandee.” I almost curse at her as my tears swell to a crescendo. “This is about the fact that I have memories no one else does. That I’m alone because no one else remembers things I can’t forget. Everything is always shifting.”
Grandee’s lips press together. “You’re gonna have to decide what makes something real. Is it real because you share it with someone, or is it real because you remember it?”
I open my mouth to tell her that doesn’t make sense, but her words burrow and bend in my mind.
Does it even matter? Everything is so tangled.
That afternoon, I lie on my bed and stare out at the snow. Max felt real. His hands, his smell. His mouth. On the balcony, the two of us. What we shared.
It was real.
Time must be punishing me. I’m not supposed to be with Max. I’m supposed to be with Carter.
The words sour in my heart. They feel wrong, which … also feels wrong.
I can’t be with Carter, not because of Max but because I want Carter to live.
That’s the whole point of this. Carter.
Not Max.
So why does my heart hurt so badly?