Chapter 38 Easton
EASTON
On the night Kevin burst into my room, I’d just finished the first two years of med school.
I’d be leaving for a paid internship in Colorado soon, one that would help me land a residency the following spring, but I had three weeks back home first, three weeks during which I planned to avoid my brothers if possible.
A smarter girl wouldn’t have come home at all.
Kevin and Sean were a danger to everyone they came into contact with.
I came because of Elijah. Elijah, who’d been dancing around me for years—close and seemingly interested, but never making his move.
I just couldn’t miss what might be my last shot for a while.
I should have run the minute Kevin flipped on my light and told me they needed me. I should have run as hard as I could to the Cabots’ house and gotten on the next plane out.
But I’m a stupid girl at the times when it has really mattered.
Sean was strewn across the couch, covered in blood, and one of his idiotic friends was in the big armchair across from him. Also bloody.
I couldn’t legally touch either of them without threatening everything.
Sure, they’d asked for my help before, but on a much smaller scale: a stomach sliced open while scaling a barbed wire fence, a dog bite.
Trying to deal with bullet wounds when they’d committed a felony?
This was something else entirely—not only would I never get a residency, but I might go to jail.
I told Kevin to take them to the hospital and he wouldn’t. There’d been a string of local robberies—I’d suspected it was them, but I’d never asked—and if they showed up with gunshot wounds, it would all come out.
So I did it. I’d only worked on cadavers at that point, but I did it, and it wasn’t until Kevin said, “It’ll be real fucking handy when we finally have a doctor in the family” that it all became clear to me.
This was never going to end. And once I got my license, it would get worse: they’d be demanding oxy and morphine and Demerol and God knew what else for the rest of my fucking life.
“You will never have a doctor in the family,” I replied. “This is the last time I ever help either of you.”
That’s when Sean laughed, his voice slurred from something Kevin had given him. “Oh, sweetheart, that wasn’t the last time. We shot that kid, you know—no idea if he’ll live—and you just helped us conceal a crime. I could ruin your life with a single phone call.”
It took me a few days to understand the hole I’d dug myself into. That if I ever got my medical license, my brothers and everyone they associated with would spend their lives blackmailing me with what they knew.
So I pivoted. I blew off my residency and got a PhD and let everyone think I’d just changed my mind.
And I thought it was a secret, but Elijah has known all of this since it happened.
He knows everything—that it was me who burned down Jacob Tucker’s house, and that I helped Sean and Blaze hide what they’d done—not that I had much of a choice.
“I didn’t give my mom and Kelsey the specifics,” he says.
I’m still sitting on the wall, shell-shocked.
He stands before me, wrapping his bowtie around my bleeding foot.
“I just told them that they had to never give you a reason to visit, and that it involved your brothers. You came home anyway, I know, but we were doing our best not to be a part of it.”
So all of the people I thought hated me as a kid were rooting for me, and all of the people who hurt me—Elijah and Judy and even my father—were doing it to save me from myself.
There was the world as it actually existed, and the world as I saw it, and they had almost no overlap.
I want to argue that he could have told me the truth, but I wouldn’t have been able to give him up if he had. I’d have returned again and again, a puppet my brothers could push around at will.
A warm breeze gusts from the west. He tucks my hair behind my ear. “Why are you telling me all this now, then?” I ask. “What’s changed?”
He cups my face in his palms. “Because even if I can’t give you all the things you wanted, Thomas can’t either.
I don’t want you coming to South Carolina, so we’d only see each other when I could get up to Boston, which probably means we never end up being parents, among other things.
I never wanted to ask you to make that choice, but—” He shakes his head.
“Even with as little as I can offer, I saw you tonight. I think I could make you happier than Thomas could. And it’s not right for me to keep making those choices for you. ”
My heart hammers in my chest. I want to believe him, but we’ve been somewhere like this before. Not entirely, but close enough. This could evaporate on me, leaving me to spend the next year flattened by an abrupt end I didn’t expect.
“I already ended things with Thomas,” I tell him.
When his face lights up, I shake my head.
“But I’m scared to believe you. An hour ago you were telling me this could never happen.
Five years ago you were telling me I’d imagined everything I thought you felt.
And I get it. You had your reasons. But it’s almost impossible for me to believe that I’m not going to wake up to some new gut punch, and you’ll have your reasons then too. ”
He steps closer. “Would it help if I announced it to the whole fucking world? If I told everyone back at the house that I’m in love with you?”
My breath holds. Yes, that might help. If nothing else, it wouldn’t leave me dealing with it alone if he changes his mind. I’d have a dozen other people there saying, “What the fuck, Elijah?”
“It’s not the right time for it,” I reply. “It’s Kelsey’s wedding.”
His mouth moves into my favorite of his lopsided smiles—sweet, a little sheepish. “Then I guess I shouldn’t have announced to Kelsey and my mother that I was in love with you just before I took off.”
I stare at him. “You didn’t.”
“You’re right. I didn’t. My grandmother did, and then she told me to stop wasting time and go find you.”
I laugh, half joy and half disbelief. “Now I know you’re making shit up.”
He scoops me off the wall and starts walking toward the car. “Then I guess maybe I’ll just let you see for yourself.”
I still have doubts and fears. I’m still furious about all the years I spent believing he didn’t care, and I’m scared to let myself see it differently.
But as he sets me so carefully on the passenger seat, as if I’m precious to him—which is the way he’s always treated me—hope begins to replace all that wariness.
When he climbs in beside me, cupping my jaw, then leaning over to press a quiet kiss to my mouth, I nearly believe it’s real.
He carries me into the kitchen, where one of the staff helps him locate alcohol wipes and bandages.
He’s just torn open a wipe when Kelsey enters the kitchen with the widest grin on her face, and pulls the door shut behind her. “Are you fucking kidding me?” she shouts, throwing her arms around me. “I can’t believe this was under my nose all along. So what’s the plan?”
Elijah frowns at her, though his mouth twitches. “I’m a thirty-five-year-old man figuring things out with my twenty-nine year old girlfriend and this doesn’t concern you.”
Kelsey laughs. “Fuck off, Elijah.” She pushes him out of the way to look at my foot. “He’s salty because Mom and I were talking and I told him it didn’t concern him, except now it sort of does.”
“Move,” Elijah says, shoving her gently. I smile—in some ways, the two of them are still ages seven and twelve. He sticks the bandage to my foot. “How does it now concern me?”
Kelsey bites her lip. “Because we were discussing my pregnancy and—”
Elijah’s eyes widen. “What?”
“I’m pregnant,” Kelsey says, her eyes glimmering with tears.
“Hawk’s relocating his business to New Orleans, and this plan we had—to go back and forth from New Orleans to St. Samuel’s—just isn’t going to work with a newborn.
And Mom wants to move here, but she didn’t want to abandon you in Oak Bluff. ”
He shakes his head. “Abandon me?”
Kelsey shrugs. “Your business is there, so she assumed you wouldn’t want to leave. She was worried you’d be lonely, so she’s been waffling about it all week. That’s what we were arguing about.”
I jump down from the counter. Elijah pulls me tight to his chest, but I get the feeling I’m the one supporting him rather than the reverse. “But—” he says hoarsely. “Mom loves the beach house. All her friends are there.”
Kelsey glances over her shoulder as voices rise on the other side of the door. “She loves New Orleans too. And she wants to be near her grandkids.”
Elijah turns me toward him. “You know what this means, right?” he asks, his voice nearly mute with shock. “It means I can move.”
It means we don’t have to give up all the things we thought we’d have to give up.
We are still smiling at each other as Kelsey opens the kitchen door. “You can come in now, weirdos. You were making so much noise.”
Hawk, Judy, and Mrs. Cabot all enter.
Judy comes over first, pulling me away from her son and turning me to face her. “I had no idea,” she says, tears running down her face. “I had no idea you two wanted to be together.”
I smile. “To be fair, I had no idea either.” I’m not a hugger, but Judy is, and I sort of want a hug, just this once, so I wrap my arms around her.
When she steps backward, Mrs. Cabot clears her throat. For the first time in my life, she is not scowling at me. “I suppose you can call me Carol. And your jokes about Christopher Columbus won’t seem so funny once your kids have Cabot DNA.”
The smile she is currently fighting, I realize, is a little lopsided like her grandson’s.
“So what happens now?” Kelsey asks breathlessly, looking between me and her brother. “You guys are moving in together in Boston?”
“If Easton decides she wants to stay in Boston, then yes,” says Elijah firmly, and gives me a look. “None of this bullshit about how you like your space.”
I laugh. I can’t see myself needing any space from him, to be honest. “We’ll figure it out,” I reply. “But I have no idea how breaking up with Thomas is going to affect everything next year.” Even if the funding issue is sorted, no one is going to be quite as warm toward me as they once were.
“If they give you any problems, let us know,” Hawk says. “No matter how much Thomas matters to the university, I know people who matter more.”
Kelsey kisses his cheek. “I knew all that money and power would come in handy eventually.”
Eventually, everyone heads outside to the after-party, but Elijah remains in the kitchen with me while I make one last call.
I’m surprised when my dad answers. He’s at the bar and it’s loud, but he says, “Hang on,” and walks outside.
“Elijah told me everything,” I say.
On the other end of the line, I hear a South Carolina silence, the kind that isn’t silent at all: the crickets and cicadas are a cacophony. I will miss it. “Oh,” he finally says.
I have no idea what to say because I’m not entirely sure why I’m calling. He did something for me, and I appreciate it, but that doesn’t make up for the past. Even if he wasn’t as bad as Kevin and Sean, he didn’t do a lot to stop them when we were growing up either.
“I guess,” I say, swallowing as my voice starts to crack, “I don’t understand. You threw a remote at my face two weeks ago. You’ve hit me more times than I can count. Why did you suddenly decide to intervene?”
I half expect him to yell at me or hang up the phone, but he does neither.
“I threw the remote because I was trying to get you out of the fucking room before Kevin made things worse. There was probably a better way to do it, but, you know, I drink too much. I make a lot of mistakes. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you.
I intervened because I didn’t want to see you end up like your brothers.
So even if I failed you in every other way, I didn’t fail in that one. ”
It’s not an apology, but I never expected one from him—apologies are not in his makeup. So, again, what did I want, in making this call?
I suppose I mostly just want to say goodbye.
Because even if I’d have risked going down there before, I won’t now—Elijah isn’t going to stand for remotes thrown at my face or threats made to my career, and the way he’d respond to those things could be ruinous.
I might have been willing to let myself get dragged down, but I will never let him get dragged down with me.
“Elijah’s planning to move with me. Either to Boston or wherever I go after this next year, so I doubt I’ll be back there much.”
“Don’t come back,” he whispers. “Ever.”
My eyes sting. I brush at them. “Okay.”
There’s a long moment of silence. The crickets on his end seem to rise up to fill the void.
“Don’t know if I ever told you this,” he says, “but I won the Beaufort science fair. Ninth grade. I wanted to be an astronaut.”
He never told me. He locked up his past and any hopes he once had for his own life and pretended they didn’t exist.
“I didn’t know.”
“I never amounted to anything,” he says, “but I’ve amounted to something through you, and that’s probably more than I deserve. Take care, kiddo.”
A part of me still feels as if there’s some better solution here.
That if I were smarter, or a better daughter, I’d force him into rehab and clean up my brothers’ shit while I was at it, but no.
..In life, there are problems that remain thorny, that you will never tie up with a bow.
My dad and my brothers are among them, and I’m done trying.
He hangs up to return to his bar.
And I return to Elijah and the big, bright future I never thought we’d get.