Chapter Six
Six
“Did you run here?”
My heartbeat in my ears mostly drowned out Dex’s question. I shuffled forward, eyes locked on my sister, and wrapped my arms around her, tucking her head under my chin.
“Ew. Why?” she said, trying to squirm out of my grasp. I held on tighter.
“You can’t do that,” I whispered, voice catching. Phoebe went still. “I have to know where you are. You can’t just disappear.”
I breathed in the smell of her coconut shampoo and the panic started to subside. The stark silence of the room caught me off-guard. No air-conditioning.
“Sorry,” Dex said quietly. I glanced at him as Phoebe resumed her attempts to wiggle out of my hug.
His expression was solemn, arms at his sides, his hair slightly less Einstein-ish, as if he’d attempted to tame it since I walked in.
“I thought—I assumed you knew she was here. When she mentioned you didn’t, I had Mary call you. ”
I mouthed the words Thank you. I didn’t trust myself not to burst into tears and I wasn’t about to cry in front of this guy again.
“It’s not a big deal,” Phoebe mumbled, successfully extracting herself from my arms. I resisted the urge to brush a pink piece of hair out of her face. “Can we forget about the momentary panic? We have exciting news.”
My eyes shot back to Dex. “ ‘We’?”
He shook his head. Phoebe hopped to her feet, her energy vibrating the room. “I found Catalina,” she declared, that bright grin appearing once again. I nearly returned the gesture before her announcement struck me somewhere in the throat.
“You what?”
“Remember when I said I wouldn’t create a burner account to follow her on Insta because it was weird?
Well, I did it anyway.” I sank into the seat she’d inhabited moments earlier, my legs on the verge of giving out.
I was pretty sure Phoebe’s smile was the only thing keeping me conscious.
“And last week, she posted this picture with a friend and tagged the restaurant they were at,” she continued, gesturing wildly, the same way I did mid-rant.
“Bend, Oregon. I checked a few more geotags from over the last year, and they’re all there. She moved to Oregon.”
“I told you,” Dex said with a surprising level of patience, “this is not new information.”
“It is to me.”
“What—” The word slipped out unwittingly and I cut myself off, trying to catch up. “What does this have to do with anything? I don’t understand.”
“You said Dex told you he wasn’t gonna send the letter,” Phoebe said. “So, I obviously had to come here and tell him he’s wrong.”
I let out a soft groan, too exhausted to get into this. It was too big a conversation to have under the circumstances. A week ago, I might’ve assumed my sister was old enough to respect other people’s business, but hey, I’d been wrong about a lot of things lately.
“It’s fine.” Phoebe’s hands found my shoulders and when I met her electric gaze my own energy seemed to lift from the proximity. “I’m right. He knows I’m right. He said so. But it’s not enough to just send it at this point, right?”
I shook my head and a drop of rain fell from my eyelashes. “I’m not following. This is all going over my head.”
“He needs to give her the letter,” she explained, no less enthusiastic in the face of my confusion. “And he needs to apologize. In person.”
“What does this have to do with us?”
“Good question,” Dex muttered.
Phoebe spun to face him. “It has everything to do with us and you know it. We spent like an hour talking about it.”
My mind pushed hard to keep up, snagging briefly on that time frame; I couldn’t believe Dex humored my sister for an hour and the building was still standing.
“Vi,” Phoebe said, tearing my attention back to her. The grin faded, but fireworks burst in her eyes. “Dex is going to Oregon to see Catalina. We should go with him.”
My lips pulled into a smile against my will. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Your sister has it all figured out,” Dex said, deadpan, and whatever emotion was swirling ominously through my chest weakened.
“Figured what out?”
“Hear me out,” Phoebe said. Her eyes locked on me, determined.
I’d seen that look before. A blond toddler taking a running leap into an in-ground pool; an eight-year-old reaching for the scariest book in the horror section at Barnes the only indication this meant anything to him were his clenched fists.
“How do you live with yourself?” Phoebe added, piling on in that voice she used when issuing a challenge. As if this was a game, not some life-altering fork in the road.
“I live with myself just fine,” Dex said. “I haven’t completely lost myself in entertaining the every whim of a child.”
His accusation hit hard. He meant it to.
It was my worst fear, spoken aloud: I had accepted the role of Phoebe’s guardian without taking into account the work and wisdom it takes to raise a child, and in my failure, I’d overcompensated.
I let her run wild. We were both flailing, searching for something solid to hang on to, because I had no idea what I was doing.
You didn’t even take time to consider the options, Shawn had said two days after the accident. But Phoebe and I were crushed and we needed each other—there were no other options.
I felt Phoebe look at me, but I couldn’t bring myself to see her reaction to Dex’s words. My eyes stung and everything in my body grew heavy; I wanted to lie on the floor and cry. I’d done everything wrong. My own grief muddled the clarity of the situation and now, here we were. Drowning.
How am I supposed to take care of a kid when I can barely take care of myself?
The question had been haunting me for nine months and I still didn’t have a good enough answer.
As gutting as it was to hear Dex’s words out loud, something else emerged with that pain—relief.
It had been so long since anyone spoke to me with unabashed honesty.
Phoebe held so much in. Arden’s compulsive sugarcoating nearly gave me a cavity.
Shawn was the last one to look me in the eyes and say what he felt, even though it hurt us both.
Dex saw my fragility, my failure, and refused to go easy on me. Part of me wanted him to keep talking. To hurt me more, until I felt like me again.
I placed my hand on Phoebe’s shoulder and murmured, “Let’s go.”
“No!” she cried. “That’s what he wants. He’s only insulting us so we’ll leave and he’ll be off the hook.”