Chapter 7
Eight Years Ago
C HLOE STOOD ON THE cliffs near her home. This stretch of the California coast was so wild and untamed that she felt free to be any version of herself she desired. As a child, she pretended to be an explorer, a captured princess, a lost bird, the ocean tides crashing with varying intensity seeming to encourage changing roles. It used to be her favorite spot, but she wondered whether she’d ever feel safe in this place again.
Her brother’s voice echoed in her head, his childhood stutter returning as he stumbled out words about a car accident. Ever since that moment one week ago, Chloe felt like it was impossible to take full breaths.
As she stood on the high overlook of the Pacific Ocean, she forced herself to breathe the air of a world in which her parents were no longer alive.
Her parents loved their dog, a rescue puppy that had the face of a German shepherd and the body of a beagle. They took her everywhere, on car rides especially. A sudden jump. That’s what the police officer described. The dog must have jumped, startling her father, who swerved across three lanes of traffic. They didn’t suffer, the officer said. They died instantly.
Chloe knew it was supposed to bring comfort, but it didn’t. To be alive one moment and gone the next. No time to think about who and what mattered in life. No time to reflect on a well-loved and well-lived life. Chloe couldn’t imagine anything more tragic.
Last week, Chloe had been complaining about finals, and how much she was going to miss everyone over the summer. Wyatt was going to be interning at the town paper, and Sloane and Marianne were working in the alumni office along with Alden and Luke. Sloane told Chloe that she could get a job too. Five students seemed like too many students to staff a tiny office and make phone calls asking for donations, but somehow Chloe knew Sloane could make it happen. But Chloe’s parents convinced her to spend the summer in California, promising road trips up the coast visiting different galleries and introducing her to all of their local artist friends. As much as Chloe loved campus, she needed the recharge of her parents and a summer without humidity.
It was the end of sophomore year. And next summer, the year before graduation, would be the time to focus on internships and their future. This summer, her parents had argued, was the summer to play.
They had called her together. Chloe’s parents always did that, each speaking on the phone over each other, excited to tell her about tiny mundane details of their day. They were describing a new restaurant in town when Chloe cut them off. She said she needed to get back to studying. But she would see them next week, she had said. Her mother was describing a new granola she’d discovered at the farmers market. She’d pick some up when Chloe was home. Chloe had mumbled, “Sounds good,” and hung up the phone. Those were the last words they spoke. Maybe she said, “You too” when her parents said, “We love you” as the phone disconnected.
Did it matter that Chloe got to read her notes on Surrealist painters one more time? Not when she could have heard about her mother’s latest knitting project. Or the vintage Ford her father was restoring. Or the watercress salad they ate at lunch. Instead, Chloe prepared for her exams while her parents took a spontaneous drive down the coast. For the first time in her life, Chloe wished they were less adventurous. Boring, but still alive.
She’d been in bed with Luke when her phone rang. She saw her brother’s number and ignored the call. But when he called back, once and then twice more, she answered, pulling on Luke’s T-shirt and swinging her feet over the edge of the bed. Luke was kissing her shoulder, slipping his arm around her waist, fingers trailing lower, trying to distract her. It was working, her mind barely registering her brother’s voice. But when her body froze, when she swatted away Luke’s hand and screamed into the phone, Luke wasn’t sure what to do. After the moment when Chloe’s brother relayed the horrifying news, Chloe knew nothing would ever be the same again.
As she stood on the cliffs in Monterey, her fingers rubbed back and forth over the necklace her mother had given her on her sixteenth birthday. Chloe needed to get back inside the house to help her brother, but all she really wanted was a few quiet moments to imagine that her parents were still alive.
Chloe felt Luke’s presence before he said a word. As he extended his steady arms, she felt herself collapsing into his chest. From the moment she had received her brother’s call to this moment before the funeral, Luke had barely left Chloe’s side. She never asked. He just showed up.
“Sorry I skipped out of there,” Chloe said.
“You aren’t obligated to do anything, Chloe,” Luke whispered.
Chloe fidgeted with the hem of her dress. A thread had come loose and she pulled, making the whole thing unravel. When she looked down, she saw that half of the bottom had come undone. It looked as ragged as she felt.
“I’m ready to go inside,” Chloe said.
“Are you sure? We can stay out here all afternoon.”
“I don’t want to leave Ezra alone,” Chloe said. But she knew her older brother wasn’t really alone. Ezra was married, and their newborn had been a welcome source of distraction over the last week. It was the longest stretch of time Chloe had spent with her nephew since he was born while she was away at school. Ezra lived only twenty minutes away from her parents, and his wife seemed more comfortable in Chloe’s childhood home than she did.
There were little things that were different. Her mother had changed the pillows on the living room sofa. The pantry was reorganized, and Chloe couldn’t find the oatmeal. It was in a drawer now, Ezra’s wife showed her. It was a strange, untethered feeling she’d experienced all week. Tiny differences in a house shouldn’t matter because home was wherever her parents were. Except they were gone. And in their absence, each tiny difference made Chloe feel like there was no place she now belonged.
“Let’s go back inside,” Chloe said, walking up the pathway toward her parents’ house. But halfway up the steps, she stopped.
She stared at the four people approaching, her eyes narrowing at the mirage. But when she looked at Luke, who smiled sheepishly and shrugged, and then back to the faces approaching, she felt overwhelmed by emotion.
Sloane, Alden, Marianne, and Wyatt were waiting at the top of the stairs. And when Chloe finally got over her shock and climbed to join them, she was immediately surrounded and hugged so tightly that it muffled her tears.
“What are you guys doing here?” Chloe stuttered.
“We want to be here for you,” Sloane said.
“We insisted,” Marianne added.
Chloe looked at Luke, her face full of questions.
“They want to help” was Luke’s simple answer.
Chloe had told her friends to stay at Mayfield. It seemed like too much hassle for four people to fly across the country for two strangers’ funerals.
“You’re missing finals,” Chloe tried to argue.
“You’re more important than all of that.” Alden said the words, but Chloe knew it wasn’t true. Alden obsessed over every single quiz grade. She couldn’t imagine him bailing on finals.
“Sloane got us all extensions,” Wyatt explained.
Chloe laughed. For the first time in a week, she laughed at the undeniable negotiating power of her friend. “Of course she did.”
“We still would have come,” Marianne added. “We’re your family too.”
Most friendships are fun. Parties and inside jokes and brunch discussions of bad outfits over poorly poached eggs. Those friendships are important, but many times, friendships never move below that joyful surface.
In that moment, when they showed up for Chloe, it moved their friendship deeper. Because when she walked into her childhood home, wrapped in the five of them, she didn’t feel so alone.
The next few days were a blur. Somehow, Sloane and Ezra’s wife coordinated food for everyone. Alden helped Ezra access passwords and login information for her parents’ accounts on her dad’s laptop. Marianne was a baby whisperer, never once complaining even when she was covered in spit-up. Wyatt sat down with Chloe and helped her with the obituary. It was a task Chloe hadn’t anticipated being so difficult, but reducing two whole lives into two simple paragraphs seemed impossible. Wyatt sat as Chloe talked for hours about her parents and everything she thought the world should know about them. And somehow, Wyatt managed to write the most beautiful words about people he’d never met. When Ezra broke down in tears reading the obituary, Chloe was even more grateful to have Wyatt in her life.
Luke did everything else. Ezra and Chloe struggled with the logistics; the list of tasks seemed overwhelming for the siblings. But Luke handled all of it. Finding the will, contacting the insurance company and the bank, and filing all the offensive paperwork the federal government required to prove the people you love most are actually dead. Luke was a college student. He shouldn’t have known how to handle a situation no one is prepared for. And yet he called his mother to ask all the legal questions about notifying Social Security and filing for a death certificate. He handled all the phone calls from people expressing condolences, sentiments Chloe couldn’t bear to hear. Luke didn’t even know these people, and yet he listened as they grieved and said all of the things. He kept a list of who sent flowers and even wrote thank-you notes, something Chloe would have forgotten even if she was able to hold a pen without crying.
He gave Chloe a list each morning of things she needed to do and things he was going to handle, and then at night he studied for his exams because they still had to finish their sophomore year.
They all stayed for an entire week. Chloe barely remembered those days, except she knew her friends were by her side.
“You should transfer,” Ezra said once everyone had left and they were back in an empty house. Chloe didn’t have to return for finals. Her professors said they would give her a grade based on her work earlier in the semester. “You can live in Mom and Dad’s house,” Ezra said.
Chloe shook her head. She knew that her parents would want Ezra to raise his family in this home. No matter what the will said, there was no way she was going to sell a place that meant so much so that she could split money she didn’t need with her brother.
It turned out her parents had life insurance that would cover the rest of her college tuition and give her a cushion better than most new graduates had. To Chloe, the house was an extra she didn’t need. But having her brother live in this place, so that the memories could stay in their family, was something she desperately wanted.
“You and Jillian and the baby are going to move here. You’re going to raise that adorable hellion in the same backyard we played in, not some rental house across town.”
“We don’t need this much space,” Ezra tried to argue, but it was pointless. Chloe could tell that Ezra wanted it just as much as she did. “You could live here with us.”
Chloe shook her head. “I love you. But I can’t wedge my life into yours.”
“You need family, Chloe. You can’t go back to that school all by yourself.”
“I’m not. I have my friends,” Chloe said.
It took some convincing, but eventually Ezra got on board with Chloe’s return to Mayfield. Chloe suspected that Jillian had played a role, persuading her husband that living with a baby was not an ideal situation for a college student.
When Chloe called Sloane and asked if she could get her a summer job in the alumni office, Sloane squealed and said, “Consider it done.”
When Chloe came back to campus that June, she was a mess. There were weeks when she struggled to get out of bed. But Sloane was there each morning. Some days she pushed, forcing Chloe to put on clothes and walk outside. Some days she sat at the end of the bed so Chloe wasn’t alone. In those early, heady days of grief when most people flee because it is uncomfortable to be surrounded by so much pain, Sloane showed up. She pulled Chloe out.
And when Chloe was finally able to wake up on her own, to start a day, Marianne was there to help her fill it. They got very into adult coloring books. There was something almost meditative about filling in the designs as they monitored the alumni office phones. And doing it together made Chloe feel less alone.
Chloe pushed Luke away. But he never left. For most of that summer, Chloe told Luke she wanted to be alone. She cried too often, at the most inopportune times—when she saw a family taking a campus tour, when she saw her father’s favorite pen in the campus bookstore, when she burned toast in the cafeteria, a trait directly inherited from her mother.
Her relationship with Luke still felt too young and too new for him to witness these emotions. She built a wall around her heart and her body and locked him out.
Anyone else would have given up. There’s only so much distance young love can take. But Luke kept coming back. He sat outside her dorm door for two hours every night, just to be there until she fell asleep. In their year of dating, he’d had a few phone calls with Chloe’s dad, mostly leading up to parent visits and how the school’s football season was going. So Luke wrote down every word he could remember about those conversations. And he’d slip those stories under Chloe’s door so she could read about other people’s memories of the parents she loved.
Luke called Ezra every afternoon to update him on how Chloe was doing. And he sent a birthday present to Ezra’s wife Jillian, an occasion Chloe forgot about and then panicked.
But mostly, he was there for Chloe. When she needed him and when she didn’t. He made himself available, without expectations and without questions. Outside of the hours he was at work, he was otherwise within eyesight of Chloe. If she wanted to talk to him. To hug him. To yell at him because the anger at having her parents stolen sometimes diverted to whoever was closest. Luke was there. He had started telling Chloe he loved her in March. But it wasn’t until the end of that summer, a summer filled with so much heartache, that Chloe knew he really did.
And by fall, when Chloe was ready to cry herself to sleep on Luke’s chest instead of in an empty bed, he was still there.