22. Chapter 22 Alex
The fire turned everything orange.
Faces, snow, the steam rising off six mugs of hot chocolate that Noah had made on the cabin stove with actual milk because Priya told him the water version was unacceptable.
The stone pit threw heat in a circle and we sat inside it, six chairs pulled close, and beyond the circle the snow was blue in the dark and the lake was a flat black line and the cold pressed in from every direction but couldn't quite reach us.
Liam's hand was on my leg. His thumb resting on the inside of my knee, warm through my jeans. I kept looking at it. His knuckles. The calluses across his palm from the oar and the marina and twenty years of working with his hands. I wanted to pick it up and hold it against my face.
Remy was talking to Noah about transit systems. I didn't know how they'd gotten there — something about Noah's commute to campus, and Remy had opinions, and now he was drawing an imaginary map on his knee with his finger explaining why the bus route through Noah's neighborhood was designed wrong.
"The transfer point is a fifteen-minute walk from the station," Remy said. "That's not a connection. That's a punishment."
"I just drive," Noah said.
"That's because the system failed you. You shouldn't have to drive."
"I like driving."
"Nobody likes driving. People like not waiting for a bus in the rain."
Ethan was showing Priya something on his phone — footage from the fall, the joint program stuff, camera low along the water.
She was leaning in, asking questions about shot composition the way she asked questions about everything, precisely, with follow-ups that made Ethan pause and think before answering.
They looked like two people who'd known each other for years instead of hours.
Snow started. Not heavy — small flakes, dry, catching the firelight like sparks going the wrong direction.
They landed on Liam's hair and on the shoulders of Remy's denim jacket and on the blanket Priya had pulled across her lap.
The world got quieter the way it does when it snows.
Smaller. Like the lake and the trees and the dark had pulled in close to listen.
I almost said it.
On the ice. His face right there, his eyes on mine, and the word had been in my mouth and I'd swallowed it. Replaced it with something safe. Something true, but smaller.
His hand was on my leg and the fire was warm, and these people had driven hours to sit in the cold with us, and I should have been able to say it. The simplest sentence in the language.
But what if I say it and he leaves?
I just watched everything I thought was permanent disappear in one night. The trust, the house, the name, the family — all of it conditional, all of it revocable, all of it gone. And now I was sitting here with no tuition and no registration and no idea what January looked like.
What if I put the last thing I have into his hands and he gives it back?
Then I have nothing. Not the family I was born into, and not the person I chose.
So I didn't say it. Not because I didn't mean it. Because I meant it so much that losing it would be the one thing I couldn't come back from.
"Alex." Remy's voice. I looked up. He was watching me from his chair, feet tucked up, mug in both hands. "Did you ever think about rowing for Riverside?"
The question landed strangely. "What?"
"Riverside. If the Kingswell thing doesn't work out. Transfer. We'd just need someone to replace Braden, and we've already got the quad."
I stared at him. I hadn't thought about it. Not once. The whole time I'd been doing math on Kingswell's tuition, it hadn't occurred to me that there was another school on the same river.
"I didn't think of that," I said.
Liam looked at me, his eyes lit up.
"I don't even know how I'd pay for tuition."
Noah leaned back in his chair. "Well, Liam doesn't pay tuition."
Everyone looked at him.
"What? He doesn't. Full ride."
Liam threw a marshmallow at him. It hit Noah in the chest and fell into his mug. Priya laughed and Remy shook his head, and the moment broke open into something warm and easy, and Liam's hand squeezed my knee once, gently, and I covered it with mine and held on.
"We'll figure something out," he said, eyes catching mine.
The snow kept falling. The fire kept burning. And I loved him. I loved him and I couldn't say it.
***
I told them I was going to grab coffee.
Seven-thirty in the morning. Everyone still half-asleep in the cabin.
Noah under a blanket on the couch, Priya in the kitchen with her hands around a mug of the terrible coffeemaker coffee, Remy in his chair by the window already looking at footage on his phone.
Ethan wasn't up yet. Liam was in the bedroom, still warm, the covers pulled to his chin.
"The place on Route 4 has good stuff," Liam said. His voice was thick with sleep. "Get me a large black."
"Anyone else?"
Orders came from around the cabin. Noah wanted a latte. Priya wanted Earl Grey. Remy said "Anything with caffeine" without looking up.
"Twenty minutes," I said.
Liam rolled over. "Take the car."
"Yeah."
I took the keys off the counter. Put on my coat and walked out into the cold. The snow from last night was still on the ground, and the sky was flat and gray, and the lake was frozen and silent.
I got into the car. Started the engine. Pulled out of the gravel lot and turned left onto the lake road.
The coffee shop was right. Route 4.
I turned left.
Peninsula Point was fourteen minutes from the south shore. The houses got bigger at the bend. Longer driveways, hedges, gates. The Caldwell place. The Lockwood place. Then came the turn for the private road, the trees opening up, and the house.
Stone and glass. Jutting over the water as if it were making a point. Every window was dark except the kitchen.
I parked in the gravel circle. Cut the engine. Sat there.
I hadn't planned what to say. I hadn't rehearsed anything. I'd been lying in bed at three in the morning with Liam's arm across my chest, knowing I had to come here one more time, and the knowing was the plan.
I got out. Walked to the door. Didn't knock. This had been my house a week ago. The handle was cold. The door opened.
The foyer smelled the way it always smelled. Floor polish and cold stone and the faint eucalyptus from the diffuser my mother kept by the stairs. The house was quiet, but not peaceful. It was filled with dread.
I walked toward the kitchen. My shoes on the hardwood. The family photos on the wall, the ones my mother had chosen. Sailing. Christmas. My father and I at a regatta when I was twelve, his hand on my shoulder, both of us squinting into the sun. I looked happy in that photo.
I think I was.
They were at the dining table. My father at the head, my mother to his left. Coffee, the Times folded beside his plate, eggs and toast. The morning choreography of a marriage that ran on schedule.
My mother saw me first.
Her face opened. Something moved through it fast, hope and fear tangled together. She set her coffee cup down. Her hands were shaking.
"Alex."
My father looked up from the paper. His face didn't open. It closed. The jaw set, the eyes narrowed, the posture straightening.
"Alexander. Have you changed your mind?"
I didn't look at him. I looked at my mother.
"Mom."
"Alex, honey—"
"How are you going to let him do this?"
She didn't answer. Her hands were in her lap. She was wearing the blue cardigan she wore every morning, her hair down, and she looked tired in a way that makeup hadn't fixed.
"Don't you love me?"
"Of course I love you. Of course I—"
"Then how are you sitting here?"
"Alexander," my father said. "If you've come to have a conversation, sit down. If you've come to make a scene—"
"I'm not talking to you."
The room went quiet. My father's hand stilled on his coffee cup.
I kept looking at my mother. "I talked to James."
Her face changed.
"I know what he went through. Alone, without support. And none of you cared enough to pick up the phone." I paused. "Is that what I'm going to be?"
My mother's eyes started to tear up.
"Is that what I'm going to be, Mom?"
"That's enough," my father said.
I looked at him. Finally. His face was composed. My grandfather's Patek on his wrist.
"Why can't you just say what this is?" I said. "Forget the trust. Forget the tuition. Forget the enrollment package. Say what this actually is."
"This is about your future, Alexander. It's always been—"
"This is about me being gay."
The word landed on the table.
"This is about Liam. This has always been about that. I'm your gay son and you can't say it. You've made up all of this stuff. All of it, just because you can't say it."
My father's jaw worked. His hands were flat on the table.
"I could be gay and follow every plan you've ever made for me.
Every single one. I could row for Kingswell, graduate with honors, go to law school, run your fund, marry a man and raise kids with your last name.
I could do all of it. But you've made it one or the other.
Gay or a Harrington. And that's your choice. Not mine."
The room was silent.
"I'm choosing myself over you. I already did. I'm telling you again so you hear it."
My father didn't speak.
I looked at my mother. "So, what are you going to do?"
She was crying. Her shoulders shaking, her hands pressed together in her lap, tears running down her face onto the blue cardigan.
She looked at me, and I saw every year of her marriage in her face.
The accommodations. The concessions. The slow trade of herself for this house and this life and this man.
"I'm sorry," she said.
I waited, but nothing else came. That was it.
Not I love you. Not I'll talk to him. Not come home.
I'm sorry.
I stood there. The dining room. The table where I'd eaten hundreds of meals. The windows looking out over the frozen lake.
I didn't answer her.
That was it.
I turned and walked out of the dining room. Down the hall. Past the photos. Into the den.
"Alexander, where are you —?"
The den was dark. Wood-paneled walls, leather chairs, the shelves lined with things my father kept because they proved something. First editions. Awards. Framed letters. And on the third shelf, between a crystal decanter and a photo of my father shaking hands with the governor, a trophy.
I stopped.
There it was the IRA Championship, 1967. Riverside State University.
I picked it up. I didn't think about it.
I didn't calculate or weigh the options or run the scenario forward.
I picked it up because it was Riverside's, not my father's.
Because it belonged to Riverside, not to this house.
And because I didn't want a single thing connected to Liam or his school sitting on a shelf in a room where my father poured scotch and congratulated himself.
A Christmas gift. Late, but right.
I held it and walked back down the hall.
My parents were both standing when I came back into the dining room. My mother's face was wet and broken. My father, with his napkin still in his hand, his composure cracking because he hadn't planned for this. He hadn't planned for the version of me that walked into rooms and took things.
I held up the trophy. "And this is not yours," I said.
I walked out the front door. It closed behind me. The cold hit my face, and the gravel crunched under my feet, and I got in the car and put the trophy on the passenger seat and sat there with my hands on the wheel.
The kitchen light was still on. No one came to the door.
I looked at the trophy. My hands were shaking.
My chest was tight, and my eyes were burning, and I felt relieved and hurt and scared and something else I couldn't name, something close to awe.
Because I hadn't planned that. Any of it.
Not the speech, not the trophy, not walking into the den without knowing what I was going to do until I was already doing it.
That was the most impulsive thing I'd ever done in my life. I spent twenty years calculating every move in that house, and I'd just walked in and taken something off a shelf because it didn't belong to them, and neither did I.
I started the engine. Backed down the driveway. Hit the lake road south.
My phone buzzed on the seat next to the trophy.
Liam
Where are you?