23. Chapter 23 Liam
He had been gone too long.
Eight-twenty. Remy was in his chair by the window.
Ethan was still asleep. Priya was reading something on her phone at the kitchen table with her glasses on.
Outside, the snow from last night covered the yard and the fire pit and the Adirondack chairs and the frozen lake beyond. The sky was the color of nothing.
Eight-thirty. I picked up my phone. Put it down. Picked it up again.
Liam
Where are you?
I sent it and stared at the screen, and the screen stared back. Three dots. Then nothing. Then three dots again.
Alex
Line was long. Coming.
I put the phone on my chest. Closed my eyes. Told myself it was fine. But the telling didn't work because my body already knew something my brain hadn't caught up to. That feeling in my stomach. The one that starts low and spreads. Not nausea. Dread.
The car pulled into the gravel lot at eight-forty. I heard the engine cut. The door open and close. His footsteps on the porch, the cabin door, the cold air coming in with him.
"Coffee's here," Alex said.
He was smiling. He was holding a cardboard carrier with six cups and he was smiling and his voice was normal and he handed Noah his latte and Priya her Earl Grey and Remy his whatever-has-caffeine, and then he came to the couch and handed me my large black and sat down next to me.
And I knew.
I knew the way you know when someone's breathing is wrong.
The way I'd known in bed on Christmas morning when his jaw was working and his eyes were doing math on the ceiling.
His smile was too even. His hands were too steady.
He was performing calm, and I'd been watching Alex Harrington perform calm since the day I met him, and the performance always meant the same thing.
Something happened, and he was deciding how much of it to show me.
"Thanks," I said. I took the coffee. Our fingers touched on the cup, and his were cold, colder than a ten-minute drive would explain, and he pulled his hand back too fast.
"Yeah."
He sat next to me. Put his head on my shoulder. And his body was tight against mine, wound up, vibrating with something he was holding down, and I put my arm around him because that's what I do, that's what my body does when his body is next to mine, but the dread didn't go away. It got louder.
I gave him ten minutes.
Ten minutes of the cabin waking up around us. Ethan stumbling out in sweatpants. Noah making toast. Priya correcting Noah's toast technique. Remy not moving from his chair. The sounds of people being normal in a small space, and Alex beside me with his coffee getting cold in his hands.
"Hey," I said. Low. Just for him. "Come outside with me."
He looked at me. I watched his face do the thing where he ran the options, calculated the cost, and decided whether to let me in or keep the wall up. Then he nodded.
The back deck was cold. Snow on the railing, snow on the steps, our breath coming in clouds. The lake was flat and frozen, and the trees along the shore were bare and black against the gray sky. I leaned against the railing. He stood next to me. Both of us holding coffee we weren't drinking.
"What's going on?" I said.
"Nothing."
"Alex."
"It's nothing, I just." He stopped. Took a breath. "I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You've been nervous since you walked in." I set my coffee on the railing. "Talk to me. Whatever it is."
His mouth opened. Closed. He was looking at the lake, not at me, and his jaw was doing the thing and his hands were tight on his cup and I could see it happening in real time. The control slipping. The walls cracking. Whatever he was holding down was coming up whether he wanted it to or not.
"I." He stopped again. Swallowed. His eyes were wet. "I did something. This morning."
"Okay."
"I didn't go to the coffee shop. I mean I did, but I didn't. I went somewhere else first."
My stomach dropped. I didn't know why yet. I just felt it fall.
"Where?"
"I went." His voice cracked. He pressed his hand over his mouth for a second. His shoulders were shaking. "I went to my parents' house."
Everything stopped.
"You went to Peninsula Point?"
"Yes."
"This morning."
"I had to, Liam. I had to see her. I had to know if she would." He was stuttering now, tripping over the words, his voice breaking apart. "I needed to know if she'd take me back."
Take me back.
I heard take me back, and it landed on every scar I had, every one, the ones from when my dad walked out and the ones from the first time Alex walked away and the ones I'd been stitching shut for months telling myself this time was different, he was different; we were different.
"You wanted to go back," I said.
"No, that's not what I—"
"You went to your parents' house to see if they'd take you back."
"Liam, listen to me—"
"I knew it." My voice came out wrong. Too loud. Too raw. I stepped away from the railing. Away from him. "I knew this was going to happen."
"That's not what I said—"
"You said take me back. That's what you said. You went there because you want to go back."
He was crying now. Tears on his face, his hands out in front of him, reaching for me. "No. No, Liam, please. I said her. I said if she would take me back. My mom. Just my mom."
But I couldn't hear him. I could hear the words, but they weren't landing because the thing inside me was louder, the thing that had been waiting since the first day we picked him up.
This is what happens. People like him don't stay with people like me.
"You saw how I live," I said. My voice was shaking. I hated that it was shaking. "You've been sleeping in my bed for two weeks. You saw the house. You saw the kitchen and my mom working doubles. You saw all of it, and you had to go back there."
"That has nothing to do with—"
"It has everything to do with it, Alex. Everything." I turned away from him. "Your dad waves some money and you just. You go running back."
"He didn't wave anything. I went there to—"
I turned back to him. "You could've told me. But you didn't tell me. You lied to me."
He flinched. I saw it. The word lied hit him, and he flinched and I wanted to take it back, and I also wanted to say it again because it was true. He'd looked me in the face and said, coffee.
"You're right," he said. His voice was small. "I should have told you. I was scared."
"Scared of what?"
"Scared of this. Scared of exactly this. I knew you'd think I was going back to him, and that's not what happened, Liam, please—"
"Then why didn't you tell me?"
"Because you would have tried to stop me."
"Yeah. I would have."
"And I needed to go."
I stood there on the deck with the cold in my lungs and the gray sky pressing down and looked at him.
He was standing by the railing, crying, his hands at his sides, his coffee abandoned on the snow-covered wood.
He looked like a kid. He looked like me at ten years old, standing in the kitchen, watching my dad's taillights go down the road and knowing, knowing in my body before my brain could form the thought, that he wasn't coming back.
He's going to leave you. Everyone leaves. It's the same story and it never ends differently.
I tried to fight it. I stood there on the deck and I tried to push that thought out of my head because I knew it wasn't fair.
I knew Alex was not my father. I knew this was different.
I could feel the difference in my bones.
But the feeling was bigger than the knowing.
The fear was older than the logic, and it had deeper roots, and it wrapped around my chest and squeezed until I couldn't breathe.
"I can't do this," I said.
His face broke. "Liam. Don't."
"I can't keep doing this. I can't keep waiting for you to decide that this isn't enough."
"You are enough. You've always been—"
"Then why did you go back?"
He opened his mouth. Nothing came out. And in that silence I heard the answer I was afraid of, even though it wasn't the answer he was trying to give. In that silence, I heard everything I'd ever been told about people like me and people like him.
"I already told you."
"I can't do this right now," I said. "I need to not be here right now."
"Liam, please don't walk away—"
"I'm going for a walk."
"Liam."
But I was already moving. Down the deck steps, through the snow in the yard, past the dead fire pit and the Adirondack chairs and the path that led into the trees along the south shore.
I could hear him behind me saying my name, and I kept walking because if I stopped, I was going to say something I couldn't take back, or I was going to fall apart, and both of those things felt like the same thing.
The trail went into the pines. The snow was thinner under the trees, just a dusting over frozen ground, and my boots crunched on it and my breath was loud in my ears and I walked faster, then faster, my hands in fists at my sides, and the trees closed around me and the cabin disappeared behind me and I was alone.
I stopped at a clearing where the trail bent toward the lake. A break in the pines, an opening to the frozen water, the gray sky above. I stood there, my chest heaving and my eyes burning. I put my hands on my knees and tried to breathe.
Stop. Stop it. This is not the same story.
But it felt the same. It felt exactly the same.
The person you love standing in the kitchen telling you they have to go somewhere, and the door closing and the car backing down the drive and the sound of the engine fading and the quiet after.
The quiet that means you weren't enough to make them stay.
He came back. He came back with coffee. He's standing on the deck right now.
I knew that. I knew he had come back. But my dad came back too, for a while.
Came back on weekends. Came back for birthdays.
Came back with promises, and then the weekends got further apart, and the birthdays got shorter, and the promises got lighter until they weighed nothing at all, and then he was gone, and the gone was permanent.
I sat down on a rock at the edge of the clearing.
The cold came through my jeans immediately.
I didn't care. I sat there and looked at the frozen lake and the tears came, finally, the ones I'd been holding since the deck, and I let them come because nobody was here and I didn't have to be strong and I was so tired of being strong.
You are enough.
He'd said it. Right there on the deck. His voice breaking, tears on his face, reaching for me. You are enough.
And I'd walked away from it.
I sat on the rock and cried and the lake didn't care and the trees didn't care and the cold didn't care, and after a while the crying slowed and my breathing evened out and I was just sitting there, empty and quiet, with snow on my shoulders and the taste of salt on my lips.
I didn't know how long I'd been gone. Twenty minutes. Maybe thirty. Long enough for the cold to get into my bones. Long enough for the anger to drain out and leave something worse underneath it.
Shame.
Because I knew, sitting on that rock, that I'd just done the thing I always do.
Someone tries to get close, and I find the reason to run.
Alex tells me something hard and honest, and instead of hearing what he actually said, I hear the version that confirms the story I've been telling myself since I was ten years old.
And then I leave. I leave before they can leave me, because at least that way I'm the one who chose it.
It was at that moment that I realized I was just doing what my dad did.
Fuck.
I shifted on the rock, and something pressed into my thigh.
Hard, small, through the coat pocket. I reached in and my fingers closed around it.
The heron. Glass, warm from my body even in the cold.
I'd been carrying it since Christmas morning.
Six days in my coat pocket, waiting for the right time to give it to him.
I pulled it out. Held it in my palm. Blue-gray glass, the S-curve of the neck, the one leg. My mom's favorite thing in the house. The thing she kept when she threw everything else away. The thing she said was ready to mean something new.
I was sitting on a frozen rock feeling sorry for myself with a gift in my pocket for the person I loved, and he was standing on a deck a quarter mile away waiting for me to come back, and I was doing my dad's trick. The leaving trick. The one I swore I'd never learn.
I closed my hand around the bird. The glass edges pressed into my palm.
He's not leaving you. You're leaving him. Right now. On this rock. You are the one who walked away.
I put my face in my hands. The heron still in my fist, pressing against my cheek, cold now from the air. The trees were quiet around me, and the lake was quiet in front of me, and somewhere behind me, through the pines, back at the cabin, Alex was standing on a deck waiting for me to come back.
The cold bit into my fingers. The trees were quiet around me, and the lake was quiet in front of me, and somewhere behind me, through the pines, back at the cabin, Alex was standing on a deck waiting for me to come back.
I didn't move. Not because I didn't want to. Because I needed another minute to sit with the thing I'd just realized. The thing I'd been running from for two years.
I wasn't afraid Alex would leave me.
I was afraid that I'd never believe he wouldn't.
And that was my problem. Not his.