24. Chapter 24 Alex
He walked into the trees, and I stood on the deck and watched him go.
His boots in the snow. His shoulders hunched.
His hands in fists at his sides. He didn't look back.
The trail bent into the pines and the pines took him and then he was gone and the yard was empty and the snow was falling again, soft and slow, and I was standing there with my arms at my sides and tears freezing on my face.
The cabin door opened behind me. I didn't turn around.
"Alex." Noah's voice. "What happened?"
I tried to talk. My mouth opened, and what came out was not words. It was the sound you make when you've been holding your breath for too long and your body takes over. A gasp. A sob. Something ugly and involuntary that I couldn't control.
"He's gone," I said. "He just. He left."
"Left where?" Noah was beside me now. His hand was on my arm. "Alex. Left where?"
"The trail. He went down the trail."
"Okay. Okay, that's just the lake loop. It goes along the shore and comes back. He's not. He didn't leave leave."
"Should we go after him?" Noah said. Not to me. To someone behind me.
"No." Remy's voice. Close. He was already on the deck. I didn't know when he'd come out. "Give him a minute."
"Remy, he's upset—"
"I know he's upset. Give him a minute."
Noah went quiet. I could feel him next to me, hovering, wanting to do something, the instinct in him that always wanted to fix the thing happening to the person he cared about. But he stayed. Because Remy said to stay.
I sat down on the deck steps. The wood was cold and wet, and I didn't care. My hands were shaking. I pressed them together between my knees and tried to breathe, and the breathing kept getting interrupted by the thing in my throat, the thing that kept coming up in waves.
Remy sat down next to me. Not close. Not touching. Just there. On the step. His feet in the snow, his hands in the pockets of the denim jacket that was too thin for this weather. He didn't say anything.
I don't know how long we sat there. A minute. Three. Long enough for my breathing to slow. Long enough for the sobs to stop being sobs and start being just shaking, just the aftermath of it, my body coming down from whatever it had been doing.
"I went to my parents' house this morning," I said.
Remy didn't react.
"I told Liam, and he thinks I want to go back.
He thinks I went there because I want to be with them instead of him.
But that's not what happened. I went there for my mom.
I went there because I needed to look at her and ask her to choose me, and she didn't. She said I'm sorry, and that was it.
She didn't say she loved me. She just said she was sorry. "
My voice broke on the word sorry. I put my hand over my mouth. Pressed hard.
"And then I told Liam, and I said the wrong thing. I said I went to see if she'd take me back, and he heard they. He heard if they'd take me back. And I saw it happen. I saw his face change and I couldn't. I tried to explain, and he couldn't hear me. He was already somewhere else."
Remy was quiet. The snow fell on his shoulders and on the steps, and on the yard where Liam's footprints led into the trees. Noah had gone inside. I could see him through the kitchen window, standing at the counter, watching us. Priya next to him. Ethan in the hallway.
"She said I'm sorry," I said again. Quieter. "My own mother. I stood there and asked her if she loved me, and she said I'm sorry."
The words sat in the cold air between us. I could hear the cabin's heat pump running. A bird somewhere in the trees. The faint creak of ice on the lake.
"My mom works nights," Remy said.
I looked at him. His face was calm. Not performing calm. Just calm.
"She works nights at the hospital. Has since I was twelve.
So when I was growing up, it was me and my sisters at the house most evenings.
I made dinner. I checked homework. I got them to bed," He paused.
"I used to stand in the hallway after they fell asleep and just listen.
Making sure the house was quiet. Making sure everyone was okay. I did that every night for six years."
I didn't know why he was telling me this. I waited.
"There were nights when I wanted someone to come stand in my hallway," he said. "Just to check. Just to listen. Nobody did. My mom was working. My dad was at a gig. And I was fine. I handled it. But I wanted someone to show up."
He looked at the treeline where Liam had disappeared.
"He didn't leave," Remy said. "He went for a walk. Those are different things."
One sentence. It cut through everything. All the noise and the panic and the replaying and the guilt. He didn't leave. He went for a walk.
"You showed up at his house with nothing," Remy said. "And he opened the door. That's not a person who leaves."
The cold was in my jeans and in my hands, and in my face.
"Go," Remy said.
I stood up. My legs were stiff. I wiped my face with both hands, and the tears were cold on my skin.
"Thanks Remy."
The pines were thick and quiet, and the snow under the trees was thin, just a skin of white over frozen ground. His boot prints were easy to follow. Deep and spaced far apart. He'd been walking fast. Almost running.
I walked. Then I walked faster. The trail bent along the lake shore, and I could see the water through the trees, flat and gray, the surface like a dirty mirror. The air smelled like pine and cold and nothing else. My breathing was loud. My heartbeat was louder.
He didn't leave. He went for a walk.
The trail opened into a clearing. A break in the trees where the shore curved, and the lake spread out wide and the sky came down low and met the ice. A rock at the edge, big enough to sit on.
Liam was sitting on it.
His back to me. His elbows on his knees. His head down. Snow on his shoulders and in his hair. He looked smaller than he was against the horizon.
I stopped at the edge of the clearing. Ten feet behind him. My boots made a sound on the frozen ground, and his head came up, but he didn't turn around.
"Liam."
He didn't answer. His shoulders moved. A breath. Something he was holding.
"I'm not going back to them."
He was quiet.
"I didn't go there to ask them to take me back. I went there for my mom. I needed to look at her face and ask her one question, and I got my answer. The answer was I'm sorry, and that's... that's all she had. That's all she's ever going to have."
I took a step closer. Then another. He still wasn't looking at me. I could see his face in profile, and his eyes were red, and his jaw was tight, and he was holding on to himself with everything he had.
"I went there because I needed to know if my mother loved me enough to say it out loud. And she doesn't. Or she does, but she can't."
My voice cracked. I let it crack. I was done holding things together.
"And then I came back here, and I tried to tell you and I said it wrong. I said the wrong words. I'm sorry."
I was standing behind him now. Close enough to touch him. I didn't touch him.
"You said I saw how you live. Like that's something I'd run from. Like the house and your mom's double shifts are reasons I would leave."
He flinched.
"Liam. Your house is the only place I've ever felt safe. Your kitchen is the only kitchen I've ever stood in where nobody was keeping score. Your mom didn't ask a single question. She just handed me a bowl of chili."
He pressed his palms into his eyes. His chest was shaking.
"I'm not going anywhere. I know you don't believe me yet. I know you've heard that before and it didn't hold. But I'm going to keep saying it until the saying is louder than the thing inside you that says it isn't true."
He dropped his hands. Looked at the lake. His face was wet and raw and open in a way I'd never seen from him, the way he looked when all the armor was off and there was nothing between him and the cold.
"I keep doing this," he said. His voice was rough. "You try to tell me something and I hear the worst version. Every time. I hear the version where you leave."
"I know."
"It's not about you. It's about. It's my dad. It's the same."
His voice broke.
"I can't stop being that kid, Alex. I try. I fight it. I know you're not him. I know it in my head. But my body doesn't know it yet."
I sat down next to him on the rock. Close. Our legs touching. The cold came through immediately, and I didn't care. I put my hand on the back of his neck. His skin was freezing. He leaned into my palm the way he always did, automatic; the body doing what the body knows.
"I should have told you," I said. "This morning. I should have woken you up and said I need to go see my mom. That's on me. The lie is on me. I won't do that again."
He nodded. Small. His eyes were on the ice.
"And you have to tell me when you're going to that place," I said. "The ten-year-old place. You have to say Liam is gone right now, the scared kid is here, so I know who I'm talking to. Because I can talk to scared-kid Liam. I just need to know he's the one in the room."
He almost smiled. Not quite. The corner of his mouth. "Scared-kid Liam."
"Yeah. He shows up sometimes. I like him. He just needs different words than regular Liam."
He exhaled. Long and shaky.
"I'm sorry," he said. "For what I said. On the deck. About you wanting to go back. About you seeing how I live. That's not. I didn't mean it."
"You meant some of it."
"I meant none of it."
"You meant the part about being scared."
He looked at me. His eyes were red and tired, and honest. "Yeah. I meant that part."
We sat on the rock. The lake in front of us, frozen and wide. The pines behind us, quiet. The snow had stopped and the sky was still gray but lighter at the edges, like the day was trying to decide whether to open up.
"Liam."
"Yeah."
"Look at me."
He turned. His whole face. Wet and open and scared and beautiful and mine.
"I love you."
He didn't move. He didn't breathe. His lips parted and his eyes widened, and I watched the words land on him, watched them go through his skin and into his chest, and something in his face changed. Not a wall going up. A wall coming down. The last one. The one he'd been building since he was ten.
"I love you," I said again. "I love you.
Not because you saved me, and not because you brought me home, and not because I have nowhere else to go.
I love you because you're the only person who ever let me be the real version of myself and didn't ask me to be less of it.
I love you because when I'm with you I don't have to calculate what to say or how to say it or what it's going to cost. I love you and I am not leaving. "
His hand came to my face. Shaking. His thumb on my cheek, his fingers in my hair, and his forehead came down against mine, and I could feel his breath and his tears and his heartbeat through the places where we were touching.
"I love you too," he said. Barely. A whisper. His voice wrecked. "I love you too. I've loved you since the dock. Since the first time. I've been carrying it for so long, Alex."
"I know."
"I was so scared to say it."
"I know. Me too."
We sat there. Foreheads together. His hand on my face. Mine on the back of his neck. The rock was cold, and the air was cold, and the lake was cold, and none of it mattered because the only warm things in the world were the places where his skin touched mine.
He kissed me. Slow and careful, the way you kiss someone when the word has finally been said and you don't have to rush anymore. His mouth tasted like salt and cold air and coffee he hadn't finished, and I kissed him back and held his face in both hands.
"We should go back," I said.
"In a minute."
"They're going to worry."
"Let them worry." He pulled me closer. His arm around my waist, my head on his shoulder, and we sat on the rock and looked at the lake.
Two boys on a frozen shore in the last days of December, holding the word between them like something they'd built together, something that belonged to both of them, something that was finally out in the open where it could breathe.
"Hey, Alex."
"Yeah."
"I love you."
"I know."
"Just practicing."
"Practice all you want."
He smiled.
"Hey," Liam said. He shifted, reached into his coat pocket. "I lied to you."
"About what?"
"Christmas morning. When I said I had something ordered that hadn't come yet." He pulled his hand out of his pocket. Something small. He held it in his palm and opened his fingers.
A glass heron. Blue-gray, hand-painted, the neck in a long S-curve. Small enough to fit in his hand. I recognized it. The tree…
"This has been on our tree every year since I can remember," Liam said.
"My dad gave it to my mom. When he left, she got rid of everything.
Every photo, every shirt he left behind, every piece of him in the house.
But she kept this. She hung it on the tree every December and took it down every January and put it in a box in the closet, and that was it. The one thing she couldn't throw away."
He turned it in his fingers. The glass caught the gray light.
"It was her favorite thing in the house. Not because of him. Because it was beautiful. Because it reminded her of a time when things were good and she was happy, and the house was full." He looked at me. "She doesn't need it anymore."
My throat was closing.
"I've been waiting for the right time."
He held it out.
"This is me telling you that you're home. You're home with me. Wherever that is."
I took it from his palm. The glass was warm from being in his pocket. I turned it over.
Frederick. My mother's heron on the dock. The one she named when I was seven. He comes back because he wants to. And if he doesn't come back, he was never ours.
"Liam."
I closed my hand around it. Held it against my chest.
"Thank you," I said and leaned into him.