Chapter 5 #2
Three drinks, it would seem, is also the exact amount of alcohol required for me to start confessing the deep dark stuff.
I expect Liv to die laughing when I tell her about Zola’s matchmaking ambush, but she’s uncharacteristically quiet.
“Why aren’t you saying anything?” I ask, when I can’t take the silence any longer.
A lazy smile spreads across her lips as she chases her straw down with her tongue. She finally catches it and takes a long sip before speaking.
“You’re considering it, aren’t you?”
I can’t swallow my own sip fast enough. “Hellllll no.”
Liv shakes her head, braving my glare to boop my nose.
“I know you,” she says. And even though her words are slower and drenched in tequila now, they still sound like POP! POP! “You can’t say no to them. They’ve got that Harper hold on you.”
That Harper hold. I don’t have to ask what she means by it.
Liv was there in the weeks after my dad left, when there was no order in our world anymore—no constants, no control. She saw how it changed me to realize how vulnerable we’d been. How fragile our world was that it could be destroyed by one man’s goodbye.
All my dad had to do was flick a finger to turn over the ignition, and everything came crashing down. Our old lives, and old selves, shattered.
One moment we were the people we’d always been, and the next, we became something different.
I just made sure my “different” was stronger, so I couldn’t be torn down like that again.
So even if everyone around me fell, I’d still be standing.
Ready to help them get back up. I never paused to consider if the thing holding me up was muscle or scar tissue.
“You should have seen them,” I say, surprised by how quickly I sober at the thought of Mom and Zola. “And Zo,” I whine. “I want this for her. I want her to have something nobody can take from her. But there’s gotta be another way.”
“Zo would be doing you a favor by keeping you off the apps. I’ve been swiping up here for years.
That shit is horrendous.” Liv braces for impact as she continues.
“And I love you, but you, my friend, have looked fucking miserable all night. A little dumb fun isn’t the worst thing that could happen to you.
Or a crush. I haven’t heard you talk about a guy since—”
“That guy with the hands?” I ask, cupping the air above my lap.
“Ew, god, no.”
“Okay, but I do kinda miss him.”
“That’s ’cause you’re disgusting,” she says, a little too quickly. “No, it was the one who’d come see you at the bar every night. We tailgated with him when I was in town.”
“Oh! Adam.”
“Wait, I thought Adam was gay.”
“He is.”
“Then why would I be talking about Adam, Kai?”
I shrug as Liv’s phone vibrates in her hand.
“Well,” she says, face going momentarily blank to unlock her phone, “if we just scanned the last four years of your dating history and all we came up with was a creep and a gay guy, my vote on this thing with Zo is a hard yes.”
Liv reads her new text and cartoon heart eyes bug out of her face. Girls’ night is officially over.
I signal the bartender to run our tab. “Thank Daddy Foster for the drinks.”
“Please stop calling him that,” Liv says, rolling her eyes at my long-running joke. “I can stay a little longer. Travis can wait.”
She places her phone face down on the bar as she says it. I know she means it—she’d stay if I asked. But I also know she wants to go. I can already see the Liv-shaped hole she’s about to leave, running out the front door. Besides, now I get to go home and eat snacks. Tonight, I’m winning.
I wave her off and order my Uber to make our exit official. “I should get back anyway. Broken hearts to heal, babies to deliver.”
“Isn’t Zola like seven months along?”
“You know she’s always been an overachiever,” I say, pulling Liv in for one last hug. “Now, let’s get you to your train.”
—
The déjà vu of sneaking back into Mom’s with a buzz is as disorienting as the strobing lights of the muted TV Mom’s currently staring through.
But the stakes of getting caught now aren’t a lecture or grounding, the way they were for teenage me.
Now, even so much as a tipsy stutter step will be confirmation of Zola’s assessment that I’m the less adult-y adult.
Worse yet, it’d be all the proof she needs that her earlier words struck the exact soft spot she’d been aiming for.
Luckily though, when I poke my head into the living room, Mom raises a finger to her weak welcome home smile, before pointing toward a sleeping Zola—hands wrapped gently around her midsection. I still have to remind myself that it’s not just a belly. There’s an actual baby in there.
It’s been the Harper girls for so long now, I can’t imagine it any other way. But everything is about to change. In so many ways, it already has.
As I scale the stairs, I steal one final glance at Zola and Mom the way I have countless times before, and I wish life would slow down a little.
My eyes linger on the familiar scene below, until I’m distracted by a glint on the coffee table.
The flashing TV reflects off the silver rings of Zola’s work binder, still splayed open the way it’d been before I left—back when Zola looked like a mogul in the making and Mom looked like her old self.
It catches the light like a tiny flare declaring a state of emergency.
When my head hits my pillow, it’s spinning from more than just the margaritas.
This is the longest I’ve been still enough to take everything in.
The two people I love most in this world are out there.
Knocked down and hurting. Mom needs this distraction.
Zola needs a foothold. They need my help to get back up.
They need me to do this, and if one last Harper girls hurrah is the bridge between the way things are and whatever’s coming next for us all, that’s as good a reason as any. And it’s not the worst thing if that comes with a few free dinners and an LLC.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I send a text to the group chat that will either be exactly what we all need or the thing that sets in motion a series of catastrophic events that will leave us all forever scarred.
Only one way to find out.
9:24pm
Me: Fine. I’ll do it.
Before my phone even registers that the message has been Delivered, I hear the shrill excitement of my very not-asleep sister’s voice screeching:
“Oh my god! She said yes!”
The happy shrieks and squeals coming from the living room make two things perfectly clear:
I’m doing this.
I was never not going to.