Chapter 30
Asher
Eli’s been kneeling on the folding chair for ten minutes, scanning the doors like a lookout, and the second he spots them he nearly goes over the back of it.
"Owen!" He sits up higher, both arms in the air, waving like he's flagging down a rescue boat. "Owen, I saved you a seat!”
I get a hand on the back of his shirt before gravity does anything we’ll both regret.
Nate comes down the aisle with Nora and Owen, and Eli is still going, patting the seat on his other side, claiming it loudly. Owen lights up at his name. Then I watch his eyes slide to the seat on the other side of me, to Sophie, who's already settled, watching the curtain.
Nora gets there first. She slips into the open chair right beside Sophie and leans in to say something that makes her almost smile. Nate drops into the seat next to her.
And Owen's face does the smallest crack.
He recovers quickly, taking the spot Eli’s hammering with his palm. Sits down next to him. Then he sighs like a man twice his age.
Interesting.
I file it away, wondering if Audrey knows her daughter's got an admirer working the room. Wondering if Sophie knows. I don’t think she does. She’s still facing forward, still watching the curtain without looking Owen’s way once.
“How was she?” Nora asks, speaking over Sophie’s head between us. “Is she nervous? She’s never done anything like this before.”
“She’s good.” And I mean it when I say it. “Nervous but ready.”
Nora nods. “It helps that you’re here.”
It throws me off guard. This is the most civil—no, nicest—conversation we’ve ever had. For Audrey’s sake.
“Wouldn’t be anywhere else.”
She snorts. “Never thought you’d say that in a church.”
Sophie smiles softly beside me. Nate glances over with a wide grin.
And things go back to the way they should be.
The lights go down.
It's not much of a dimming, just the gym overheads sinking to half power, but the room takes the hint and goes quiet. Chairs creak. A baby gets shushed near the back. The smell of the grill rolls in through the side door, char and sugar, and then the door shuts, and it’s all gym again.
A woman's voice comes out of the dark at stage left. Warm, unhurried. "In the beginning."
I half-watch the world get made.
Little kids with lanterns. Set pieces of earth and ocean moving across the stage.
Sophie points out the pieces she helped paint.
Two kids flap painted wings as the birds, and one of them is too into it and clips the other one.
A ripple of laughter goes through the rows.
Adam walks out and names the animals in a bored monotone that gets a real laugh from the adults, the kind that means a room's on your side.
But I'm not really watching the stage.
I'm watching the gap in the curtain stage right, the dark seam where I know she's standing, waiting for her mark. Too many years of waiting for her turn.
She told me about it once. In the dark, after, her head on my shoulder and the lamp still on.
A play when she was thirteen. A part she learned every line of, all of them, said into her bedroom mirror and underneath the covers with a flashlight.
Until it was taken away from her. And she was shamed for wanting it and told it was vanity.
A girl who knew every line and never got to say one.
"And God said, it is not good for the man to be alone."
The seam in the curtain moves.
She steps out into the lights.
I half-expect the small flinch, the one she does sometimes when she’s not sure if she’s allowed to take up space.
It’s not there. She walks to her place in the cream robe like the length of the stage is hers and always was, shoulders down, her face loose and certain in a way I’ve only ever seen behind a locked door.
She told me she wanted this when she was a kid, before it got taken.
Then she let herself want it again, carefully, in pieces.
First in a bedroom with a costume and a script that never left the house, my hands the only audience.
And now she's standing in the one place she was most afraid of being judged—in front of God, the women she grew up with, the whole church community—and choosing it anyway.
My chest does something I don't bother fighting.
She crosses to the tree. Real branches wired to a frame, one apple hanging off the low bough. She lifts a hand toward it.
"It's the only thing we're told not to touch," she says, and her voice carries clear to the back wall. "Everything in the garden is ours. The whole world, ours. And the one thing kept back is the one thing I can't stop looking at."
Caleb says his line. She says hers. The room is quiet in the easy way of people enjoying themselves, no idea they're watching anything but a nice little play their neighbor's in.
Then she goes still, the way she does, a full beat hanging in the air.
"There's a difference," she says, lower, "between being given everything and being trusted with it."
And right before she reaches, she looks at me.
Straight through the lights, straight to the second row, like she's known where I was the whole time. Doe eyes. Soft and dark and aimed at me alone, and the whole gym disappears.
"So let it be mine to choose," she says.
And she reaches up and takes the apple off the branch.
Just like that. Her hand closing around the thing she wasn't supposed to want, eyes on me the whole time.
The way she reached for me in that hallway at Nate's. No plan. No permission. Just a woman deciding, her mouth on mine before either of us could think better of it.
That one reach started all of it. Every single thing I've got now started with her hand closing around something she'd been told to leave alone.
She brings the apple down against her chest, and the room sits there content, none of them knowing what they just saw.
I know.
I press my lips together so I don't make a sound, and I let her finish the scene.
The garden gets struck, and the flood comes in.
Noah does his thing, and the little ones go up the ramp into the cardboard ark two by two in felt ears and painted noses. A couple of parents have dressed up to herd them, a dad in full lion getup carrying a kid who's decided halfway up she's done being a sheep.
Then the blue tarp comes out for the flood, a long stretch of it, teenagers and parents lining the wings to take the edges and snap it into rolling waves.
A fish doll lands on it.
Somebody chucked it from the wing, and it rides a wave and flops off the stage.
The front rows lose it, and that's all the encouragement anyone needs. Another fish sails out. Then a dolphin. A shark with a felt grin comes spinning across the blue, and the whole gym is laughing now. Somewhere low and sharp from stage left I hear a woman hissing that’s not in the play, stop it, stop—
Sounds like something I'd do, I think, grinning.
A fish goes wide, arcing off the back of the tarp, and a hand shoots out of the wing and snatches it clean out of the air.
Hers.
Audrey, half in shadow at the edge of the stage, a fish doll caught in one fist, and she's biting down a laugh so hard her shoulders shake. And then she finds me in the dark again, holds up the fish like a trophy, eyes streaming with the effort of not cracking up out loud.
There she is.
Not a widow.
Not somebody's daughter.
Not somebody's cautionary tale.
Just Audrey.
Happy. Loose. Doing exactly what she wants in a room full of people and still—still—looking for me to share it with.
Before her, I was somewhere else entirely.
A bar, probably. Some Friday, some woman, some version of me that hid behind the reputation.
Nobody knew one true thing about me because I never gave them one.
The playboy was the version of me everybody was comfortable with, so I played the part and played it well.
Until her.
The truth is, I've been trying not to say the words for months.
Every version of my future started showing up with Audrey in it, then somewhere along the way, she became the whole picture.
And I know I'm not getting through one more day with this thing locked in my chest.
The lights come up and it's a gym again—folding chairs, a basketball hoop winched to the ceiling, a painted ark somebody’s already taking apart.
She comes off the side steps and Eli hits her first, full speed, arms around her middle, and Sophie's a half-second behind him. Audrey reaches her arms around both of them at once, saying something into Sophie's hair that makes the kid hold on tighter.
"Mom," Eli's already saying, “can we go do the cakewalk?"
"Go. Win one back for me." She kisses the top of his head and lets them go. They tear off toward the doors, Owen peeling away from Nate's side to chase after them, his whole campaign apparently back on.
Nora gets to her before I do. She pulls Audrey into a fast, fierce hug, both hands on her sister's face when she lets go.
"You’re a natural up there," Nora says. "You hear me? A natural." She presses her lips together. "We've got the kids. Take your time getting changed.”
And before I can reach her, Audrey's gone too, pulled by one of her cast mates, joining the animals, Noah, and Adam in one of the back rooms.
The crowd thins out under the gold banner hung over the doors of the fair, toward the food and the string lights, the noise draining out of the gym. It's just me and the half-struck ark with the hum of the overheads.
I let everyone else have her first.
I've waited a year. I can wait another ten minutes.
When she comes back out, she's changed back into her own clothes. Jeans, a green top. Her hair's down and her face is flushed, bright, worn out in the best way. She watches me meet her the last few steps with something already starting in her eyes.
"You did it," I say.
"I know. I actually did it. I played Eve."
"That's not what I watched." I stop close enough that she has to tip her head up. "I watched a woman go after exactly what she wanted and not apologize for it. In front of everybody. In the one room you were sure they'd judge you in." I shake my head. "You walked out there and took it."
Her breath catches.
"And I'm just glad," I say, waiting for her to meet my eyes again, "that you were brave enough to do it with me first. To reach for me in that hallway at Nate's."
Her eyes shine, wet at the rims.
"I never thanked you. No, not for that." She waves her hand. "For—" She stops. Takes a breath and steadies herself. "I don't know how long I would've stayed in that place I was in. How long I'd have just—barely existed. You pulled me out."
"Audrey—"
"You had no idea what you were doing." She gives a small, breaking smile. "You didn't even know who I was, but—"
"I knew."
She goes still. Tilts her head.
"Nate told us. In the group text, before the barbecue." I watch it land. "I knew exactly who you were the second I saw you at that bar, strangling your glass." My voice drops. "I just wanted to see you do something. Anything other than what you were doing there."
Something shifts across her face.
Like she's suddenly seeing all those months differently. The texts. The costumes. The concert. The way I kept showing up.
Like she's finally realizing I've been choosing her from the beginning.
The tears come up over the edge now, and she doesn't fight them, and I can't hold the rest of it back one more second.
"I love you, Audrey."
Her eyes flutter shut. When they open, she's smiling through the tears, and her chin trembles with it.
"You stole my line," she gets out, barely.
I huff a laugh.
She wipes the tears from her eyes. "I've been trying to find the right time to tell you the same thing." Her hand comes up to my chest, flat over my heart. "I love you. I love you, Asher."
For one impossible second, I think I could live on those seven words for the rest of my life.
Nothing has ever sounded more like home.
I pull her in, and she comes, her face against my collar. I close my eyes and let myself have it.
Her.
The kids.
The future I've been carrying around in my head for months.
I hold her in the empty gym and let the thing I've been carrying finally sit where it belongs.
She pulls back enough to look at me.
"I want to move."
"Move?" I say, searching her face.
"Closer to Nora. Closer to you." She says it fast, before she can fold it back up. "I want to start over somewhere I get to be this person all the time.”
It hits me all at once. The size of it. The house, the church, the whole careful life she built to survive inside. Pulling up every root of it. For Nora. For me. For herself.
For a second, I can't find anything to say. I just look at her, this woman who’s waited on the edge of things, standing here in an empty gym telling me she's ready to pack up her entire world to be near mine.
Then I get my mouth working again, because the alternative is me losing it right here, and I've got a reputation to think about.
"So, this isn't a sales pitch, but…" I clear my throat. "If you're in the market for a realtor, I happen to know a pretty good one."
She laughs, wet and surprised. "Yeah?"
"Yeah. Fair warning, she's a little intense."
She thinks it over for a few seconds.
"Your sister?"
"Yeah." I tuck a piece of hair behind her ear. "Only one of us got the looks and the charm, so try not to hold it against her."
The laugh breaks all the way out of her, through the tears, that loose unguarded sound I've spent a year chasing.
And this time, when I catch it, I get to keep it.
Behind her, over the doors, the gold banner says it plain:
NEW BEGINNINGS.