Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
MEGAN: THE PAST
The weekend at the beach house was perfect.
That’s what I kept coming back to later.
How perfect it was. How I’d let myself have it—all of it, the sun and the sand and the laughter and the long hours in his arms—without a single wall up, without the armor I’d spent most of my life perfecting.
For two days, I was just Megan. Not the scholarship girl, not the housekeeper’s daughter, not the outsider cataloging the distance between herself and everyone else.
Just a girl who was crazy in love with a boy who looked at her as if she’d hung the moon.
I should’ve known better.
Happiness that complete doesn’t last. Not for people like me.
I’d known that since I was six years old, watching my parents navigate a world that would never be fully on their side, and I’d known it every day since.
The universe had a way of course-correcting when you reached too far above your station.
I just hadn’t expected it to happen so fast, or hurt so much, or come from the direction it came from.
We drove up on a Friday in May with the windows down, and somewhere past Plymouth, Wyatt started singing along to the radio—badly, without apology, drumming the wheel at the wrong tempo—and I remember laughing until my ribs hurt when I realized that Wyatt Spencer Aldridge, who walked through Harvard like the buildings had been arranged for his convenience, could not carry a tune in a bucket with a lid on it.
“You’re supposed to be good at everything,” I said. “It’s in the brochure.”
“I’m good at the things that matter.” He took my hand across the console without looking, lacing our fingers as if it were nothing, as if it hadn’t taken us two years and four hundred miles to get here. “This. I’m good at this.”
He was. God help me, he was. Two years of watching him from across a parking lot had never once occurred to me that the finished product would be funny. The brochure never mentioned funny.
The house sat on a bluff with gray shingles and white trim, a porch facing the water, the kind of place his family called a cottage, the way other people called a Rolls a car.
I braced for it on the way up the drive—for the feeling I’d managed my whole life, the outsider’s reflexive inventory of everything she couldn’t afford to break.
It never came. He carried my bag in like it lived there.
He put my toothbrush next to his like it was a fact.
The only shadow over the whole weekend was Blair.
She’d been at the house when we arrived Friday night, something Wyatt hadn’t expected and hadn’t seemed happy about.
He’d pulled her aside while I was getting settled in the room, and whatever passed between them left him quiet for a bit—not cold, not distant, just quieter than usual, as if he were working something out in his head.
When I asked if everything was okay, he’d smiled, kissed my temple, and said it was fine.
I believed him.
At eighteen, I fell in love for the first time and trusted him completely because that’s what you do—you believe someone on their word, find meaning in every small kindness, and never pause to wonder what might be hidden just out of sight.
Blair left the next morning without speaking to me, which was so far from unusual that it barely registered. As she left, she shot Wyatt a long, unreadable look. He didn’t look back at her.
I filed it. I didn’t know yet what I was filing it under.
Saturday belonged entirely to us.
He made breakfast—or committed breakfast, depending on your standard of proof.
The eggs were a casualty. The toast went into the trash twice.
I sat on the counter in his sweatshirt, drinking coffee and offering commentary, while he took it with the wounded dignity of a man who had never once been bad at anything in front of a witness.
When the pancakes finally worked, he plated them like a treaty and made me shake on it.
“Tell no one,” he said.
“Your secrets aren’t safe with me. I’m keeping a file on you.”
“I know.” He leaned across the counter and kissed me, unhurried, tasting of coffee and maple. “Keep it. I want the whole record to be yours.”
The Atlantic in May is a dare, not a swim.
He went in first, dove under, came up shouting as if the water had personally betrayed him, then stood there, waist-deep and shaking, holding out one hand with lifeguard confidence and chattering teeth.
“It’s refreshing,” he called, visibly dying.
“Come find out what refreshing feels like.” I made him negotiate.
He offered escalating terms. I took the deal at “unlimited hot chocolate and my hoodie for the rest of your natural life.” The cold hit like a filing cabinet to the sternum, and we lasted ninety seconds, screaming, before retreating to the blanket to shiver against each other under one towel while the whole empty beach minded its own business.
He studied for his econ final on the porch that afternoon, his notes spread across three legal pads in my system—my system, adapted to his hand by then, the margins full of the architecture I’d taught him in a library in October.
I read a novel in the porch swing, my feet in his lap, and lost my place every few pages, watching him work.
He caught me once. He didn’t say anything.
He just took my ankle in one hand, absentmindedly, as if holding it helped him think, and kept working.
I sat there, held by a boy on a porch, and understood that I had never, in my life, been this happy—the kind that doesn’t need witnesses.
The tide came in below the bluff. Neither of us moved to check it.
Saturday night, we cooked together, which meant I cooked while he was allowed to stir under close supervision, having been stripped of independent kitchen authority at breakfast. The radio played the same station from the drive up.
Somewhere between the sauce and the salad, a slow song came on, and he took the wooden spoon from my hand and set it down with tremendous ceremony, like a man laying down arms.
“We’re dancing in a kitchen,” I said, into his chest.
“Observant.” His hand spread warmly across my lower back. “It’s one of the things I love about you.”
“One of?”
“I keep a file.”
We were barefoot on cold tile, and neither of us had any skill at it.
He hummed along, off-key the whole time.
It was—of all the dances I have attended since, in ballrooms that cost more than my childhood home—the only one I would sell my holdings to stand inside again.
The window over the sink was black with night, and the Atlantic kept breathing against the bluff.
I stood with my cheek against his heartbeat and gave myself one instruction: remember this.
Whatever else happens, keep this one whole.
It is the only instruction my eighteen-year-old self ever gave me that I have obeyed to the letter.
We enjoyed the rest of the weekend just for ourselves, and it truly lived up to his promises. It was breathtaking, tender, filled with laughter, and perfect.
On the beach as the sun set, he held me and said “I love you” so many times that those words no longer felt like words but became as vital as oxygen—something essential I had been inhaling unknowingly.
He said it into my hair, against my temple, and once, quietly, into the wind, aimed at the water, as if he were registering it with a higher office.
The sky did its slow, spectacular ruin over the Atlantic, and I stood with my back against his chest, his arms crossed over me, his chin on my head, and I said it back the only way I knew how to say anything that mattered.
“True north,” I said. “Still.”
I felt him smile against my hair. “Still,” he said. “Always.”
Sunday night, before we drove back, he sat on the edge of the bed, pulled me into his lap, and held me for a long time without saying a word.
“You okay?” I asked.
“More than okay.” He pressed his lips to my hair. “I just don’t want it to end.”
“It doesn’t have to.”
He didn’t answer that. He just held on tighter. I thought about that moment a lot, long afterward. The holding on. The not answering.
I thought I understood it at the time.
I had no idea.