Chapter Thirty-Five
Before the churchyard had fully emptied, I caught Andy’s sleeve between my fingers.
He’d been laughing politely at something Pastor Spires had said, the kind of practiced laugh everyone in Woodland learned young, the one that never reached the eyes.
When I tugged lightly, he looked down at my hand first, then at my face.
His smile faltered so quickly it almost hurt to watch.
“Can we talk?” I asked softly.
Our parents stood in a loose circle beneath the church steps, all Sunday clothes and pleasant smiles, my stepmother’s gloved hands fluttering through conversation while my father nodded along beside her.
The cold air still carried the smell of wet earth from last night’s rain, mingled with that haunting musky scent of the old paint chipped boards holding Holy Trinity Baptist together.
Somewhere beyond the crop-barren fields, crows called to one another through the forest of shedding pines.
Andy looked toward our parents before nodding once. “Yeah.” There wasn’t any fight in the word.
I led him away from the congregation, my brown dress brushing against the brittle winter grass.
I’d thrown it on that morning without thinking, hardly bothering with makeup after Morgan had dropped me off at my trailer.
My hair hung loose down my back, still smelling faintly of August’s cedar shampoo from the night before.
The breeze caught the ends of it and swept it across my face as we walked.
We stopped beneath the old magnolia tree at the edge of the churchyard. “Andy…” I began softly.
His jaw flexed so hard I could see the muscle jump beneath his skin, making me pause. I swallowed tightly, searching his pale blue eyes for any softness he might have left for me.
He gave me a look that was somehow both pleading and impatient. “Are we really gonna do this here?” he asked dryly.
My stomach dipped. “Do what?”
He rolled his eyes toward heaven, as though asking God for more patience than he’d been born with.
“You’re breaking up with me, right?” His voice cracked around the words before he forced it steady again. “I figured you’d at least wait until graduation.”
He wouldn’t look at me. Instead his attention stayed fixed on our parents across the lawn, watching them laugh together like the world hadn’t already started splitting open beneath our feet.
“How did you know?” I asked softly through pinched brows.
His eyes finally found mine, though only for a second before he said, “Because I know you.”
My throat went dry, and it hurt to swallow.
Andy did know me. And I knew him. Better than I knew Emily or Lindsey, or even my own parents.
I knew where all his boundaries were, what jokes he would tell before he even got the chance to make them, and I knew when he didn’t have the energy to argue.
He would get this look on his face like a child awoken abruptly from a nap, angry and tired all at once.
An expression that was often reserved for after a particularly bad fight with his father.
But Andy wore it now, looking at anything but me underneath the magnolia tree where we’d had our first kiss.
“I used to think…” He laughed quietly. “Hell, I used to think I knew you better than anybody. Thought I always would, even if you barely let me in.” His fingers curled into fists at his sides.
“I know when you’re sad. I know when you’re angry.
I know when you’re pretending everything’s okay.
” His voice softened until it almost disappeared beneath the wind. “And I know when you’re in love.”
My eyes burned. I bit the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted blood. “I’m sorry.” The words felt small and pathetic from my mouth.
A tear escaped before he could stop it, slipping down one flushed cheek. He scrubbed it away roughly, embarrassed by it, but his shoulders had already gone rigid.
His whole body looked like it hurt to stand upright.
“Have you slept with him?” his voice came out raspy and broken.
I shook my head immediately.
“Of course not.” The lie—or maybe only half a lie—caught somewhere in my throat.
No, I hadn’t had sex with August. Not really.
But I knew what Andy was asking me. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that August had memorized my body long before he’d ever earned the right to.
He knew every place I shook apart beneath his fingertips, every place I carried loneliness beneath my skin.
Confessing that now would only be cruelty.
Andy closed his eyes. When he opened them again, something harder had settled there. “That kid…” He shook his head. “He’s never gonna see you the way I do, Lola.”
I frowned. “You don’t know that, Andy.”
“No.” His laugh was dry enough to scrape bark from the trees. “I do.”
He stepped closer, close enough that I could smell the expensive cologne his mother bought him for every birthday. His white button-down wasn’t fastened all the way, the little gold cross at his throat glinting weakly in the winter sun.
“He looks at you like you’re both perfect and wounded.” Andy searched my face desperately, as though hoping to find the girl I’d been when we were children. “Like you’re the damn deer you killed, and somehow he can nurse you back to health.”
I flinched, but Andy pressed on, “But that’s not who you are.
” He shook his head again, almost amused.
“The second he sees how selfish you can be…how impatient…” His voice grew rough.
“The second he realizes the chains you’re dragging around aren’t wrapped around you by anybody else—that you’re the one holding onto them—he’ll leave. ”
“Stop.”
“He’ll hate—”
“Stop it, Andy.” The sharpness in my own voice startled even me. “Don’t be a dick because you aren’t getting your way.”
He laughed—an exhausted, broken sound. His eyes shone. “You think I’m trying to be cruel. But I’m not, Lola.” He pressed a hand against his own chest like he was trying to keep something inside from breaking loose. “I’m being honest.”
The word landed between us heavier than scripture. I opened my mouth to respond.
“You are impatient.” He kept going, plowing over my attempt to get a word in. “You think people-pleasing is a survival skill, and you refuse to talk about anything that can’t be covered up with one of your pretty little lies.”
Each sentence felt like someone gently removing bricks from beneath my feet.
“But I know those things.” His voice trembled now.
“I’ve known them since we were ten years old.
” My balance felt weak, as if haunted by the memory of scraped knees on a playground.
“I know every ugly part of you.” Another tear slid down his face, and he sniffed hard.
“And I’ve loved you not in spite of those things, but because of them, Lola.
I have always loved that you and I are the same.
It made it all feel…less lonely. Like the shit we endured from our parents was worth it as long as we had each other. ”
My chest ached, and I forced myself to keep my eyes on his. I wanted to reach out, to cup his cheek and tell him that wasn’t love. That it was survival purely by camouflage. We had hid within each other for years, even before we had started dating.
But before I could say any of it Andy pressed, “Will he still love you when he sees you fully, Lola? Will anyone?”
The question echoed in all of the hollow parts of me.
Would August still love me, even on the days that I did not know how to love myself?
Or would he only love the version of me that still believed she could be rescued.
If one day he saw the rot underneath. The lies, the cowardice, the hunger.
Would he still reach for me then? Or would he leave?
Across the yard, Catherine Spire’s liting voice rang out her son’s name—bright and oblivious that I was breaking his heart.
He did not look away from me as he said, “Go on then.” His voice had become so soft I almost wished he’d yell instead. “Give me whatever pretty line you’ve come up with to end everything. I know you’ve practiced one.”
My mouth trembled. I’d practiced dozens. Every version sounded noble in my head as Morgan drove me home that morning. Every version sounded like someone I wanted to be.
Standing beneath that magnolia tree, none of them belonged to me anymore. I looked down, losing my nerve. “Andy…you know I care about you—”
“Nah.” He shook his head before I could finish. “I don’t like that one. Give me your first draft. I’ve always wanted to hear one of those.”
Something inside me snapped, more surrender than anger. I looked up into the face of the first boy who had ever loved me, the first boy who had ever made me believe maybe there was a place for me in the world beyond my father’s trailer. And I gave him the only sentence that felt true.
“I don’t want to do this anymore.”
Andy laughed, the sound carrying like broken glass. “That’s the most honest thing you’ve ever said to me.” He nodded once, wiping quickly at his face. “When you get bored with your new plaything, I’ll be around, Lola.”
Before I could answer, he leaned forward and kissed my cheek. It was gentle and familiar. The sort of kiss that belonged to a decade of football games and church picnics and borrowed jackets and first dances.
A goodbye disguised as habit.
Then he turned and walked across the churchyard toward his waiting parents without looking back. I stood beneath the magnolia tree long after he’d disappeared into the crowd, rubbing the place his lips had touched, wondering whether grief always arrived looking so much like relief.