CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Alex
Then
I went to Riley’s on Wednesday night.
I told myself I was going to tell him everything. I rehearsed it in the car. The wine, the hotel room, the test, the three weeks of carrying a question I couldn’t answer even for myself. I got as far as the driveway with the whole speech sitting in my chest, fully formed, ready.
He was on the porch when I pulled in. He stood up when he saw my headlights, the way he always did, like my arrival was an event worth standing for.
“Hey,” he said. Then his face changed, because he was looking at mine, and mine was apparently saying something I hadn’t given it permission to say.
“Hey,” I said back.
He came down the steps. He didn’t touch me right away, which told me he already knew, in the way he knew most things about me before I said them out loud, that something was different tonight.
“Talk to me,” he said.
I opened my mouth.
What came out was not the speech I’d rehearsed.
“My parents want me to move back to California,” I said.
He went very still. “What did you tell them?”
“I didn’t tell them anything,” I said. “I didn’t say no.”
I watched that land on him. Watched him absorb it the way he absorbed everything, fully and without flinching.
Then I watched him do the thing that broke something in me that has never entirely gone back together.
He didn’t get angry. He didn’t demand I choose him.
He just looked at me with those steady eyes and asked the only question that mattered.
“Is that what you want?”
“I don’t know what I want,” I said, and it was the first true sentence I’d managed to say out loud in three weeks, even if it wasn’t the whole truth. “I don’t know anything right now. I feel like I’m underwater and I can’t tell which way is up.”
“Then don’t decide tonight,” he said. “Stay. Figure it out with me instead of alone in California with people who’ve never once figured anything out on your behalf.”
I wanted to tell him. Standing in that driveway, I wanted more than almost anything to say the actual words. That I made a mistake, and I was pregnant. I was so afraid of what he’d think of me that I would rather run away than watch his face while I told him.
I said none of it.
“I need some time away to think clearly,” I said instead. “Away from everything. Away from even you, because I can’t think straight when I’m looking at you, and I need to think straight about this.”
It was true. It was also a door I was closing on purpose, and I knew it even as I did it.
“How long?” The words were almost a whisper.
“I don’t know.”
“Alex.”
“I don’t know, Riley.” My voice cracked on his name in a way I hadn’t intended and couldn’t take back. “I just need you to let me go figure this out without asking me to promise you anything about when I’ll be done figuring.”
He looked at me for a long moment. His face was already grieving something, like he could feel the shape of what I wasn’t saying even without the words for it.
“Okay,” he said finally.
“Okay?”
“I’m not going to beg you to stay,” he said. “I’ve never once done that with anything in my life and I’m not about to learn how tonight, even for you. But I need you to know I’m not letting go easy either. You go figure out whatever you need to figure out. I’ll be right here when you’re done.”
I have thought about that sentence more times than I could count if I tried.
I’ll be right here when you’re done.
He didn’t know, standing in that driveway, that I wasn’t planning to come back and tell him.
He thought this was a pause. I let him think it was a pause, because the alternative was watching his face understand it was an ending.
I was too much of a coward that night to be the one who put that look on him.
“I have to go,” I said.
“Alex.”
I was already turning toward the car.
“Alex,” he said again, and there was something rawer in it this time, like some part of him had caught up to what I already knew and wasn’t saying.
I turned back. I let myself look at him one more time.
Really look, the way you look at something when part of you already understands you might not get to again.
The porch light behind him. His hands loose at his sides because he was making himself keep them there instead of reaching for me.
The stillness of a man holding a door open with everything he had, waiting to see if I’d walk back through it.
“I love you,” I said. “Whatever happens. I need you to know that part is true, at least.”
Something in his jaw tightened.
“Then come back,” he said.
I got in the car.
I looked in the mirror as I drove away and saw him standing there.
I did. He hadn’t moved. He stood in the driveway in the porch light watching my taillights until the road curved and took him out of the mirror entirely.
Even then, some small, useless part of me kept checking, as if he might still be visible if I only looked hard enough.
He wasn’t.
I drove home with both hands tight on the wheel and didn’t cry until I was parked in my own driveway with the engine off. Then I cried the way you cry for something you have already decided to lose, which is a different and lonelier thing than crying for something you’re still fighting to keep.
Friday, I let my parents take me home.
I told myself I would call him. I told myself that for longer than I should have.
And somewhere in the weeks that followed.
The second test in a California bathroom, my mother’s dinner, Joshua’s steady and undemanding attention, my father’s quiet approval of a choice I hadn’t consciously made.
The calling Riley that never happened, and then it became a thing I had waited too long to do, and then it became a thing I told myself I no longer had the right to do at all.
I didn’t decide to disappear from Riley Panzolini’s life.
I only ever decided, one unbearable day at a time, not to come back.
By the time I understood those were the same decision, it had already been made for me by nothing more dramatic than time.
That Friday morning, before they arrived, I went to the clubhouse.
It was early. The lot was empty except for Lackey’s bike and a folding chair someone had left out from the night before. I let myself in through the side door that never quite latched, the one Riley had shown me my second week and told me not to mention to Price.
I took the kutte off in the hallway outside Price’s office, because I didn’t trust myself to do it anywhere Riley might walk in on. Some things you have to do quickly, or you won’t do them at all.
It’s not yours to keep, Price had told me, in that same office, the night he handed it to me. It doesn’t touch the ground. It’s never in the possession of anyone but the person it’s assigned to. No matter what.
No matter what.
I folded it the way I’d watched Riley fold his own.
Patches in, the way you fold a flag, not a jacket.
I set it in the center of Price’s desk, on top of a stack of invoices he hadn’t gotten to yet, because I couldn’t think of anywhere else in that building that felt safe enough, or sorry enough, to hold it.
I didn’t leave a note. There was nothing I could have written that wouldn’t have sounded like an apology I hadn’t earned yet, or a promise I already knew I wasn’t going to keep.
I stood in the doorway a moment and said the rule out loud, quietly, to the empty office, the way you say something to make it true.
It wasn’t mine to keep.
I didn’t leave right away.
I sat in my car across the street for a few minutes, engine off.
I looked at the clubhouse the way you look at a house you grew up in and are about to sell.
Memorizing the parts of it that wouldn’t photograph.
The porch light Riley always forgot to turn off.
The dent in the siding from the year Brisco backed a truck into it.
The window of the back room where I used to do homework with a highlighter in one hand and somebody’s little sister asleep on the couch behind me.
I drove past Della’s next, slower than I needed to, though I didn’t stop.
Her kitchen light was already on. Up before six, same as always, same as she’d been every Sunday I’d sat at that table for three years being fed like I belonged there, because as far as she was concerned, I did.
I let the Jeep idle at the curb across the street long enough to watch her shape move once behind the window.
I thought about walking up and knocking and telling her everything.
I understood, sitting there, that I didn’t have the courage for that particular honesty yet, if I ever would.
I love you too, I thought, to a house I wasn’t going to walk into. I’m sorry. I don’t know yet how sorry, but I will.
Then I put the Jeep in drive and made myself stop looking in the mirror.
I drove home, packed two suitcases, and let my parents take me back to California. I did not let myself think about that vest again.