Chapter 33
FINN
My phone sits on the marble countertop of my mother's kitchen, face up, where I can see it. I sent the text to Darcy over an hour ago. No reply. I also called twenty minutes back. She sent me straight to voicemail.
There are a dozen reasonable explanations and I've run through all of them twice.
She's busy with class work. She's at her mother's.
Her phone is at the bottom of her big tote bag with the ever-present student papers and the water bottle, on silent, forgotten, the way phones get forgotten by people who have actual lives.
Any of those explanations would cover the silence that seems like an open pit in my chest.
None of the scenarios I've concocted sits right. Darcy answers her phone. Even when she's buried, she answers. Even if it's just a few words and a promise to call back. Silence isn't her language. I know her languages by now.
I know enough to realize that this silence is something different.
Tonight was supposed to be the conversation.
I've spent half this afternoon assembling it the way I'd assemble any expedition, everything laid out in order.
The deal, the flight, what the meeting is and isn't—and then the only part that matters, the part I should have led with weeks ago.
The truth about what she means to me. That I'm in love with her.
I want her to hear all of it, face to face, before I have to board that plane.
I texted her at school because showing up unannounced during her workday seemed like a lot.
I've been sitting here since, staring at the Colorado deal paperwork, rereading clause seventeen of something I've stopped caring about, waiting for her reply that I know isn't going to come.
I let out a groan at about the same time Evan comes thumping down the hall on his crutches. He hobbles into the kitchen, and aims himself at the refrigerator.
"I hope you didn't eat all of Mom's leftover chicken," he says, and starts excavating. Then, over his shoulder, too casual: "How're you holding up? Talk to Darcy yet?"
"No." I watch him. "I texted her after lunch. Called a while ago. Nothing back."
"Oh." Evan goes still, half inside the refrigerator.
It's a small thing. A one-second hitch in a man hunting for chicken. But I've been reading this kid's face since before he could talk, and I watch the back of his neck do the thing it did when he was nine and the garage window was broken and nobody knew anything about it.
"Evan." He straightens up slowly, a container of leftovers still in one hand. "What did you do?"
He sets the chicken down and faces me. I don't like the withered look on his face. "It wasn't intentional."
"Evan. For fuck's sake. What. Did. You. Do?"
"So Annie and me, you know we've been talking a bit lately, right? We were on the phone earlier, and she could tell something was off with me, and I was worried about you—genuinely worried—and I… might have mentioned the Colorado thing."
"The Colorado thing." It's not a question, and from his miserable expression I can tell I don't need to ask anything more.
"I told Annie about the deal. That it came through and they want you out there and you're flying out tomorrow." He winces. "I told her you were torn up about leaving town. About leaving Darcy."
The kitchen is very quiet. Outside, someone's dog is barking two properties over.
Evan told Annie I'm leaving tomorrow. Annie, Darcy's best friend. Annie, who has never once in her life sat on information that concerned somebody she loves. Which means Darcy has known about the Colorado deal since this afternoon. She's known for several hours.
Not from me, not even secondhand, but thirdhand.
The way her mother heard about her father's affair after he was gone.
The way most gossip fodder gets passed around this town.
I know her history well enough to know exactly which nerve that lands on, and I provided the hammer myself.
There is no version of that story where I'm not the biggest asshole in it.
I think back to the text I sent her this afternoon. Something I need to talk to you about. I might as well have sent her a countdown.
"There's something else," Evan says.
I look at him.
"I was trying to explain to Annie how torn up you are over having to leave, and I sort of... used the bet you and the guys made back at The Retreat as an example. Of the guy you used to be. The one who'd never let himself get tied down." He finally looks up, miserable.
The ground opens up beneath me. "You told Annie about the bet."
"I'm really sorry, Finn."
I don't say anything for long enough that Evan starts talking again, faster, something about context and how he was defending me, and I hold up a hand and he stops.
On a curse, I pick up the phone and call her right there, with Evan watching, because everything in me says do it now, fix this now, and that maybe this is still a problem a conversation can solve.
I tap her number but it doesn't ring. It goes straight to voicemail, her voice bright and ordinary, recorded on some better day, telling me she can't take my call right now and to leave a message.
"Fuck." I hang up before the tone. What I have to say doesn't survive a machine.
Straight to voicemail. Not a missed call.
A declined one, or a phone shut off, which is a wall with a decision behind it.
And that's the part I can't make fit, because I know this woman.
She hears people out for a living. She has more patience for other people's explanations than anyone I've ever met.
Whatever she thinks I did, the Darcy I know opens the door far enough to let a man hang himself with his own rope.
She's not opening the door at all.
She heard that I'm leaving tomorrow, and that I'm part of that idiotic bet that says falling in love is for suckers, and she connected the dots.
Dots that aren't there at all, but she doesn't know that.
All she knows is that I treated her like a punchline in school and now it looks like I'm making her the punchline of this new joke.
She couldn't be more mistaken.
She doesn't know that she's the only thing that matters to me now.
She's put up a wall between us, but I'm the one who built it.
Evan has never looked more contrite. "I'm so, so sorry, Finn. I mean it. You want to break my other leg? Go ahead. I'd understand."
I don't laugh. He doesn't expect me to.
"For what it's worth," he says, "Annie wasn't gossiping. She was scared for her friend. If it had gone the other way, if somebody knew something about Darcy that I was keeping from you..."
He doesn't finish it. He doesn't need to. I'd want to be told. Anyone would want to be told.
"I know," I say. And I do.
And here's the thing I can't do, even now, standing in the wreckage of it. I can't put this on Evan. Not most of it. Every word he told Annie is true. The deal is real. The flight is real. The bet is real, and I'm the jackass who invented it.
My brother didn't tell Annie a single lie. He just couldn't tell her the middle, because he doesn't know any of it. The middle is mine, and it only works in person, face to face, where Darcy can see me while I say it. That Colorado is nothing next to her. Nothing.
That I'm in love with her and have been since before I let myself know it.
That the bet was written by a man I stopped being somewhere around the first full week of her.
She has to hear all of it from me. As soon as possible.
And if she won't give me the chance? If she won't allow me to tell her what's real?
Then I need a backup plan.
Because I'm not going anywhere without saying what she needs to hear.
I grab the pen lying atop the deal paperwork and a notepad from the little box of stationery my mom keeps on the kitchen island.
Evan watches me, his brows knit in confusion. "What are you gonna do with those?"
I'm already moving for the door.
"Whatever it takes to make her listen to what I need to say to her."