8. Sloane
Sloane
The walk home from the bookshop takes eleven minutes, and I spend nine of them thinking about Beau Sorensen, which is nine more than I’d budgeted.
It’s not a productive kind of thinking. It’s the circling kind — the kind where you handle a thing from a few different angles and put it down and pick it back up two minutes later having decided nothing.
I’ve been doing it since I left the shop, since I untied my apron and hung it on its hook and said goodnight to Margaret, who watched me go with the satisfaction of a woman who believes a plan is unfolding and is too dignified to say so out loud.
The thing I keep landing on isn’t the proposal. The proposal I understand. The proposal is almost insultingly logical, which is its own kind of problem, because I’ve spent the better part of a day trying to find the hole in it and the hole keeps not being there.
The thing I keep landing on is the clipboard.
The way his face did something when Margaret held it out.
The way he said I’ll do it later, let me finish my coffee in a voice that was almost his regular voice but not quite — a half-step off, the way the bell over the shop door is a half-step off, close enough that most people would never catch it.
And the way Margaret took it back without a word, smooth, like the asking had never happened, which is not how Margaret does anything.
Margaret nags. Margaret has nagged me about checking the order on nights when I was visibly drowning. She does not let people off hooks.
She let him off the hook.
There’s something there. I don’t know what it is, and it isn’t mine to know, and I’ve told myself three times in the last eleven minutes to leave it alone, which is exactly the number of times you tell yourself to leave a thing alone when you have no intention of leaving it alone.
And then — because apparently the clipboard was only ever the respectable half of what my brain has been doing — there’s the rest of it.
The rest of it is less defensible. The rest of it is his hands around the Roastery cup, too big for it, the same way they were too big for the box of books he carried into the back room like it weighed nothing.
The way he matched his stride to mine on Main without making a thing of it, without slowing so obviously that I’d have to notice and resent it — he just shortened the gap and let me set the pace, and I noticed anyway, and I resented it anyway, but quietly, in the way you resent a thing you’re also keeping.
The one-cornered almost-smile. The line of his jaw when Evan wouldn’t let go of my arm and something in him went flat and certain and handled it, and the entirely separate, entirely unwelcome fact of what that did to the back of my neck.
I think about the back of my neck for half a block before I catch myself, which is half a block longer than I have ever permitted any man real estate in my head, and I would like it on the record — the record being the inside of my own skull, where these proceedings are sealed and will never be entered into evidence — that I am furious about it.
I built this head specifically so this wouldn’t happen in it.
I have rules. The rules are good rules. They have kept me upright through worse than a hockey captain with careful hands and a thing he won’t say about a clipboard.
The rule, when a thought like this shows up uninvited, is that you look at it once, flatly, the way you’d look at a coat someone left on your sofa, and then you fold it and you set it by the door and you do not try it on.
I’m two blocks from Sailmaker Lane, the maples going dark gold overhead and the streetlights just coming on, when my phone goes off in my pocket.
I know who it is before I look. There’s a particular dread that has a shape, and this one has Evan’s shape.
I look anyway.
Evan
We need to talk, Sloane.
I keep walking.
Evan
You can’t avoid me forever.
Evan
I made a mistake, okay?
I watch the dots appear and disappear and appear again, which is its own small theater, Evan composing and recomposing, deciding how to package the thing he’s decided isn’t his fault.
Evan
You wanted a break. I gave it to you.
Evan
We never talked about exclusivity.
Evan
I didn’t actually do anything wrong.
There it is. The thesis statement. I didn’t actually do anything wrong — delivered with the confidence of a man who genuinely believes that the absence of a verbal contract retroactively converts being inside Vivienne Park into a technicality.
I think about the word actually doing all that work in that sentence.
I think about how a person has to arrange the furniture of their own mind to get to a room where that sentence is true.
The phone buzzes again. He’s calling now.
I hit decline without breaking stride, and slide the phone back into my pocket, and it buzzes a fourth time against my hip — voicemail, or another text, I don’t check which — and I let it.
I’ve gotten very good at letting things buzz.
It’s a skill, the way composure is a skill, the way most of the things I’m good at are skills I’d rather not have needed to learn.
By the time I turn onto Sailmaker Lane, my jaw has gone tight in a way I’m choosing not to examine, and the only thing I want in the world is to be inside my own house with the door shut and the phone face-down on a surface I’m not looking at.
The Sailmaker is lit up warm at the end of the lane, kitchen window glowing, and the relief of it loosens something in my chest before I’ve even reached the porch steps.
The living room does the thing it always does, which is forgive me for the day.
It’s not a beautiful room in any way a magazine would recognize.
It’s better than that — it’s lived in, which is a different and rarer quality.
The leather sofa is the color of a worn saddle and sags in the middle where four of us have collapsed onto it across two years of bad days and good ones.
There are throw blankets in three competing patterns that none of us chose together and all of us defend.
The bookshelf by the window is mine, mostly — overflow from a life I keep trying to fit into a single bedroom — and it leans slightly, the way everything in old New England houses leans, like the building is settling into a more comfortable position.
Margo’s collage of Polaroids climbs one whole wall.
There’s a lamp with a scarf thrown over the shade that we have been told, repeatedly, by the landlord and by common sense, is a fire hazard, and that we keep anyway because it makes the light the right color.
The kitchen opens off the back of it, separated by a counter we use as a table, a bar, a desk, and on at least one occasion a triage station. And in the kitchen, dinner is happening.
The kitchen is the warmest room in the house, partly because of the oven and partly because of who’s standing in it.
It’s small — galley-style, white cabinets gone a little soft with age, open shelves crowded with mismatched mugs and the good olive oil Margo brought back from her internship and a row of cookbooks none of us follows.
There’s a window over the sink that looks out on the back garden, dark now.
The whole room smells like garlic and lemon and something green, and the radio’s on low, and Margo is at the stove with her back to me.
She’s in sweats and a cropped tee, blonde hair piled into a bun that has given up structurally and is being held together by faith and one clip.
Margo Ashby in public is polished to a finish.
Margo Ashby in the kitchen at seven on a Tuesday, narrating a recipe to herself under her breath, is the realest thing in this house.
“Oh, good, you’re home,” she says without turning around, the way she somehow always knows. “I made lemon-herb chicken with the roasted vegetables and that quinoa thing you like. June’s working late and Wren’s out doing whatever Wren does, so it’s you and me. Sit. It’s basically done.”
I drop my tote bag by the end of the sofa and exhale, and it comes out longer and heavier than I mean it to.
Margo turns around.
She has a wooden spoon in one hand and an expression that has already read the exhale and filed it, because Margo reads exhales the way I read exits — fast, accurate, without seeming to.
She’s the only one of us who clocks me as quickly as I clock everyone else, which is the thing about Margo that people miss, distracted by the cheerleader gloss and the relentless brightness.
She grew up performing fine in a house that demanded it.
She knows what performing fine costs because she pays it too.
“Okay,” she says. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened.”
“You did the sigh.”
“I always sigh.”
“You did the sigh sigh.” She sets the spoon down and crosses her arms. “Sloane.”
I consider, for a moment, the cost of telling her versus the cost of not. The not-telling is easier in the short term and worse in the long term, the way it always is, and I’m tired enough that the long term wins.
“Evan’s been texting,” I say.
Margo’s whole face changes.
It’s worth saying that Margo has never liked Evan.
This isn’t a recent development dredged up to make me feel better after the fact.
She didn’t like him in March, when I started seeing him, and she didn’t like him in May, and she said so both times, in the clear, sunny, completely unmovable way Margo says things she’s decided are true.
She has more friends in the football crowd than I’ll ever have — cheerleaders and players orbit the same gravitational system, and Margo is beloved in it — which means she has watched Evan be Evan in rooms where he thought no one whose opinion mattered was watching, and she has not been impressed by what she saw.
“What does he want?” she asks, flat, which is the closest Margo gets to dangerous.
“To talk. To explain. To inform me that he didn’t, and I’m quoting, actually do anything wrong.”