Chapter 29 A Hanging Piece
WATERFIELD
Waterfield isn’t everyone’s idea of a perfect hometown.
There’s only one main drag cutting through, and if a car gets stuck or there’s a parade, well good luck trying to get to the post office.
We have exactly one church, though everyone goes to it, regardless of what they believe; it’s more of a social club with wooden pews and philosophical debates.
When I was a kid, I’d sometimes dream about running away.
Packing my bag, vanishing into the woods.
I thought that I needed to leave home to really be able to come back.
But as I got older, I realized that once you leave someplace—move to New York, or go abroad, start running—you get so far down a path that turning around becomes impossible.
Even as I let my suitcase thump against my childhood wicker dresser, I feel like I’m both here, in Waterfield, in my room, and somewhere else.
“Dinner’s in fifteen!” Samantha yells up from downstairs.
“All right,” I yell back.
That was always my favorite part of this house—it’s old and big but thin, noises from our separate rooms melting together.
The steady bump of Samantha’s volleyball against her bedroom wall, the soft emo music drifting from Bailey’s bedroom as she draws, and Maisie’s laughter, bubbling between calls with online friends.
We always turn back into an us, the four Alden girls. Walking trouble.
Maisie had promised that she’d let me tell Bailey and Samantha what happened when I was ready.
And I don’t think that’ll be tonight. When I get to my bed, I just want to collapse into the gingham comforter, forever.
It all looks how it used to look. The blankets, my desk, my sewing machine, my bookshelf.
I slip the old copy of Watership Down from the shelf and open it to the first page, already knowing what’s there.
To my special Cady-Cat—
Don’t ever stop running to where you want to be.
Your grandma
The sob starts in my stomach, works up my chest, battles my throat, and then I’m sitting at the foot of my childhood bed, surrounded by outdated flyers and faded Instax photographs, crying from the almosts collected like dust on the old calendars and forgotten VHS tapes.
Here was my almost life. Grandma almost living.
Almost never lying to Dad and the girls.
And then there’s Faust, my worst almost. Not here. Statistically impossible.
Thinking of him and what happened breaks me down. When I finally notice that I’m not alone, I have my knees pulled up to my chest, arms wrapped tight around my legs.
It’s Maisie, with a plate and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “I come bearing dinner.”
“You don’t think Samantha can cook?”
She frowns. “You have been gone a long time.”
It’s been a long trip back to Illinois. We had a layover in Lisbon on the way in from Nice, and that went as well as one could expect.
Dissociating in a bathroom, silently eating airport pizza with my angry father while Maisie shopped for noise-canceling headphones.
I’d emailed Mei that I had to leave Stark-Benzin while we were there—due to a “family emergency.” Certainly, she’s seen the news.
My social media’s still offline, but I took a peek at the internet, and yeah.
There are pictures of the failed proposal everywhere, along with the starter rumblings of Hilton Heartbreaker gossip, back from the dead.
I left her a voicemail, too. “Hi, it’s me…
um, I just wanted to say, I’m really sorry.
I’m really, really sorry. I didn’t know that was going to happen, and you deserve better than having someone who embarrasses the team like that.
And that’s why I emailed you about—me quitting.
But I really want you to know, Mei, that this was so much fun.
And I really wish I could keep working with you. ”
She hadn’t replied that night. And I deserve it. She’s smart, and funny, and I deserve her anger.
“So, I’m thinking, maybe not the time to marathon movies filmed in Monte Carlo?” Maisie asks, putting the sandwich plate down on my lap and crawling into bed beside me.
“Maybe too soon,” I sniff, laughing.
“Dang. I just got The Red Shoes on DVD. Criterion Collection.”
“ ‘Time rushes by. Love rushes by. Life rushes by.’ ”
“ ‘But the red shoes… dance on,’ ” Maisie finishes. “Yeah, maybe too soon.”
Picking at the sandwich crust, I roll my thoughts around, unsure of where to start.
I don’t know how to bring up the implications of what Faust said to me, out there on that balcony.
Restaurant. Money. How long Maisie and my family have known him personally.
It makes me nauseous to think about. Partly because he’s broken my trust, and I hate that someone I don’t trust could’ve gotten close to them—but mostly because I haven’t had a face-to-face conversation with Maisie in months.
Maybe it’s harder to snap back into the Alden girls than I thought.
She watches me wiggle the crust from the sandwich. “They’re both fine, by the way. I looked up the race scores. No crashes.”
“Oh, good.” I don’t ask if that means that Faust even raced, let alone converted the pole position into a win.
She tells me anyway. “Faust won.”
And I’m decimated, really. His lucky charm. “Oh. Good.”
“And Dad, he’s going to come around.”
“Maybe.”
“He will. He’s downstairs packing up his Stark-Benzin jerseys right now, but he isn’t throwing them out.” She chews on her lip. “I’ve seen him angrier.”
“He—what?”
“I… uh. Okay.” She sets her hands in her lap. “I dropped out of Parsons.”
My eyes slip shut. “No, you didn’t.”
“Cat.”
“Please don’t say that.”
“Cat, I did. It happened.”
“Okay.” I drag in a long breath. “Okay. I’m sorry. I’m not mad.”
“You are. But I need to care about that a little less,” Maisie says, and I peek at her defiant pout. “I’m—I’m the one who reached out to Faust. I saw that you were working with him, and after that weird Instagram post, I messaged him.”
I’m speechless. Actually, totally done. I just blink, watching Maisie flip around the charm on her Bean necklace. A little piece of home.
Wait, I have one word. “Why?”
“You haven’t come home in like, what, three years?
At least? And I know you don’t go to the doctor, and you never take time off work—and this was before I knew what you were doing.
” She’s never spoken to me like this. Like an adult.
“So I asked him to let me know if you were okay, because you never do. You always say you’re fine, but that can’t be true.
I love you, I do, but you’re so controlling. ”
“I… am?”
“You are. You control everything around you.”
“By saying that I’m okay?”
“Yes?” She frowns. “Lying doesn’t make it better, it just makes you feel like you’re in charge.”
God, what do they teach these people in college? I wipe my cheek preemptively, shifting to face her more. “So, you messaged this famous race-car driver to check in on your sister.”
“Yes. And he replied so fast.”
Of course he did. I drop my eyes to the comforter, a mess of painful feelings I can’t parse out. He still should’ve told me. One thousand percent. And… that’s all I’ve got. I’m so deeply drained. “What does this have to do with you and school?”
A line scrunches over her nose, creased between the freckles.
“I’ve done something you may or may not like.
And I don’t want you to get mad. But… but I only went to school because that’s what you said to do.
And I went into fashion because you like it.
But I want to go out there, Cat. I want to take risks. ”
I start to say I’d never get mad at you, then pause, my shoulders dropping. Man. I am bad with this. “Okay, risks.”
“I, I got a restaurant space.” She talks in a rush, overlapping herself.
“I’ve been practicing for years, really, and it won’t be like Grandma’s—I’m not her, and I don’t want to be—but I want to try it out.
I love cooking, and when Faust asked me what I do, I told him that, and he offered to invest. That’s what happened.
And I knew you were going to be angry that I wasn’t finishing school and going to Paris, and I know that like one in three restaurants fail within the first few years, so that’s why I made him promise to let me be the one to tell you and—this is what I want to do. I’m doing it.”
She looks at me, wide-eyed, completely honest, and I don’t see myself in her, or Grandma, or Mom. Just Maisie. And I laugh, feeling another wave of tears. Happy and sad and proud and amazed.
“You’re such a surprise,” I say.
Then we’re hugging. Her curls are soft under my cheek, and she squeezes me so hard. “I’ve missed you. I miss Mom, and I miss Grandma, but I’ve really missed you.”
“Me too.”
“After Grandma left, it was like—” Maisie pulls back, wiping her nose. “It was like you left, too.”
Left makes it sound like she walked out on us, and that image, Grandma stomping out after kicking up her own arguments, makes me let out the tiniest, watery laugh.
Because she’d never go. She never wanted to.
And that’s the most painful part of death—sometimes, the people you love know that they’re leaving.
There are tests, and medical charts, and pacing by windows that overlook half-empty parking lots, and it isn’t surprising, how the hours count down, days collapsing into those minutes between sleep and being awake, when you don’t feel like you’re anywhere at all.
But Grandma didn’t want to leave. She clung to life, bartered with the doctors, sweet-talked nurses.
At the end, she was so clear-eyed, so rooted, fighting so hard, that it felt like we were leaving her.
That death took us from her life, not the other way around.
That somewhere, she’s still cackling and flirting and cooking, sleeves rolled up, an extra spoon tucked into her back pocket, and the music’s louder there, and the colors are brighter, and the party is still going. But we couldn’t stay.
I couldn’t stay in Waterfield after that.
“I’m sorry. I’ll be here more. As here as I can be.” My words stumble over themselves, this strange new territory covered in trip hazards. “I won’t vanish like that again.”
“It just happened so fast.”
But it didn’t. Not to me. There were weeks where the writing on the wall was legible.
And I never faulted my dad for sitting in the waiting room while Mom slept, instead of sitting in her hospital room with me and Maisie.
But he’d only made it through twenty minutes of Grandma’s funeral before he was in the parking lot outside the funeral home, rummaging around for his Marlboro Reds.
So I had to make it through the whole thing.
The cemetery, lunch after, my sisters sobbing.
I had to be the strong one. The person who got everyone through.
And it worked, I think, for a bit; I replaced Grandma, and loved my family the way she had.
Anchoring. Matriarchal. Controlling. Wearing her love felt like keeping her alive.
“It messed me up. Losing both of them has really done a number on me,” I confess.
Faust’s words from our fight loop back around my brain.
You don’t want you. The rest floods in after that, his anger, all the awful things we’d said to each other.
He’d lied to me like I’ve lied to everyone else, and maybe—part of me had been expecting that.
Most of me, waiting for the worst in him.
Except…
“Maisie.” My voice catches. “Earlier, what had you meant about making Faust promise something? What did he promise?”
She glances down. “Um, I thought you’d be angry I’d dropped out. So I made him promise not to tell you that he and I had talked, or about the restaurant stuff.”
“Did he?”
“Promise?” She blinks, confused. “Yeah. He was kind of weird about it, but he said he’d go along with it as long as I told you soon. And I wanted to in Monaco, but it was a last-minute thing, with school, and the garage. We wanted to surprise you both?” She winces apologetically. “Sorry.”
He really didn’t know that they were coming to the race. I feel like the room is tilting, though I don’t think I’ve moved an inch. “Has he talked to you since then?”
“Oh, I don’t think so. Why?”
He hasn’t talked to me, either. And my anger hasn’t fully vanished, knowing that Maisie was the one to contact him first, that she’d had to make this loyal-to-a-fault man promise to keep a secret from me…
but it does change things. For me, at least. It makes me regret some of the things I said to him. Quite a few things, actually.
She watches me very carefully, and apparently, her giant eyes can still pick up silent radio waves. “Shit,” she whispers. “Him?”
“Don’t swear.”
“Cat.”
“Sorry—old habits—oh my god.”
I can’t breathe. I lean forward, and Maisie catches me, arms around my shoulders.
I apologize to her. Over and over. Until she asks me to stop, though I don’t want to listen.
My chest aches with how much I want to apologize to her, and Dad, and Mei, Christine, the team, Faust, him more than anyone else.
He hadn’t meant to expose me. He’d just been helping my sister.
And he’d been right about me, too. I’ve never thought that I could fully balance the karmic scales, take down the healthcare industry through well-timed breakup texts.
But I hadn’t thought I’d been running from this anger. This grief.
But he’d noticed.
He saw the real me, and I couldn’t stand it.
Eventually, begrudgingly, Maisie leaves to eat dinner with everyone else, turning off the light switch as she goes.
I’d be alone if it wasn’t for the glowing green stars I’d taped to my ceiling over a decade ago, their light soft and blobby.
I’ve counted twenty of them before my tears catch up with me.
The big dipper, the little dipper, pointy Taurus, two-faced Gemini.
When I started going by Cat Cromwell, I’d thought it was just a mask.
Me, imitating Grandma a bit. Carrying on the Alden brand.
Shaking shit up. It was more than that, though.
I’d consciously made a new version of myself to fill the void—a woman with a new name and a new identity, who did cool things.
Important things. A legend. Like becoming larger than life could bring anyone back from the dead, or prevent it.
But I didn’t change, not on the inside. Not where it counted the most; without my job, without my armor, when no one else is around, in the dark, under the glowing stars.
I fall asleep finally understanding that horrible, illuminating truth.
You can’t run away from yourself.