Chapter 9
Katie
I called my mother around eight that evening, the buzz of my strange day at Meredith’s having evaporated, the cucumber sheet
mask on my face soft and cool, the fact that I didn’t completely hate Tyler McNally’s guts floating somewhere between my throat
and my malfunctioning prefrontal cortex. Lola was on a first date, and every article of clothing, tube of lip gloss, and bottle
of nail polish we owned was splayed out on our beds as a result, so I’d set up my work on our coffee table instead. Four hundred
names, each written on a tiny sticky note, then arranged around twenty-five invisible circles.
When my brother died, my mother started a foundation for other athletes, from middle schoolers to NFL players, who’d gone
down the same path as Mikey. My mom had a background in people—real estate; nothing fancy, just unremarkable houses on the
south shore in Suffolk County. But she knew how to socialize, how to make a deal, and the foundation grew and grew. It raised
tens of millions of dollars a year, and its biggest event, a black-tie gala held the final weekend in August, marked my brother’s
passing every summer.
“I was thinking,” she said, “what if we moved the Cohens to the state senator’s table? Amelia played basketball at Michigan
State, and I think her father could really make an impression, especially with the social media bill we’ve been working on.
But then, if we move them, we’d have to move the de la Costas too.”
I pushed a few names around. “But I think Mindy and Ernesto would be fine without the Cohens,” I said. “They could sit with the Dahls, right? Plus, they know the Koitas from the CNN Town Hall thing last year, so it works out perfectly.”
My mother sighed. I could picture her so clearly, tucked away in the extra bedroom of a house that had never felt like home.
Her head, surely, pressed against that cluttered desk in a shrine to the man my brother never became. The Westchester County
moon, beaming through the windowpane, but all wrong. All cold and lonely, even now, as the crickets chirped and the bluegrass
swayed and eight years had whirled on by and the rest of the world had returned to order.
“You all right?” I said.
A muffled sob but no answer.
“Mom? Mommy?”
“No,” she said, eventually. I could hear it in her voice: her eyes were glass, and her shattered heart was too. She was stuck,
folded into that chair again. A room full of T-shirts and buttons and pamphlets and bumper stickers, but no light, and no
son. “I . . .”
I bit down on my tongue and closed my eyes. “Mom, listen. If it’s too much, I could come up for a weekend soon. I could take
on more of the planning, I don’t mind. I know how stressed you are. I have to be here for work during the week, but I could
take the train up first thing pretty much any Saturday. Maybe we could get lunch, or go to the mall, or—”
“My Michael,” she said. “My baby. My baby. My baby.”
The next morning, I arrived at the café in the perkiest, most summery outfit I could put together given the state of my still-trashed apartment: a romper with daisies on it, plus five-inch espadrilles and my second favorite watermelon-red lipstick. I’d spent an hour on my hair.
Tyler looked up from his book—Hook, Line, and Sinker by Tessa Bailey; I would not forget this moment for as long as I lived—and inched out of his chair.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“Nothing.” I plopped into my unofficial seat across from him, offering Lola a quick wave. She’d never come home last night,
was wearing a band shirt that belonged to another woman, and was definitely glowing. She shrugged sheepishly from behind the
counter, then brought me a giant cup of coffee. “Just tired.”
Tyler drew his eyebrows together. “No. Not just tired.”
I hated this. That he knew me, that he saw me. That he could still read me like a book. It was a skill he’d picked up as a
kid—he hadn’t earned it; it just happened. I was there, and so he learned me the way toddlers learned a second language. I
was the girl next door, and so he figured me out. And there was no way to undo that—no way to take back all the secrets he’d
stolen or memories he’d made.
“Katie,” he said again. “What happened?”
“Nothing.” I pushed my hair behind my ears. “What’d you think of Tessa? So hot, right?”
“Hey, come on. Something’s wrong. I can tell. Your hair’s extra nice today.”
At that, I crossed my arms over my body. “It’s nothing, okay? Seriously.”
He just looked at me. His book, down. His eyes, soft. “Katie, please. You can talk to me.”
I squeezed myself harder. My elbows, now gripped so tightly I was lucky they hadn’t failed me—hadn’t fractured in my own fists. “It’s just . . . it’s my mom, okay? It doesn’t even matter. Don’t worry about it. I’m fine.”
Tyler gulped, then grabbed the back of his neck with both hands. “Oh, uh . . . how is she? How’s your dad? How’s Maple?”
I closed my eyes. I almost told him everything. Almost recounted every last second of my stupid phone call. Almost let him
back into my window, back into my world. Almost let him wrap his arms around me, drop his head into my lap, hug my broken
body until I ran out of heaves. But instead, I straightened. Instead, I said, “Bad. They’re bad. And Maple’s dead.”
Tyler grimaced, squishing a coffee-stained napkin into a tight little ball. His knuckles strained white, and the ink-swathed
tendons in his forearms tightened. “Katie,” he said. “Your family, they . . . I’d do anything to go back in time. To change
what happened. To—”
“Yeah,” I said as I opened my laptop. We had a book to write. We had arcs to flesh out and a deadline to meet. “Me too.”
By Friday evening, we’d transformed Pinot’s list of tropes into a ten-page outline full of plot twists and pinch points and
seminal lines of dialogue. Things like, “It’s a wallpaper sample, Willa, not the Mona Lisa,” and “Go fuck yourself, Henry Cooper,” and “Willa, wait! I think I love you! I think I’ve been in love with you since the
day you were born!” You know, those kinds of things.
The plot, quite simply, was this: Willa and Henry, we thought, would fall in love as they restored a bed-and-breakfast owned by Willa’s wealthy father.
Willa, desperate to prove to her parents she was remarkable in her own right and worthy of at least a blip of praise, would handle the interior design, the textiles, and the “vibes,” while Henry—using his rugged hands and generally bad attitude—would build things, say hot toxic shit, and, ultimately, screw Willa’s brains out.
But before that, they’d spend half of the book pretending to hate each other instead of dealing with the wreckage of their pasts.
Henry, poor and unloved, had grown up in the guesthouse of Willa’s next-door neighbor.
That was how he’d grown so close to Willa’s brother.
We hadn’t quite figured out their feud or how Henry ended up in the same world as Willa.
It was probably going to be a weird family saga thing or perhaps a nephew-of-the-live-in-gardener situation. To be determined.
Notebooks closed and laptops tucked away for the weekend, we rose to our feet and were mid-spar about whether Willa had brown
eyes or blue when Tyler held the door to the café open for me.
“What was that for?” I said.
“Uh, just trying to be chivalrous?”
“Well, don’t. It’s weird, and I hate it. We’re enemies, remember?”
He laughed. “Sorry. Next time, I’ll let it slam in your face.”
I glared at him, and then, when Seventy-Seventh Street became Third Avenue, I turned left, and he turned right, and I said, “See you Monday,” and he said, “Good night, Katie Caruso,” and just like that, we were teenagers again.
His bedroom was glowing, and I was toweling off my hair, and he was sliding on a soft, dry T-shirt, and I was counting the lines of his stomach, remembering the jut of his hips, the rain on his lips, the way his hands crawled up my ribs, the way it felt to finally twist my tongue into his warm, wet mouth, and then—our gazes, connected—he walked toward his window, pressed his hand to the glass and mouthed, Good night, Katie Caruso, and neither of us knew it yet, but in two weeks, everything was going to break.
Everything was going to shatter. And somehow,
when he said it again tonight, eight whole years of horrible later, they were still the most perfect four words I’d ever heard.