MY KNEE MADE A MIRACULOUS recovery. I told my parents that evening that all the sharp pains had disappeared. So I would be going on a long run.
They weren’t huge fans of the idea.
“You don’t want to stress it, sweetheart,” Mom said. “I’m glad it feels better, but you don’t want to push it too hard and end up injuring it again.”
Dad nodded. “It’s easy to get excited when you’re finally feeling better, but you should be careful.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
They looked skeptical.
I promised that I would mostly walk, and only gently, experimentally jog.
As soon as I was out of view of the house, I began running. It felt like rust was falling off my limbs, like they’d been waiting for me to use them properly again.
I wasn’t sure if I should tell Sarah about what I’d heard. On the one hand, he was her father—maybe that meant she had a right to know. On the other hand, whatever Mr. Matthews and her father had been to each other, whatever they still meant to each other, the relationship had obviously ended. There was no action to be taken, no change for her to brace for—no obvious anything for her to do with the information. Maybe the truth doesn’t always set you free.
As I ran along the uneven pavement, I kept seeing the two men standing together. And I felt so foolish. Because I couldn’t have been more wrong about Mr. Matthews and Anna. All the arrows that I thought pointed toward him were noise, not signal, all representing something different entirely. And I felt like the pervert for having seriously considered the idea of him and Anna in the first place.
But I was sad and confused for all the obvious reasons, all the logical fallout.
I was also sad for another reason. Sad that I would never again have an excuse to sit outside Mr. Matthews’s window and watch him wait for his tea, his cat curled up beside him. No reason to immerse myself in someone else’s quiet life for an hour, feeling connected without being asked for anything in return.
SARAH SAT BESIDE ME ON the bus, her eyes partway closed as she listened to her music.
I’d decided not to tell her. I’d wondered about it all the previous night, and in the end, I’d decided it was simply not my secret to tell.
Still, now that I knew for sure that Mr. Matthews and Anna hadn’t been involved, I wondered if Sarah might be able to shed light on part of the puzzle—why Lauren might have thought they were.
I tapped the back of the seat in front of her, my signal to get her to take off her headphones, something she seemed to tolerate, if not necessarily appreciate.
“When you were in cross-country, did Mr. Matthews ever give Anna special treatment?” I asked her.
She blinked, cradling her headphones in her arms. “Special treatment?”
“Yeah, someone said something about him treating her differently from the other girls.”
Sarah shrugged. “Not really.” She began to lift her headphones back up, and then she paused. “Well, actually I guess he did, a little.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know, Anna started pretty strong in cross-country, but after a while she began struggling.”
“Struggling?”
“She seemed tired, and once in a while she missed practice. A lot of people miss the occasional one, so that’s not all that unusual, but I don’t know, he wasn’t as hard on Anna as everyone else. I mean, he likes me plenty, but if my times started to dip, he wouldn’t sugarcoat it—he’d tell me to cut it out and get back in gear. Tough love all the way.”
“Is that what he did for Lauren too? Tough love?”
“Oh Lord, Lauren. Was she the one spouting off about ‘special treatment’?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, well—he and Lauren never hit it off, and it didn’t exactly help when he reamed her out once when he found out she’d been skipping practice to serve on the prom committee. He apologized later, said he’d been too harsh, but Lauren is hardly the forgive and forget type, so she probably wasn’t pleased to see Anna get off so lightly. Probably thought it was a sign of favoritism or whatever.”
“God,” I said. “She made it sound—” I took a deep breath. “Whatever. Even for Lauren, that’s petty.”
“Yeah, it is.” Then she paused. “I don’t know if she was totally wrong about the favoritism, though. I think he was having a bad week when he yelled at Lauren, but I think he did have a soft spot for Anna. Sometimes they’d sit together and talk about books or poetry or whatever. And not even stuff he assigned in class. I think they just really liked each other.”
Mr. Matthews and Anna. Talking. Poetry. So easy to twist into something it wasn’t. So much easier to think there had been something inappropriate, something romantic, between them than to think that, in their own way, they’d been friends.
I WENT TO PRACTICE THAT afternoon. Mr. Matthews looked surprised when I rejoined the team, but he didn’t say anything. I was briefly hopeful that he would let the whole thing go, pretend I’d never accused him of having a relationship with Anna, that I’d never mentioned listening in on his call. It would be so great to never, ever talk about any of it.
That hope lasted until the end of practice.
“Hey, Jess,” he called out as I began to walk off the field. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
I looked longingly toward the rest of the team as they left. “I’m in a bit of hurry, so maybe—”
“Jess,” he said. He stood looking at me, his arms wrapped tightly around his chest. He looked deeply uncomfortable but filled with resolve. “I’m glad your knee is feeling better, but we really need to talk about what happened.” He looked around and then pointed to the bleachers. “So let’s sit down.”
There wasn’t a question mark at the end of that. So, reluctantly, I nodded.
We trudged over to the bleachers. I noticed that he waited for me to sit down first and that when he sat, he left a notably large space between us. I couldn’t blame him.
“So,” he said. “I think you have some pretty confused ideas about me and your sister.”
“Not anymore,” I said.
“Oh. Good.” His shoulders relaxed a fraction. “You understand now there was absolutely nothing like that between us?”
“Yes. I was…confused.”
“All right,” he said.
I wondered if we could leave it at that. I really hoped we could. I hoped he’d get up and walk away and that would be it.
But then he took a deep breath, and I knew it wasn’t going to play out like that.
“I’m really glad you understand that there wasn’t anything between me and Anna. And I could let it go at that if you hadn’t referenced a phone call you had no right to listen to. A phone call that there is no way you could’ve overheard by accident.”
He took another deep breath and I braced myself for him to raise his voice, to yell. Instead, his voice grew quieter, more distant.
“I’m not going to ask whether that was the only time you eavesdropped on my conversations, because I don’t think I want to know the answer. And while I can understand how what I said might have sounded strange—taken wildly out of context—I’m not going to explain that conversation to you either. Because that’s not something you need to know, not something I should have to tell you about. What goes on in my own home is private, and what you did, for however long you did it, was a huge violation.”
I looked down at my hands. “I’m sorry. I really am.” And I was. Because I hadn’t really thought about what it meant to do that to someone. Hadn’t really thought of him as a person, not in the fullest sense. Just a candidate, a possible answer to my question.
“Good. I’m glad you understand that.” Then he turned and looked at me, relief but also puzzlement on his face. “What I still don’t get is why you’d ever have thought there was something there. Why you’d even think to spy on me in the first place?”
I could’ve told him about all the things that had seemed so important at the time. How with so little to go on, I’d been grasping at straws and trying to turn them into a raft.
I didn’t want to tell him, though. Didn’t want to embarrass him by telling him about Lauren’s comment, and definitely didn’t want to say anything that might reveal how long I’d watched him for. So I shrugged. “I don’t know. It doesn’t make much sense now.”
“There had to be some—” He caught himself and stopped. He sighed. “Look, I don’t mean to put you through the wringer with this. What you did really shook me, really upset me very deeply, but I know you’ve been through a lot. And grief can make people do strange things.”
So many strange things. So many hours of watching him.
And I thought of him with his cat, helping it down from the bookcase, thought of how I’d left Anna’s paper for him. And without meaning to, I found myself smiling.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I was thinking about the strangest part.”
He raised his eyebrows and waited for me to explain. I paused, unsure whether to say it. And then I went ahead, because if there was anyone who was already justified in thinking I was unhinged, it was him. “There were moments when I almost thought that, if things were different, you wouldn’t have been the worst choice for her.”
His eyes widened. I flushed and wished I’d kept my mouth shut, until I noticed the tiniest trace of a smile forming at the side of his mouth. “And by different, you mean if I hadn’t been twice her age and her teacher?”
“Yes,” I said. And gay, I added silently. That also put a wrinkle in things. “I thought you might have made her happy, made her feel special.”
“Oh,” he said. For a second, I thought I could see another version of my mom’s lecture on inappropriate relationships coming. Then he nodded. “Well, I always thought she seemed like a very special person.”
“She was.”
He looked at me. And for the first time, it felt like he really saw me. Not the girl with the dead twin. Not the crazy girl who’d accused him of sleeping with her sister. Me.
“She was lucky to have you,” he said. “I know you meant a lot to her. I know you were her best friend.”
Best friend. I shook my head, even though it hurt to do it. “She was always my best friend, but I wasn’t hers—not by the end. By the end it was Lily.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t think by the end the two of them were that close.”
His voice was strained, like it was hard for him to say it. I didn’t correct him. I knew he was trying to be kind. Sometimes it’s good to let people try to make you feel better.