“Rebecca! I was wondering where you’ve been lately.” Mrs. Kelly opens the front door and smiles when I knock the next day. “Did you want to come in or do you need the pool gate unlocked...?” She glances at the periwinkle summer dress I’m wearing instead of the swimsuit she almost always sees me in.
“I’m actually not here to borrow your pool for once. I was looking for Ethan?”
She pulls the door closer to herself giving me room to pop my casters over the threshold and muscle the rest of the way inside. “Oh, that’s good. He’s been so isolated this week and then he and Neel got into a fight—”
“They did?” I turn once I’m inside to face her. “About what?”
She sighs. “I have no idea. He doesn’t talk to me. Maybe a word here and there, but he wasn’t very happy that we made him come here.”
I glance at my lap, unsure of how much to say here but, remembering my own recent fallout with Ethan, I can’t say nothing. “It’s more than just bringing him here. You know that.”
Her brows pinch together. “We’ve done everything we ever could for him.”
“Yeah.” I nod. “And maybe one day he’ll be able to see all the good stuff, but it’s not gonna happen when you keep treating him like he’s still a kid. He had a right to know when his mom left rehab—like, the second you found out, he should have found out. Keeping that from him was a betrayal that you can’t undo with a car and cookies.” I soften my voice when it starts to rise. “I know you think you’re protecting him, but believe me, he needs to be able to trust you more than he needs anything else.”
“Rebecca.” Mrs. Kelly draws back in shock. I don’t think I’ve ever so much as frowned at her. I never had a reason to before, but the way she and Mr. Kelly have treated Ethan is wrong.
“I know you love him and he—” I inhale because I know how complicated Ethan’s emotions toward his grandparents are “—he loves you too, but you’ve been making these big decisions for him his whole life and you never talked to him about any of them. Do you know how messed up that is? You want him to trust you, then start trusting him. He’s not a child and he hasn’t been one for a very long time.”
Something dims in her expression letting me know she understands that last statement all too well. It’s frustrating to watch her remain silent though. Ethan’s starting to look at things with his mom differently and I think he’s going to need his grandparents now more than ever.
“He’s so angry,” she whispers, glancing down the hall toward Ethan’s closed bedroom door. “I didn’t realize how much until recently.”
There’s a stretch of silence after that before she adds, “I’ll think about what you said.” Then she steps back and lets me pass.
“Grandma, I told you I’m not—”
“It’s me,” I call through Ethan’s closed door. A second later he opens it enough to poke his head out.
“Hi. I thought you were babysitting Layla today?”
“She ended up going to a friend’s house.” And then, because he still hasn’t opened the door more than a few inches, I add, “Is it okay that I came over?” He hesitates, glancing over his shoulder, and my stomach drops. “I should have texted.” I thought after last night we were okay again. Is he having second thoughts?
“No, it’s not that. I’m glad you’re here. It’s just...” He sucks in a breath then opens the door all the way.
“Oh,” I say, in a voice that suddenly feels rough as sandpaper. “Oh, wow.”
His hand rubs at the back of his neck as though seeing the scene through my eyes.
“You’ve gone full True Detective in here.” I stare unblinking at the back wall behind his bed which he’s turned into one giant conspiracy board with papers and maps and all kinds of notes tacked up everywhere with a picture of his mom in the center. “All you’re missing is the red string.”
“It’s what I’ve been doing these past few days.” He rubs his neck some more. “And nights.”
I can’t bring myself to look at any one thing too closely. I don’t want to know how close he is to finding his mom, not when it was only last night that I started feeling like I really had him back.
“We don’t have to stay in here. My grandparents just left for Bible study so the living room is free.”
I nod, registering that I heard the front door open and shut a minute ago. “Okay.” Then let him lead us down the hall.
Once we’re both sitting on the couch, I know I have to ask. “Anything?”
Ethan doesn’t need more than that one word. “Nothing.”
I feel guilty at the relief his answer gives me. At his request, I’m not actively helping Ethan look for his mom anymore, but I still think about it constantly. There was a lot more on that wall than I helped him find. He may not know exactly where she is yet, but he’s got more than nothing.
He gets to his feet then and hurries out of the room returning with a plate of cookies before I can do more than mildly panic over that one tiny question about his mom. “She made them about an hour ago, so they’re fresh.”
He bites his cookie though I’m not sure he’s even tasting it, which is saying something because Mrs. Kelly makes Martha Stewart look like a hack. That thought leads me to a hopefully distracting question. “Hey, so what happened with you and Neel? Your grandmother mentioned something about a fight?”
Ethan stops chewing his cookie. “When were you talking to my grandmother about me?”
“Not about you,” I say. When I realize I’m about to do the very thing I just told her to stop doing, I shake my head. “Actually we were. Just now when she let me in.” I watch his muscles tense up and guilt sloshes around in my stomach as I keep talking. “I guess you guys haven’t really been talking and she’s worried about you.” He must be doing a good job of keeping her out of his room because if she saw his wall, she’d be miles past worried. “Do they know that you’re looking for your mom?”
“No.” That’s all I get, that one clipped-word answer.
“I’m trying here,” I tell him. “But you have to try too.”
His fists unclench first, then his shoulders, and finally his jaw. “I know. Sorry. No, they don’t know. I don’t think they’d be real supportive.”
“Maybe you should tell them.”
A flicker of anger flashes in his eyes before he banishes it too. “What good would that do?”
“They could help,” I offer, remembering the way Mrs. Kelly had looked at the door. “They love you, you know?”
He doesn’t respond to that, but he stays relaxed beside me. And then he shifts his hand until the backs of our fingers brush together. “You know. That’s all I need.”
I should draw away. There’s an entire wall not twenty feet away from me full of reasons to not let us touch even this tiny bit.
A hint of a smile plays at Ethan’s lips when I don’t.
“You never told me what you and Neel fought about.”
His smile quirks higher on one side. “Actually, it was kind of about you.”