Chapter 17

Zoe

She’s taller than I remember.

It doesn’t make sense, of course, that it’s the first thing I think when I see Kathleen O’Leary standing there. The first thing I think should probably be something like abandon ship, but instead I stand stock still beside Aiden, my hand still in his, my skin flushing in a hot shock of surprise and shame. It’s possible—probable, even, that I murmur a quiet “Oh, no.”

Beside me, Aiden jerks in surprise, and I feel his hand heat, briefly, before he pulls it away from mine, my first indication of how wrong everything is about to go. “Fuck,” he murmurs, for my ears only, or maybe not for my ears at all, but I’ve heard it.

“Kathleen?” says Lorraine, her voice a happy question before she moves toward the door, calling, “Oh, Kathleen!”

She’s not seen me yet, or if she has, she hasn’t yet registered who I am. That much is clear, because right now she’s smiling, her arms out to Lorraine, and then to Paul, who’s also crossed the room to her, adding to Lorraine’s exclamations of surprise. It’s a meeting of old friends, I guess—maybe the O’Learys and Dillards weren’t close, but if Aaron and Aiden spent over a decade of summers here, clearly there’s a history, and I can see it in the way they embrace and then stand back from each other, cataloging what must be years of changes.

It’s not that she’s taller, I realize, still staring. It’s that she’s healthier looking. Her hair is a shiny white, her face lightly tanned, her back straighter than it was when I watched her walk from conference room four. For a ridiculous, stupid, suspended-reality moment, I look toward Aiden, open my mouth to say something like, Hey, your mom looks great, but already he, too, is moving away from me, his stride slow and his shoulders set firm. I slide my eyes to the door, wondering: Would he want me to slip out?

“That’s your future mother-in-law?” says Val, interrupting my half-baked thoughts of escape, and I suppress a wince, unsure of how to answer now. Will Mrs. O’Leary play along? Does Aiden have some way to tell her, I think, as I watch him lean down to kiss her cheek, that I’m here, that there’s something he hasn’t told her yet, but he’ll explain it all later?

But that’s not what he’s telling her. From here I can hear Mrs. O’Leary say, “Oh, he’s fine, honey,” because what Aiden must’ve have been asking her about, in this brief, critical moment, is his father, about that call from this morning, the one that had me making one last, desperate attempt to stop this. At this precise moment, it is painful, physically painful, to know that it didn’t work. If I had pushed harder—if I’d told Paul and Lorraine myself, maybe—I could’ve stopped this, what’s about to happen. Aiden would’ve been angry, of course, but it wouldn’t have turned out this way. “I wanted to be here for you today,” I hear her say. “But I guess I missed the whole thing!”

“Yeah,” I answer Val, finally, quietly, and she tsks in some commiserating annoyance. “God, it’s just the same with Hammond. He’s completely a sucker for his mother, I swear. You know she called me Valerie for an entire year? My real name is Valentine. I told her that the first time I met her.” I think I manage a smile; I think I manage to shift my eyes to her and nod, acknowledging her story. But my insides feel like the center of a tornado. Every single thing around me is spinning entirely out of control, breaking apart, and I’m a great column of whirring noise.

I feel it the second she notices me. She’s seen me, past Aiden’s shoulder, and I’ve never seen a face do what hers does then, such an abrupt transformation from happiness to—I don’t know what. It’s not anger, not sadness, not cruelty or vengeance. It’s…blank. Like I am not even worth the very worst of her emotions.

I think I might, in spite of myself, take a slight step back. “In-laws,” Val says, staying by my side in a gesture of loyalty that I find strangely comforting, no matter how fleeting it’s likely to be. “I swear, they’re just jealous.”

“Zoe, my goodness!” calls Lorraine. “Come on over here.” But it’s not even really necessary—she and Paul are already ushering Mrs. O’Leary farther in, Aiden beside her, his face full of dread and panic. We lock eyes for a brief, painful second, and I can feel it, what’s in that look. This is the end.

“Mrs. O’Leary,” I say, when she’s standing in front of me, my voice steady and clear. It’s the voice she would’ve heard come out of my mouth before, and I add a professional nod. Oddly, this feels like the thing I should do for her—it’s kinder, in some way, not to upset her expectations. Still, I can’t do old Zoe as completely as I might like, what with my thermal shirt and my messy ponytail, my dirty hiking boots, now well worn-in from weeks of walking this land alongside Aiden.

She barely looks at me, turning her eyes instead toward her son. “Aiden?” she asks, and in her furrowed brow I see the only relic of his face in her, the only way they look even a little related.

“Mom, if you could—”

“Don’t be telling me you kept her a secret from your own mother too,” says Lorraine, laughing. “When he called us and said he’d be bringing a fiancée, we could hardly—”

Mrs. O’Leary’s eyes snap back to mine, and I feel myself flush all the way to my hairline, feel my stomach drop to my feet when she shifts them down my arm, to my left hand, and her mouth purses and twists in what must be shock—though not, I hope, recognition. I can’t imagine how she’d feel if I’m wearing a ring of hers, or of a member of her family.

Aiden clears his throat. “I need to explain something,” he says, and what’s awful is that everyone’s sort of gathered around now, or at least they’ve come closer. Tom and Sheree have taken a seat at a nearby table, and I can tell they’re pretending not to watch, pretending to concentrate on Little Tommy pushing a toy train across the wood floors. Val’s not even bothering with such etiquette—she’s looking at us like something good is coming.

“You’re with this person?” Mrs. O’Leary says, and that’s all I need to know about where this is going to end. This person. I almost want to laugh at having been so reduced, so fully categorized into nothingness. Mrs. O’Leary’s voice, after all, is only the audible expression of what I’d thought about myself for so long, back when I was so stuck—that I did nothing, was nothing. “Do you know who she is?”

“Wait, who is she?” says Lorraine, and Mrs. O’Leary briefly looks to Aiden again, a pause where she must realize that there’s something here Aiden has not told anyone, some complexity that she can’t account for.

He opens his mouth to speak, but I interrupt him. “I’m an attorney who worked on the settlement case for Aaron.” Sharp, like I’m putting a knife through this whole thing, slicing myself off from everyone else in this room. It’s a bit of wishful thinking, doing it this way—to hope I could be extricated so easily from the community we’ve built over the last five weeks, no matter what brought us all here.

Aiden looks over at me, his face a mask of shock. Today has been so difficult for him already. I can see, behind his eyes, how overwhelmed he is, how painful it is to see his mother, and to have to tell her this, this inevitable truth about what I’m doing here. It’s like his circuit board is overloaded.

“Is—is that how you met?” says Paul, tentative and confused, and this is fucking miserable; one of us has to end this, to let everyone in this room know the wrong we’ve done, and at least give them some clarity.

“I asked Zoe to be here with me,” Aiden says, before I can open my mouth to do it for the both of us. “She came to see me several weeks ago to—” He stops, clears his throat again, looks over at me. He doesn’t want to say what I came to see him for—to apologize—and I don’t know if he’s doing that out of kindness, out of respect for my privacy, or because he doesn’t think his mother will believe it. He begins again. “She came to see me, and I—saw an opportunity.”

He shifts as soon as he’s said it, moves his weight to a different side of his body, a physical effort to figure out how to do this, or redo it. Me, I’m still frozen, maybe even more so now, because of course what he’s said is true—I was an opportunity, guilt-ridden and willing to do whatever he’d asked of me, and, whether I realized it then or not, curious about him. Eager to know him.

But it still tears my heart right in half.

“An opportunity for what?” Mrs. O’Leary says, her first flash of anger.

“Several weeks ago?” repeats Lorraine, looking back and forth between us, and I can see what she’s trying to do. She’s trying to find a way to make it possible that Aiden and I have not lied, that we’re somehow really, truly engaged after a matter of several weeks.

Slowly, so I don’t draw attention to myself, I bring my hands together. I slide Aiden’s ring off my hand and for a few seconds I hold it tightly in my fist, feeling it press into my palm.

And then Aiden tells the truth.

* * * *

Here are the three strokes of luck I have that afternoon, after Aiden tells his mother, and Paul and Lorraine, and everyone else, that our engagement was just for show:

One, I have my phone with me, tucked into the back pocket of my jeans.

Two, in the chaos following, which includes Hammond coming downstairs with all three very excited, very rowdy girls, Aiden doesn’t notice right away when I slip out the lodge’s front door.

Three, Aiden doesn’t notice, but Sheree does, and she offers to drive me anywhere I want to go. She takes me to the little bakery in Coleville, the one where Aiden bought me a hot chocolate. She stays with me while I call Greer, then she insists on giving me five dollars so I can get myself something to drink while I wait. Before she goes, she asks if I want to pray with her. I say no thanks but she still hugs me goodbye, as if she hasn’t just found out about me, about the lie I’ve been telling her and everyone else from the second we all stepped on that campground. I give her the ring I’d stashed in my pocket, and she agrees to make sure Aiden gets it.

If there’s a fourth stroke of luck, it may be that I don’t cry until I’m in Greer’s car, but I like to think of that coming not from luck, but from a lot of hard-earned practice.

“You want to sit for a while?” she asks, and I shake my head.

“Just drive,” I manage, swiping at my face.

“You don’t have any things with you?”

“My fr—the woman who brought me here said she’d get my pack from Aiden.”

“Okay,” she says, and for the next ninety miles she drives, and waits. Greer is more comfortable with silence than anyone I know, and she knows I won’t talk until the tears stop.

So it’s a pretty quiet drive.

When I notice that we’ve pulled off an exit ramp toward Kit’s place, I stiffen in my seat. “Greer,” I say. “No.”

At the next red light she turns to me, her blue eyes so big and clear. “I already called her. We do these things together.”

“She knew from the beginning it was a bad idea. Self-immolation, she said.”

“She’s not going to crow over you, Zoe. She loves you.”

I swallow back a fresh wave of tears, close my eyes, and lean my head back on the seat. That we’re even having this conversation—that I’m afraid to face one of my best friends in the world—is another profound, painful reminder of the mistakes I’ve made these last couple of months, letting this thing with Aiden drive any kind of wedge between us. If Kit tells me she told me so, she’ll be right.

When we pull up to the curb, she’s on the front porch, her arms crossed over her chest and her brow furrowed beneath the rim of her glasses, and before Greer’s even switched off her engine, she’s down the steps and out her small gate, reaching for my door even as I’m opening it. “Are you okay?” she says, her eyes cataloging my puffy eyes, my tear-streaked face. It’s possible, I realize, that this is the first time she or Greer has seen me cry, so long as we’re not counting laugh-crying, which I’ve done a lot with these two.

They hustle me up the front steps and into the house as if I’m some damaged starlet, bailed out from a dumb, reckless mistake, hounded by the press. As soon as we cross the threshold I see Ben’s boots inside the foyer, and feel a sudden shock of embarrassment, enough to stop me dead in my tracks. It’s bad enough that Kit and Greer are going to see this.

“Maybe we should stay on the porch,” I manage.

“It’s too cold out there, hon,” says Kit, and the kindness in her voice almost breaks me again.

“Z,” says Ben, coming into the foyer. He’s got a giant bag of peanut M&M’s in his hand—my favorite—that he holds out to me. “If he hurt you, I’ll fuck him up.”

Kit rolls her eyes, but I can tells she’s a little proud too, and a lot grateful. I offer a weak smile and take the candy. Sweet, genuine Ben. I was so hard on him, back when we first met, grilling him at Betty’s like he was a danger to my friend. He loves me because Kit loves me, but I think he likes me, too. He reaches out, gives me a brief hug before he slips up the steps.

It’s just the three of us then, and I breathe my first sigh of relief in hours.

* * * *

“He said—you were an opportunity?” says Greer, sounding surprised.

I’ve told them the whole thing now, though it’s taken a while, because I’ve done a bit more crying and because Greer and Kit seem so rattled by it that they keep offering me things: the candy, water, alcohol, a sandwich, a blanket, and—at one particularly desperate point, I guess—a hot towel, like we’re on a first-class flight to Patheticville.

I shrug. “I was.”

“He’s an asshole,” says Kit. “He wouldn’t have made it past the first week without you.”

That doesn’t have the desired effect, probably. Probably Kit wants me to start feeling indignant, remembering all the shit I shoveled for him that first week at the campground, my bag of breakfast food and my smiling, eager friendliness with Paul and Lorraine and everyone else who’d been there. But there’s no indignation there, not yet, and probably not ever. To me, memories of that first week feel oddly tender and simple, such a contrast to the intense complexity of the last few days, and to the messy, chaotic unraveling of it all tonight.

“Maybe that would’ve been better for him, though,” I say. “If he wouldn’t have made it past the first week. If I hadn’t said yes.”

“Zoe,” says Greer, her voice firmer than usual. “Please don’t blame yourself for this too.”

Kit looks over at her, surprised that Greer’s beat her to it. “Yeah,” she says, looking back at me. “Don’t.”

I take a deep breath, flatten the bag of still-unopened M&M’s on my thigh, feeling the bumps of candy against my palm. “It’s not the right thing for him, this camp. It’s not what he really wants, not for himself.”

“This is the face I make,” Kit says, gesturing vaguely at her head, “when I am trying really hard to give a shit.”

“Kit, I know—I know what he said, and I know it wasn’t pretty.” An opportunity. I hear it echo in my head again—still true, and still painful. “But he’s so—he’s so sad. And he feels so guilty, and he’s been trying to—” I break off, meet her eyes. She’s sympathetic toward him, I know she is. But what she feels for me is always going to be bigger than any feelings she can muster toward him. “I love him,” I tell her, and I watch her eyes widen in shock. “I know it’s over, but still.”

I let that sit in the air between us, this big thing I kept from them—that I kept from myself, I know, for longer than I’m willing to admit. With sudden, painful clarity I realize how much I would’ve enjoyed telling them more—how much fun it would’ve been to tell them about the way Aiden and I had fought and laughed, the way we’d pushed each other, the way being with each other had been easy and hard, all at the same time. And now that it’s over, it feels like I won’t ever really get the chance.

They’re both quiet for a minute, the only sound in the room the crinkle of plastic from my candy-bag fidgeting, and eventually Greer stops that by taking it from me and opening it. I’m pretty sure the handful she takes is stress-eating related.

I take a deep breath, steady myself. “You know that night we bought the ticket, and we all said what we’d buy with the money?” I ask, finally.

“You said you wanted an adventure,” says Greer.

I nod, my head feeling heavy, congested with tears I still haven’t shed. “What I really thought, that night, was that I wanted to be forgiven. I wanted to feel better about the things that I’ve done. The stuff I did at my job, the stuff I did after my dad died—I don’t know. The person I’d become.” From where I sit in Kit’s armchair, I look out the front window, across the street. A porch light illuminates the neighbors’ fat dachshund digging a hole in one of the flower beds, covering its belly in dirt.

“You’re a great person,” says Greer. “You’ve always been a great person.”

I give her a small smile in thanks, not even really taking her words in. “I wanted forgiveness from Aiden, from his family,” I say. “And I guess I got an adventure instead.”

“Zoe,” says Kit, “the camp does not have to be your—”

“He was the adventure,” I say. “A stupid, reckless adventure that I should’ve known better than to go on. And now—the way it’s all turned out—it’s another sin to add to the pile.”

“Don’t say that,” says Greer, and Kit and I both slide our eyes toward her. “Yeah, everything unraveled in the end, and he—he could’ve handled things better, once his mom showed up. But whatever happened—you were different, these last few weeks.”

“Different how?” I say, because I guess I’m a glutton for punishment. I guess I didn’t get enough in that lodge, Aiden’s mother looking at me like I was nothing.

Greer shifts on the couch, worried, maybe, that she’s gone down this path. “After we won, you were definitely different. You weren’t wound so tight, I guess, once you left your job. But it still seemed like you were…I don’t know. It seemed like you were trying so hard.” I suppress a wince at this, knowing just what she means. I had been trying so hard. Laughing too loud, making a joke of everything, my books about around-the-world trips, my fucking guilt jar. Trying to find something to do with myself. “But the past couple of weeks?” she says. “I’ve never seen you like that. I thought I knew your laugh, your smile. But I don’t think I really did, not until lately. So it wasn’t stupid. No matter how it turned out, it gave you something.”

There’s a long pause, while Kit and I take in what Greer’s said. It’s how it always is with Greer. It’s almost like you have to get used to her for the first time when she really commits to saying something. “What she said,” says Kit.

“You thought it was a terrible idea, from the start,” I say to Kit. “You never liked this whole thing.”

Kit takes a deep breath, adjusts her glasses. “I think I was a little jealous.”

“What?”

“You’ve always known the right things to say to us. The things that would get us out of our own heads, or that would get us to take risks. You’re our bullshit detector, our conscience. I knew you were struggling with your work, and I knew you were struggling after you quit, too. But I—I couldn’t seem to find the right thing to say or do, to get you out of it. I think maybe it bothered me that would be him, or his camp, or whatever, that managed it.”

“Oh,” I say, because I can’t say anything else, because here come the waterworks again. Not as fast or furious this time, but enough that I feel the tears track down my cheeks.

From her spot on the couch, Greer grabs my hand and tugs, hard, until I’m forced to stand and stumble over toward where she and Kit are sitting. Soon enough, I’m between them, right in the join of the couch cushions, their bodies pressed against mine, keeping me from sinking. “I’m sorry for that,” says Kit. “I’m sorry I didn’t know how to help.”

“Me too,” says Greer.

“Hey, don’t,” I tell them, reaching my hands out, setting one on Greer’s arm, one on Kit’s knee, pretzeling us all up in a way that reminds me of what I still have, what I’ll always have with these two. What I almost messed up. “I’m sorry I didn’t ask. I’m sorry I wasn’t more honest. I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you more about—I don’t know. Everything, I guess. My job, and how I felt about it. The way I felt after we won. I think I—I like being the tough one for you guys. I got used to playing that role. Maybe too much.”

“Idea,” says Kit, raising a finger in the air. “No more apologizing between us? We’re okay. And you’re going to be okay.”

I sigh out a breath of relief. No more apologizing. What a concept. “Good idea,” I say.

We’re quiet then, aside from my sniffling, a sound that I would normally find humiliating coming out of my own self, but I can’t muster any shame. I still feel so unbelievably, hugely sad. I’m still thinking, in spite of myself, about what Aiden’s doing now, about whether Sheree has given him the ring back, about how it’ll go with his mother, about what more he’s said to Paul and Lorraine. When I’d left Willis-Hanawalt all those months ago, what had surprised me most was how little I’d thought of it after, in terms of the day to day. How few things about it I’d missed.

It won’t be like that, not with this. I can feel it waiting for me like a physical presence, the missing I’m going to do. The campground, the people I met there, and Aiden.

Aiden, most of all.

But I have this, I tell myself, steeling my body for the long weeks to come, feeling the warmth and kindness of my friends next to me.

“Great idea,” says Greer. And then after a pause, she pats my hand where it rests on her arm. “And anyways, let’s be honest. It’s me that’s the tough one.”

I laugh, for the first time in what feels like forever, lift my hands to wipe the tears from my face. For once, I’m okay being weak, at least for a little while.