Elaine came home with her suitcase and nothing else. No divorce papers. No Jeremy Weston. It’s like she never left for several months. In theory.

The reality is a stark, ugly picture. She’s a crisp, neat puzzle piece trying to rejoin a framework that was damaged and warped a little while she was gone. Too clean to fit into the ugly gap left behind, she just sits awkwardly on top of the other ruined pieces.

She and Thorny talk for hours and hours, sitting stiffly on the balcony, their backs to the house. I watch them from their bedroom and follow their conversation without hearing a word.

She’s sorry.

He’s stressed.

She wants to work on their problems.

He’s too tired.

She sighs at the horizon.

He drinks wine.

They play that game for hours, never really saying anything at all.

When he finally leaves, Elaine starts to cry, staring out at the ocean, while I retreat to my room like a good niece. Climbing onto my bed, I grab my notebook and scribble the million little snipes I’m used to saying out loud.

She’s pathetic.

He’s pathetic.

They’re pathetic.

I’m jealous.

Oops. I start to cross that final line out only to stop halfway. Lous remains, the bitter half of a terrible word.

“You were telling me what your answer was.”

I look up and find Thorny in my doorway, standing there awkwardly out of place. My hand lands over the page I’m on, obscuring the words.

He frowns but doesn’t come closer. “So what is it? Yes or no?”

“Yes,” I whisper, closing my journal and setting it aside.

It’s almost ironic that the first day of the college admission test is tomorrow. Good. I don’t have to sit there awkwardly as they avoid each other in the same room. I don’t have to witness the aftermath.

I don’t have to pretend like none of this matters.

“Fine,” Thorny says, turning away. “I’ll take you in the morning.” He heads toward the master bedroom—avoiding Elaine, I realize. She doesn’t come up here, even as the hours tick toward midnight.

They’re avoiding another fight, I guess.

And if I wanted…

I could make it one worth having. All I’d have to do is leave my little red journal out in the open for anyone to find. Like a morally compromised wife, perhaps? It’d be so fucking easy. So easy.

It’s what I wanted when I wrote it in the first place. Chaos. I tell myself that even as I shove the journal underneath my mattress and out of sight.

Words have the power to destroy—Thorny taught me that. So does silence, when nothing is deemed important enough to say and the words shrivel up inside you with no one around to hear them. You just burn.

But at least you feel something.