Page 26 of The Night We Lost Him

“So Dad’s history with Cece didn’t play into this somehow?”

Something flashes in Joe’s face, his jaw tensing, before he pushes back against it. “That wasn’t what this was about.”

“You sure about that?” Sam says.

Joe stands up, done with this conversation. “The engagement party is tomorrow night. Come if you like. You’re both welcome.”

He starts to walk away, but I’m going over it in my head, his choice of words, his careful phrasing: he just said that the sale wasn’t about our father’s history with Cece. And I hear what he refused to flat out say in the silence. He didn’t say that Cece and my father didn’t have a relationship. He didn’t say there wasn’t a history there to factor in.

“So what was this about?” I call out after him.

He turns back. “What’s that?”

“For Dad. What was it about?”

Joe shakes his head. But I see it in his face, the sadness there. It’s gone as quick as it came, but it’s there all the same. That tiny part of him seems to want to just say it, whatever it is that he knows.

“Something else,” he says.

Fifty Years Ago

“I don’t want to be apart,” Liam said.

“Well, I would hope not,” she said.

It was the night before he was leaving for college. They were in Cory’s bedroom, lying on the floor—her hand on his stomach, her head against his bare chest, against his heart. Her bed was covered with books. They hadn’t even waited to move them. The floor was good enough for them, being alone good enough for them. Her mother was teaching a night class at the college. Her father was out with friends. They had at least a couple of hours more. They had right now.

“I’m serious about this, Cory…”

“I thought you weren’t taking anything with you from Midwood.”

“Things change.”

“Not that much they don’t,” she said.

“New Haven isn’t that far.”

“For someone who has been planning his escape from Midwood for his whole life, you maybe should have thought of that.”

“Cory—”

She sat up and reached for her dress. It was its own small injury, how easily she moved away. How cold the air felt without her.

“You told me yourself that you can’t wait to leave this place behind. If we stay together, you’ll resent me. I have no desire to be something or someone you resent.”

“I’d never resent you.”

She turned around to face him. “So maybe that’s just an excuse. Maybe I just don’t like you very much.”

“I’m serious.”

She pulled her dress over her head, Liam sitting up so he could zip it for her. “So am I,” she said. “I know how this goes if we try to stay together.”

“What do you know?”

“I know you. And this time tomorrow night you’re going to be in a different state, sharing a dorm room with Charles Theodore Hearst III, who can’t wait to introduce you to the guys he went to boarding school with in Maine. And isn’t that funny, he likes football too. And you should come with the guys to Mory’s for a beer. The Whiffenpoofs are singing later, and there’s this girl he thinks you may like—”

“You think I’m that easily swayed.”

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