Page 53 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux
I draw a deep breath, look up at her. “A few too many for my taste, to be honest.”
“Yeah,” she says softly. “You’re carrying a lot right now, aren’t you?”
I try to turn away, but I’m not fast enough. When I start crying again she pulls me against her, wrapping both arms around me. “Oh, honey,” she says. “He’s going to be fine.”
I sniffle into her shirt, the familiar smell of her detergent. “Am I, though?”
“Of course.” Her hand moves over my back. “You’ve always been so strong. And you have a good team in your corner. Your dad, and XLR8, and Miller, and me.”
I pull back, wiping my eyes as I look up at her. She brushes the hair from my face and smiles. “I always thought you two would find your way back to each other. I just didn’t expect it to look like this.”
“Yeah,” I say on a half laugh. “Tell me about it.”
“We’ve missed you,” she says, and I can’t bring myself to look at her. “Both of us.”
I stare down at my shoes, and she keeps going. “And we’re grateful—Miller’s dad and me.”
Her son just had surgery halfway across the country from ourhome, and she’s grateful? I look up at her. “For what?”
“The money,” Willow says simply. “Al and I never thought we’d be able to give Miller what he wants. What he deserves.” She sighs, looking over the street at the park. “He’s so smart, smarter than both of us together. But these schools he’s interested in, and a Classics degree, it just—” She hesitates, then smiles at me. “We just wouldn’t have been able to consider it, if it weren’t for you and MASH.”
I knew, I guess, that Miller needed this money—of course he did, or he wouldn’t have asked for it. But still, something settles heavy and immovable on my chest. “What would he have done instead?”
“Oh, community college,” Willow says, shrugging. “RMC, probably, in Denver. Al’s always been insistent he not start his postgrad life with insurmountable debt.”
I swallow. “Do they have a Classics program?”
Willow looks at me, smiling sadly. “No. Which makes us feel all the luckier. And not just because of the money, of course.” She brushes my knee with her fingertips. “It’s a gift to see the two of you together again.”
I force a smile. If I felt like MASH was closing in on me before, now it feels like a lead blanket rooting me to the ledge.
Willow slides her hands into her coat pockets and hunches against the cold. “You know, when your mom left, I lost my best friend, too.”
I stare at the side of her face, silent. No one in my life talks about my mother, and having her brought here now—to this freezing ledge outside a hospital in a brand-new city—makes me feel like I’ve missed a step on the way down the stairs.
“We were like the two of you,” she says. “Grew up together, did everything together. Then she made a choice I couldn’t understand.” Willow looks at me, her eyes softening. “I’d hoped it wouldn’t be like that for you and Miller. That you’d never become unrecognizable to each other.”
I draw a cold breath, and it stings all the way down. There’s so much I could say—that it’s impossible to imagine my mother as a young woman, somebody’s best friend. That she’s a specter to me. That losing Miller created a hole in my life so massive it didn’t close up, not even a little bit, the entire time we were apart. And that I can’t imagine how Willow has survived this long if it felt the same for her when my mom went away.
But there’s one truth that’s simplest, so I tell her that instead. “I messed it up,” I whisper, straight at the sidewalk.
“We all mess up,” she says. “But you came back to him eventually. And he’s still here.”
I look up at her, and she stands from the ledge.
“Come on.” She reaches for my hand. “Let’s go keep him company.”
Later, when Willow goes out to find dinner and Felix and Jazz take a conference call with Evelyn, Miller and I are finally alone. He’s still sleepy, heavy-lidded as his body fights to fix itself.
“Out with it,” he says gently, as soon as the door closes behind his mom.
“Out with what?” I’m in the chair next to his bed, my socked feet up on the mattress.
“Whatever it is you’ve been holding back all day.”
“There’s nothing,” I tell him, and he levels me with his gaze.
“Don’t lie to me.” He reaches up, touches the scab on his lip. “We’re past that now.”
