Page 51 of The Someday Daughter
“What happened?” Silas says, eyes wide. I need to move and I keep not doing it.
“I’m fine,” I say. My thumb is still tapping my fingers, counting wordlessly.
“Okay, Audrey, you’re shaking.” He reaches for me, careful, like I might spook. When his hand lands on my arm it’s so warm and so gentle I feel the tears choke me from the inside—this is too kind. I need to be alone. “Come sit down.”
“No,” I say, but when he moves I do, too, and suddenly the door is closing behind us and I’m sitting on the edge of one bedand he’s sitting on the edge of the other one and it’s so much, it’s too much, I’m so far from enough.
Our knees are touching. I can feel Silas’s eyes on me, the absolute head-on angle of his body directed at mine.
“Don’t look at me,” I whisper. I don’t deserve to be looked at. I don’t even want to occupy the space of my own body. “Please don’t.”
He’s quiet, and when I hazard a glance up at him he has a hand pressed over his eyes. Arm in the air, elbow cocked at an angle. His hair wavy and wild and a blue T-shirt I’m so familiar with by now and the way he smells—like woods and soap and GG’s house.
“Not looking,” Silas says, and something swells so huge in my chest that it practically pushes me off the bed toward him. Even after what happened in Colorado, even like this. Everything inside me wants to be close to him.
“Tell me what happened,” he says. “I won’t look.”
I don’t want to tell him. I don’t want it to be true.
“I didn’t get it,” I say, and the words shred from me like violence. Like something that’ll leave me different. “I know you think I’ve been this rigid, soulless robot—”
“I don’t think that.”
“—and it wasn’t even worth it because I failed.”
Silas says, “The ICU position?” and when the sob gasps out of me I lift a hand to my face so we’re mirrors of each other.
Silas moves, then—coming to kneel on the carpet in front of me, his hips between my knees. My eyes are squeezed shut so tightly it hurts.
“Can I?” he whispers, and when I manage a nod his armscome around me, nudging my elbow up and out of the way so it’s rested on his shoulder. I exhale and his arms move into the space it leaves, pressing even closer to me so the bruises on my rib cage ache. He’s holding me so tightly there isn’t room for my shame, or my fear, or anything else between us. I push my face into his neck, knowing he can feel the tears stuck to my eyelashes but incapable of moving away. And he doesn’t, either, and time doesn’t pass, and when his fingertips dig into the tops of my shoulders something shifts inside me. A change I’m too afraid to name.
“Everything’s falling apart,” I say, and when he pulls back to look at me the collar of his shirt’s all wet. I reach for it, like I could dry it with my fingers. “God, sorry,” I sniff, and Silas traps my hand in his. He rotates my wrist, eyes tracking over the set of cuts on my forearm—four crescent-shaped slivers, red echoes of my fingernails.
“Audrey,” he says quietly. I try to pull my arm away but he smooths his thumb over the cuts, his fingers folded around my palm. His gaze moves back to mine. “Everything?”
“Everything.” Failing at the only plan I have, the only thing that was mine to control this summer. The off-kilter way I felt yesterday at the Bard on the Barge, like maybe what I’ve always understood about Camilla is wrong. And Silas, right in front of me—god, and Ethan, who’s going to hate this when I tell him. Ethan’s disappointment seizes inside me, wrings me out. “I’m ruining everything.”
“Name one thing,” Silas says, and I wipe roughly at my eyes. This is the most embarrassing moment of my life—worse than Lake Michigan, worse than the Sex Summit.
“I didn’t get the shadowing position,” I say. Hasn’t he been listening? “I haven’t achieved a single thing this summer.”
Silas is quiet for a minute, studying me. “That’s not true,” he says. “Two days ago you walked barefoot through GG’s entire garden without an earthworm touching you.”
The laugh that bubbles out of me feels indecent, obscene. Silas smiles, but he looks sad.
I draw a rickety breath. “I’m serious.”
“I am, too,” he says. I realize my hand is still in his, resting on my knee. “You’ve met all kinds of doctors and impressed the shit out of every single one of them.” I can’t meet his eyes. “Sadie always tells me how you blow everyone away. And you’ve spontaneously road-tripped across the country, and seen the biggest field of mailboxes in America, and done a bunch of shows that have made a lot of people really happy.” I look at him, and something goes loose and squishy and vulnerable inside me. “Audrey, that’s the opposite of nothing.”
But those things aren’t the same as this, the brutal truth rattling behind my teeth. It wants to come out, so I let it. “I let myself down.”
“But you tried your best,” Silas says. “Their choice wasn’t yours to control.”
Tears fill my eyes and I press them shut. “I just wasn’t good enough.”
“No,” he says, and when he squeezes my hand I open my eyes again. “They’re strangers and they don’t know you and this is just one thing. There will be so many other things.”
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “It’s just that if I can’t be the best at things like this, I’m not sure who I am.”
