Page 68 of The Someday Daughter
Ethan looks out over the water. The wind moves through his hair and he lifts a hand to rub a fist between his eyebrows, working out a headache. “Damn it,” he mumbles finally. “This feels like shit.”
I reach for him and he lets me do it, wrap both arms around his bicep and lean my head onto his shoulder. I’ve always wanted more of Ethan than he was willing to give to me, and now we won’t have any of each other at all. It feels awful and inevitable in equal measure.
“I’m sorry, Audrey,” Ethan says, when we’ve been sitting for a long time staring out at the water. He draws a deep breath that nudges my head with the rise of his shoulder. “You’re going to be a really good doctor.”
My eyes prick with tears, and I squeeze his arm. “So are you.”
43
After that, Ethan and I eat Frosted Mini-Wheats in the kitchen. It’s the only room they’ve taken the boards off of, and golden light floods in to slice through it like some kind of Renaissance painting. This house is stunning—a different place in the daylight. Ethan is a sixty-year-old professor in an eighteen-year-old’s body, but he loves nothing more than sugary cereal.
“No flights today,” Mags tells us, scrolling her laptop at the island. She has her hair in a topknot and is wearing yoga clothes, not a speck of makeup. It’s like the storm shook something loose in all of us, brought us down to a common denominator. She props a hand on her hip in a way that can only be described ascasual.
“Even private?” my mom asks, popping a Mini-Wheat in her mouth. I gape at her. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her eat processed food.
“Mmm,” Mags says, clicking around. “We might be able to do private.”
“No private planes.” I level Mags with my gaze. “No death traps.”
Ethan rolls his eyes, nudging me in the side. “I can take the bus again,” he offers, and Mags and my mother grimace in unison.
“Eight oh five tomorrow morning,” Mags says, glancing at Ethan and then me. “United from Miami International. That okay?”
I watch Ethan sip cereal milk from his spoon. “I have an aunt,” he says. “In Coral Gables. I can stay with her until then.”
When my eyebrows arch, he smiles sheepishly. “I told her I was coming, in case you kicked me out.”
“We’d never have kicked you out,” Camilla says, and I look up at her. “Not with nowhere else to go.” She sounds serious and sincere. Motherly.
Footsteps echo behind us, and when we turn around in the bar seats, Silas is standing in the foyer. He’s in basketball shorts and the T-shirt he pulled on after we got soaked through last night, bright purple with a frenetic line illustration of a cowboy hat that he bought from a street vendor in Austin. His hair is wild and unkempt, loose around his cheekbones. Puddles circles his feet.
“Hi,” he says, and Ethan’s gaze swoops immediately back down to his cereal. Silas lets his eyes linger on mine for one held-breath moment—he looks simultaneously wrecked and resigned. He turns and makes for the door. I’m standing before it’s fallen shut.
It takes me fifteen minutes to find him; Silas moved so quickly it’s like he and Puddles simply evaporated into the muggy post-storm air. I check the backyard, the tangle of palm trees behind the pool, the side gardens where people in matching T-shirts gather fallen plants into garbage bags. I walk half the seawall. I’ve nearly given up when I finally circle back to the front of the house and catch sight of Puddles: twenty yards down the beach, chasing a seagullalong the shoreline. Silas sits in the sand with his knees pulled up to his chest.
He doesn’t see me until I’m right beside him, lowering myself onto the beach. It’s quiet out here—no one in sight except Puddles and the seagull and the two of us.
“Hey,” I say. Silas turns to me, his temple resting on one of his kneecaps. His arms are wrapped around his legs. We look at each other, the sun emerging from behind a cloud to cast his eyes green and gold.
I reach out to brush the hair off his cheek, same as I did on the dance floor at Lady June’s, and it’s not enough. I want to crawl into his lap. I never want to stop touching him. He closes his eyes.
“It’s over,” I say.
Silas keeps his eyes shut. He says, lowly, “I figured.”
“No.” I run my hand along his arm, fit my fingers around his wrist. He’s holding his own elbows so tightly his knuckles are white. “It’s over with Ethan.”
His eyes break open. It feels like gasping for air in that boat on Lake Michigan. Like his arms holding me together on the hotel bed in Nashville. Like everything’s all right.
“What?” he says, but I know he heard me. Every muscle in his face fights not to reveal itself, his lips listing sideways and his eyebrows drawing together and finally, total abandon, the smile breaking across his mouth on a breathless laugh. “But he’s here.”
“Yeah,” I say. When I slide my palm into his, Silas grips on to my fingers, tight. “To say goodbye.”
“I’m not—” He rights himself, focusing his features into a frown. Even as his body’s turning toward mine, my hand wrapped in both of his. “I’m sorry. Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” A warm breeze moves off the water, rustling hair into his face, and I push it back. Tuck it behind his ear. “I’m okay.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” His eyes track over mine. “I mean, did he—are you—”
