All the Missing Girls(72)

“No, I know exactly what you want me for.”

Sharp and cutting, but nothing compared to the look on his face. Everything right about the night before, overexposed in the daylight and undeniably wrong.

“I’m sorry. But what do you want from me?”

His eyes grew wider, if possible. “You’re not serious,” he said. He shook his head, ran a hand down his face. “What exactly are you sorry for, Nic? I’m just curious. For this, right now? For last year? The one before that? Or for leaving the first time without saying a goddamn word?”

I stood, my limbs shaking with adrenaline. “Oh, don’t do this now. Don’t bring this up now.”

This was our unspoken agreement. We didn’t discuss it. Couldn’t look back and couldn’t look forward.

After I graduated, the plan was to wait a year. Save up some money, leave together. But Corinne disappeared and all the plans went to shit. Daniel stopped working on the renovation, gave me what money he could. I left by myself—one year at a community college, then transferring to a four-year university with student housing and loans and a campus that existed unto itself, segregated from the rest of the world. Someplace safe and far away.

“Or are you sorry for changing your number?” Tyler continued, coming a step closer. “For coming home five months later like it was all nothing?”

“I can’t do this,” I said. “We were kids, Tyler. Just kids.”

“Doesn’t mean it wasn’t real,” he said, his voice softening. “We could’ve made it.”

“Could’ve. Might’ve. There’s a lot of hypothetical in that. We didn’t, Tyler. We didn’t make it.”

“Because you disappeared! Literally.”

“I didn’t disappear, I left.”

“You were there one day and then you were gone. How is that any different? Your brother had to tell me, Nic.”

“I couldn’t stay,” I said, my voice barely making it across the room.

“I know,” he said. “But it wasn’t a temporary thing. A temporary promise. I meant what I said to you.”

He let me drive his truck because his hand was all messed up. I kept touching my fingers to my face, expecting to find something new, something more substantial than a red mark and a swollen lip. “For real, Nic, are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m so done with them all. With Daniel, Corinne. I’m done with her games. I’m done with my dad. I’m done with this place.”

“Pull over,” he said.

“Where?” The streets were dark and curvy, and there wasn’t much of a shoulder, if any, in most places. But there were these outlooks over the valley—guardrails set up around tiny rectangles jutting over the rocks below.

“Anywhere.”

But I thought I knew why he wanted me to pull over, and I didn’t want to be caught in the glare of the headlights. “We’re almost to the caverns,” I said. I pulled his truck into the lot, pulled it off the road, over the lip of rocks and into the clearing, mostly hidden from view by a row of trees.

I turned off the engine. Unbuckled my seat belt. But he didn’t pull me toward him. Didn’t turn to face me at first.

“I’ll take care of you, you know that,” he said. “I’ll be good to you. I’ll love you forever, Nic.”

“I know you will,” I said. It was the one thing I was sure of.

He reached into his glove compartment and pulled out a ring. It was simple. Beautiful. Perfect. Two silver bands woven together. A line of blue gems where they interlocked.

Forever. It’s the kind of thing you say when forever has only been a handful of years. When it’s not decades before you become those Russian nesting dolls.

There was a small part of me that was still childish, stubborn in her hope, thinking I could somehow have everything. That Tyler could become Everett, that Everett could become Tyler. That I could be all the versions of me, stacked inside one another, and find someone who would want them all. But that’s childhood. Before you realize that every step is a choice. That something must be given up for something to be gained. Everything on a scale, a weighing of desires, an ordering of which you want more—and what you’d be willing to give for it.

Ten years ago, I made that choice for the both of us, ripping off a Band-Aid and taking the skin with it. A clean break, I’d thought back then. But I’d never given him that choice, never let him have any say. You disappeared, he’d said—

“I left, and I’m sorry, but that was ten years ago,” I said. “I can’t go back and undo it.”

“You keep coming back, Nic.”

I wasn’t sure whether he meant to Cooley Ridge or to him. “You’re going to be late.”

He dragged his fingers slowly and forcibly through his hair. “You make me crazy,” he said, turning for the bathroom. The shower turned on, and I could hear cabinets slamming, sense him losing his cool behind the closed door.

It happens like this—men losing themselves in moments of passion. We drive them to it. It’s not their fault.

I closed my eyes and leaned against the counter beside the refrigerator, feeling my nails digging into my palms, and slowly counted to one hundred.