Harder (Caroline & West #2)(87)

And then there were crocuses.

April brought sunshine, the world drying out, the first questing blades of grass pushing through the earth. Rugby practices to plan. A rally to organize. Every day, some contact to be made, some reporter to talk to, some new thing to pursue.

This was how it would be. It was how we would be, always.

This full of change. This full of life.

Spilling over into words and laughter, cold hands and hot mouths, and the sound of rain drumming down.


The lawyer’s office is cold.

Outdoors, the temperature is exactly perfect. Sixty-four degrees and sunny, which is unheard of for April in Iowa, so that all anyone wants to chitchat about is Gulf currents and global warming.

At Putnam, it’s one of those afternoons when the entirety of the winter-pale student body emerges blinking from their dorm rooms and spreads out blankets on the lawn of the quad. Boys strip off their shirts and toss Frisbees. Girls hold their textbooks, their chem notes—whatever props they require—when really they’re out there to watch the flesh parade.

I’m sitting at a conference table with the lawyer and my dad on one side of me, West and Frankie on the other. Across the gleaming cherrywood surface, Nate is flanked by his lawyer and both of his parents.

This isn’t how it’s normally done. My father made that abundantly clear.

It’s not normal to insist on signing the papers in front of the person you’ve accused.

It’s not normal to bring your boyfriend with you, or to invite along a girl too young to fully understand what it is she’s being asked to witness.

Settlements don’t usually take fifteen weeks to negotiate, either, I told my dad, but I let you have your way. Give me this.

The document is nothing. I don’t know why I expected a sheaf of pages, binder-clipped together, covered in tape flags, when I’ve been part of hammering out every single one of these terms.

I guess we expect the turning points in our lives to be plastered in flags and warning signs when, in fact, most of the time our lives change when we’re not paying attention. We blow past the markers without even seeing them, and then we come to the end of some path and find there’s no label for it at all.

No guardrail. No dead-end sign.

Just six pages and fifteen paragraphs, with a blank line at the end where I sign my name.

“Initial here,” the lawyer says, so I do that, and I watch him shove the sheets across the table to Nate.

The man holding a pen across from me isn’t anyone I know. I broke up with him before the start of our sophomore year. Now we’re coming up on the end of junior year, and we’ve slipped past estranged to the other side of it.

We’re strangers.

His father slides the pages from under his hand to read them through before Nate can sign, leaving Nate with his hand wrapped around a pen and nothing to do while he waits in the cold and embarrassed silence of the conference room.

Nothing to look at but me.

We stare at each other.

He’s a young man with sandy hair, blond at the tips, and a scruffy not-quite beard framing padded cheeks and bright blue eyes. He wears a dress shirt and tie. Slacks.

He wears his privilege in his clothes and his sour expression, as though he’s been asked here for no reason, harassed to the limits of his tolerance, and now this.

This requirement that he look me in the eye.

This distasteful performance I’ve staged.

When his father puts the sheets down in front of him, Nate signs on the last page, initials where he’s told to, and shoves the document across the table toward me.

“I hope you’re happy,” he says.

And there is this moment when any number of things could happen.

West could leap across the table and deck him.

I could ask to be left alone with Nate and take one last opportunity to give him a piece of my mind before the settlement kicks in and I’m legally obliged to avoid contact with him forever.

I thought I would do that. Fantasized about it.

I imagined what I would tell him, what words would sink right into the heart of him and make him see what he’d done, why it’s wrong, why it devastated me.

I had a whole speech.

But this isn’t my life here in this conference room that’s cold as a tomb. Everyone is dressed for a funeral because this is the end of something—the final act of a drama that’s been difficult and hurtful, complicated and rich.

A drama that’s taught me more about myself than anything I went through in the years preceding it.

What Nate did to me will never go away. I will never stop being angry, because it will never stop rearing up to hurt me. He lashed out at me, attacked me with the weapons at his disposal, and changed the contours of who I am forever.

He changed my future.

He made everything harder.

But God. Here I am with West and Frankie and my dad—these people I love more than anything. And after I walk out of this room, I’m going to get into West’s car and roll down the window and stick my hand out to feel the spring air sliding through my fingers.

We’re going to drive down the interstate at seventy miles an hour, and all of this will slip away.

Back in Putnam, I’ll change into shorts and find a blanket, drive over to campus, plant myself on the lawn, and pretend to study while I watch the boys playing Frisbee with their shirts off.