Save the Date(69)

I didn’t know anything about him, I was realizing, now that I could hear him breathing just a few feet away from me. “So . . . you said something about New Mexico?” I realized that it was a terrible segue, but I felt like if I was going to be sleeping next to someone, I should at least know where they were from.

“Yeah,” Bill said, and if he thought this was weird, I couldn’t tell from his tone. “My parents got divorced when I was in eighth grade, and my dad moved out there.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

Bill was silent for a moment, but the kind of silence that has something behind it, the kind you don’t want to rush over. “It was hard,” he finally said. “Especially because I was splitting the school year up for a while. I always had the wrong clothes, the wrong slang. . . .”

I rolled over so that I was on my side and could see him now. He was propped up on one elbow, his hair slightly mussed. “And then your mom moved out of Putnam?”

He nodded. “Last year. She got a new job in Mystic, so she sold our house. . . .” There was something in Bill’s tone I recognized—it sounded like the way I’d been feeling ever since Lily and Greg Pearson had first walked through the door.

“My parents sold this place,” I said, bunching my pillow up a little more. “Two months ago. We’re moving out when the escrow is . . .” I paused, not exactly sure what the right adjective was. But then, I wasn’t exactly sure what escrow was, so this wasn’t that surprising. “When it’s done. But they haven’t even found a place here yet.”

“They’re staying here?” I nodded. “And you’re staying too,” Bill said, his tone thoughtful.

“That doesn’t—” I sat up a little more. “That doesn’t have anything to do with this. Stanwich is a great school, that’s all. And I get a discount on tuition.”

“Did you always want to go there?”

I thought for a moment. When I’d visited my siblings at their various schools, I’d always tried to picture myself there—walking across that quad, eating at that dining hall. But I’d never done it at Stanwich, the school I’d been to a hundred times. “I guess not.”

Bill yawned, then covered his mouth with his hand. “Thank you again for letting me stay here,” he said after a moment, his voice still yawn-fogged. “It really was getting kind of cold in the car. And I kept thinking about bears.”

“Bears?”

“Yeah,” he said with a small laugh. “My dad and I went camping in Oregon once, and we had to take all these precautions against bears. Especially in your car—if they smell anything, they’ll basically rip it apart to get to what they think is food.”

“I don’t think that’s a problem here,” I said, trying, and failing, to think of any instance I’d ever even heard of bears in Connecticut. “I know they have them in upstate New York and Pennsylvania.” I started to yawn myself, no doubt because I’d seen Bill do it. “But I don’t think they’re rip-cars-apart bears. I think that might be a West Coast thing.”

Bill laughed. “Probably. It’d be a heck of a way to go, though, wouldn’t it?”

“I can see it on the front page of the Sentinel,” I said, raising my arm to frame a headline. “Bad News Bear.” Bill groaned, which only encouraged me. “Unbearable Pain!”

“Stop,” Bill said, even though he was smiling.

“Trouble Bruin?” I asked, and Bill laughed.

“It would be worth it just to get one of those,” he said, rolling onto his back and folding one hand behind his head. “You should be a writer or something.”

I smiled at that. “Ha ha.” Silence fell again, but it didn’t feel awkward or strange—more like peaceful. Or maybe I was just getting too tired to keep analyzing what our silences were feeling like, if they were comfortable or uncomfortable.

I felt myself yawn, and realized all at once just how tired I was. A second before I had been fine, and now I was struggling to keep my eyes open. I took off my glasses and tucked them under the couch, along with my phone, in the hopes that I wouldn’t accidentally step on either one when I got up. “Good night, Bill.”

“Night, Charlie,” Bill replied, his voice already getting slow and sleepy.

I closed my eyes, then immediately opened them again—I had forgotten to call Siobhan back. I reached under the couch for my phone, only to see that it had died. But it was okay, I figured, as I pushed it back under the couch, since it was too late to call her now anyway. I’d just call her in the morning.

I lay back down and let my eyes drift closed. I could feel sleep starting to pull me under, and across the room, I could hear Bill’s breathing grow slower and more steady.

I was about to drift off when I heard feet pattering across the carpet. I opened my eyes to see Waffles sitting on the floor by my couch. I looked at him, wondering what he wanted and just praying that he didn’t need another walk. But a moment later, he jumped up onto the couch, turned around twice in a circle, and then curled himself in a ball in the space behind my knees, resting his head on my leg. And a second later, he started snuffle-breathing, and I had a feeling that I was the only awake one in the room—that both the dog and Bill had fallen asleep.