99 Days(50)

Did you think I wouldn’t want you if I knew I could have your brother? I want to ask him. Did you worry I was settling for second best? “Talk to me,” I prod him. “Whatever else happened, you used to be able to talk to me.”

“I used to be able to do a lot of things,” Patrick snaps, a flash of temper. “Can you leave it?”

“No!” I exclaim. It feels like we’re tossing a ball back and forth, like Hot Potato, like neither one of us wants to be the one left holding it when it explodes. I bailed on coffee with Imogen to come here. I still haven’t told Gabe what’s going on. “Tell me.” Then, when he doesn’t answer: “Patrick.”

“Mols.” Patrick’s eyes are darker than I’ve ever seen them, that fleck in the iris like the North Star. “Let it go, okay?”

Things get weirdly quiet then, the trees and the lake and how empty it is out here, no tourists or anyone to see. Patrick’s face is tipped down close to mine. He wants to kiss me, I can tell he does, both of us standing here practically panting. He wants to kiss me so, so bad.

I know because I want to kiss him, too.

“We should go,” Patrick says, shaking his head and turning away from me. He takes off so fast I lose my breath.





Day 51


Tess calls early the next morning—an actual phone call, not just a text, so I fish my phone out of my pocket with the tips of two wet fingers: One of the dishwashers at the Lodge broke overnight and flooded half the kitchen, so it’s kind of an all-hands-on-deck situation. “Hey,” I tell her, wedging the skinny phone uncomfortably between my ear and my shoulder and dunking some coffee cups in the first basin of the three-bay sink. A wet towel squelches under my feet. “Are you here?”

“No,” Tess tells me. “I’m supposed to be on at noon, but I don’t think I can come.”

“Okay,” I say slowly. Something in her voice doesn’t sound right. I glance across the kitchen at Jay, who’s working on some scrambled eggs for the breakfast buffet. “You sick?”

“Patrick broke up with me.”

I freeze where I’m standing, two hands in the sudsy water like I’m aiming to start the second flood of the day, enough water to sweep the whole Lodge out into the lake. A low, nauseated chill swoops through my gut, my brain pinging out in a hundred different directions.

Patrick broke up with her.

“Oh my God,” I manage finally, the first coherent thought I manage to put together being that I need to act normal here, and the second being that there’s no reason for me to feel one way or another, beyond the fact that Patrick and Tess are my friends. I’m not allowed to be invested. I’m definitely not allowed to be so immediately, physically relieved. “Are you okay?”

“I—yeah. No. I don’t—” Tess breaks off. “I’m sorry, it’s totally weird that I’m calling you, I just figured maybe you could tell Penn for me.” Another pause. “I mean, that’s not even totally true, I just kind of wanted to talk to you about it, you know? Since you—” She stops again. “Sorry.”

“Since I’m also somebody who’s been dumped by Patrick Donnelly?” I supply, hoping if I can kid around about it Tess won’t guess at the taste of my heart pulsing at the back of my mouth, thick and coppery. I think of yesterday on the trail with Patrick, the weird, charged, electrical moment that passed between us.

Tess is laughing a little, this phlegmy, snotty sound like she’s been crying. “Yeah,” she admits. “I guess that’s why.”

The urge to hang up and call Patrick feels like trying to hold back a cough: to hear his side of the story and make sure everything’s okay with him. I try to think quickly. “You want me to call Imogen? We’ll do a girls’ night tomorrow? We’ll go to Crow Bar or something. I’ll try really hard not to get anything thrown on me this time.”


“Yeah?” Tess says, sounding hopeful. “You want to? I mean, you don’t have plans with Gabe or something?”

The sound of Gabe’s name is startling: For a second I forgot he existed entirely, let alone that we’re together. God, what’s wrong with me? My heart is rattling away inside my chest like a shopping cart with a bum wheel. “No,” I tell Tess, trying to keep my voice even. “No, he’s in Boston for an interview. We’ll go just the three of us; it’ll be fun.”

“Okay,” Tess says, sounding a little less wobbly than she did at the start of this conversation. I feel wobbly in the freaking extreme. “Crow Bar, then. Nineish?”

I promise her I’ll be there and plunge two more glasses into the soapy water. I leave my phone in the freezer for the rest of the day.





Day 52


I don’t think I’ve ever done a proper girls’ night, but Imogen’s an old pro, the smell of steam and burning as she flatirons my hair and a bottle of Apple Pucker she pulled from her purse like Mary Poppins, witchy green and syrupy like melted-down lollipops. Her mom’s away at a women’s retreat in Hudson. Nobody dresses up to go to Crow Bar, but Imogen insists we should anyway, pulling dress upon lacy dress from the depths of her walk-in closet while Tess and I watch from the bed, calling out our myriad opinions like something out of a chick flick montage. It feels like the kind of pregame Emily Green would have with her girlfriends, not me with my cat-lady tendencies and long queue full of documentaries about baseball and the history of salt. It’s nice.