Chapter 2

Dean’s POV

2011

I was twelve years old the first time I noticed Marie Cruz laugh.

Not heard. Noticed. We were sitting on the curb outside her house with a bag of stolen popsicles between us, both of our tongues stained blue. She was laughing so hard at something dumb Luke had said on the phone that she snorted and then laughed harder at herself for snorting.

I'd heard her laugh a thousand times by then. We'd been doing this — the curb, the popsicles, the whole ordinary architecture of being nine and then ten and then twelve together. I knew her laugh the way I knew my own house. I could've picked it out in a crowded gym.

But that day I noticed it. The way her whole face did something helpless when she really lost it. The gap where she'd lost a tooth in a bike accident and never quite let the orthodontist close it all the way because she said it made her look interesting. The blue on her tongue.

I didn't have a word for what happened in my chest. I was twelve. I thought maybe I just really liked popsicles.

"You're staring," she said, still catching her breath, wiping her eyes.

"I'm not staring."

"You're staring, Harrison. It's creepy."

"I'm thinking," I said, with all the dignity a twelve-year-old can summon, and she rolled her eyes and shoved her shoulder into mine, and I shoved back, and for a second neither of us moved away after, sitting there with our arms pressed together in the sun, sticky and blue-mouthed and twelve, and something in me went very quiet and very loud at the same time.

I didn't know what it was.

I know now. I've known for a long time now.

When Tristan showed up twenty minutes later doing his usual routine — too loud, too charming, dropping down next to her like he had some kind of claim on the space — something ugly and unfamiliar twisted in my stomach that I also didn't have a word for yet.

I didn't tell her any of it. Not that day. Not for years.

I told myself there'd be time.

***

Present day

My father's kitchen smells like garlic bread and nerves.

"She hates cilantro, right?" Dad asks, for the third time, hovering over a pot of sauce like it might turn on him. "I feel like I remember that. Or was that the other one — no. No, that's Diane. Diane hates cilantro."

"Marie's allergic to shellfish," I say. "Not the same thing."

"Right. Right, I knew that." He wipes his hands on the towel hanging off his shoulder, and I watch him check his reflection in the microwave door, this fifty-three-year-old man who's run a garage and a clubhouse full of grown men for twenty years, looking more nervous than I've seen him look in a decade.

"You didn't have to help with dinner," he says.

"I wanted to."

I found out three days ago — not from him, from Luke, who heard it from somebody at the shop, who heard it from God knows where — that my father was marrying Diane Cruz, and by the time Dad worked up the nerve to actually tell me himself, I'd already had two full days to sit with the second half of that sentence.

Diane Cruz. Which meant Marie.

I remember exactly what my face did when he said it, because I watched it happen in the black screen of the shut-off TV behind him — nothing. I made my face do nothing. Twenty-six years of practice, apparently, is enough to keep a man's face doing nothing while the rest of him falls apart.

"You're happy for me," Dad had said. Not really a question.

"I am," I'd said. Not really a lie, either. Just not the whole truth, the way most things between me and my father have been for a long time now.

I didn't tell him I hadn't said her name out loud since the funeral. I didn't tell him that some nights I still catch myself halfway through a sentence that starts Marie would — Marie would love this song, Marie would think that's hilarious, Marie would never let me live down this haircut — before I remember I don't get to finish those sentences anymore. I definitely didn't tell him about the last conversation Marie and I ever had.

I told him I was happy for him. And then I came over three hours early to help make garlic bread, because apparently that's what a person does with an unfinished conversation that's been sitting there for far too long. They butter bread.

"I know it’s going to be strange for you and Marie, son," Dad says, not looking at me, "I know something happened between you two."

"Dad—"

"I'm not asking. I don't need to know the details." He finally looks up, and there's something steady and a little pleading in his face that I recognize, because it's the same look he had at Mom's grave every year on her birthday. "I just need you to try. For me. And for Diane. She's — Dean, she's the best thing that's happened to me since your mother, and I am not going to lose this because two kids had a falling out a decade ago."

A falling out. Right.

"I'll try," I say, and it comes out rougher than I mean it to.

That's when the doorbell rings.

And there she is.

Furious-looking and so much more beautiful than any of the versions of her I've been grieving all this time.

"Hi, Ree-Ree," I say and watch it land on her like a slap and a gift at the exact same time, watch something complicated cross her face before she shuts it down into a single, careful nod.

She doesn't say anything back.

My father reaches for Diane's hand as she steps up onto the porch, glowing with a happiness, and then we're all four of us funneling into the front hall in a mess of so good to finally and the drive wasn't too bad, was it and somehow, twenty minutes later, we're sitting around my father's dinner table like this is a normal thing that normal families do.

It is, I remind myself. It's just dinner.

It doesn't feel like just dinner. It feels like sitting in a room with a live wire and pretending not to notice the sparks.

Marie sits across from me, and she's doing this thing I remember from when we were kids — this bright, easy performance of fine, laughing at Dad's terrible jokes, being so relentlessly, convincingly okay that if I didn't know her, I'd believe it completely.

But I know her. I know the difference between her real laugh and the one she's using right now, the one that doesn't reach her eyes, the one I used to be able to talk her out of with nothing but a stupid face across a lunch table.

I don't have that right anymore. I gave that up a long time ago.

"You'll have to come by the clubhouse sometime," Dad says to Marie, easy, proud in that way he gets when he's talking about the club. "See the place properly. Dean basically runs the day-to-day of it now — him and Tristan and Luke. Been that way a couple years."

"You handed it over?" Marie asks, and there's real surprise in it, the first unguarded thing she's said all night.

"Not officially. Not yet." Dad waves a hand like it's a small thing, though I know it isn't. "But a man's got to know when the next generation's ready. These three practically raised each other in that garage. Feels right, letting them take it forward."

Marie doesn't say anything to that. She just looks at me for a second, and when I meet her eyes, she looks back down at her plate.

"Dean was actually a huge help tonight," Dad's saying, gesturing at the garlic bread like it's a diplomatic achievement. "Made the whole salad himself."

"Wow," Marie says, and there's an edge under the politeness. "Didn't peg you for a salad guy, Harrison."

"People change," I say.

She freezes for a second.

"Do they, though?"

She holds my eyes exactly long enough to make sure I feel the coldness before she looks away.

The doorbell rings.

Dad's face does something bright and easy, already halfway out of his chair. "That'll be Tristan. Told him to swing by for dessert."

The fork in my hand goes still.

Across the table, Marie's whole posture shifts — sits up a little straighter, some old, automatic warmth sliding into her face before she can catch it, the exact opposite of the wall she's had up for me this whole time — and something ugly and unfamiliar twists hard in my stomach, the same feeling I’ve had when I was twelve years old on a curb watching him drop down beside her.

"Tristan's here?" she says.

Dad's already at the door. I hear it open. I hear that voice — easy, warm, exactly the kind of voice a person could fall for without ever seeing what's underneath it — say her name like he's been waiting a long time to say it too.

"Marie Cruz! Look at you! Come here."

And I watch her get up from the table to go hug him.

The way she would hug me.