Chapter 4

Marie’s POV

The house goes quiet around eleven, everyone gone home, everyone finally out of rooms to perform fine in, and that's when it hits me.

I'm sitting on the edge of the guest bed — my bed, apparently, for the foreseeable future — and my chest just stops working right. I can't get a full breath no matter how hard I try.

Dad in the driveway. Dad on the ground.

Mom's hair in the sink. Chemo and remission and relapse and chemo again, over and over.

Ten years of not saying his name and now his name is everywhere.

“It's my fault, it's all my fault”

I never asked what he meant, I never let him finish, and now it’s too late —

My hands go cold. The room tilts half an inch to the left and doesn't tilt back. I press my palm flat against my sternum like I can hold my own heart still through skin and bone if I just push hard enough, and none of it works, none of it slows down, it just keeps coming — Dad, Mom, the funeral, the U-Haul, Dean's jaw locked tight over a spoon at dinner, all of it stacked on top of itself with nowhere left to go.

You're fine. Breathe. You're fine.

I don't feel fine. I feel like every single thing I've been holding very still all night has decided to arrive at once, right now, with nobody around to perform for anymore.

I need air. I need a cigarette, badly, the kind of badly I haven't felt in months, and I'm up and moving before I've fully decided to, down the hallway in bare feet, heart still going too hard, hand braced on the wall like the wall is the only steady thing left in this house.

I don't mean to stop at the living room.

I do anyway.

He's shirtless. That's the first thing that registers, before anything else has a chance to — Dean, crouched low in front of the little gallery wall Frank's got going by the stairs, bare-backed in the dim light from the hallway, and my brain just stops on that fact for a second too long. He's not the lanky, half-finished shape I remember. His shoulders have filled out into something broad and solid, muscle stacked along his spine that catches the low light every time he shifts. There's ink I've never seen before, dark lines curling over one shoulder blade and down his arm, and I have no idea what any of it means or when he got it or who was standing next to him when he did, and the not-knowing hurts.

Then I notice what he's actually doing.

He's got a frame in both hands, and he's not moving.

I know that picture. I know it before I'm close enough to actually see it — a wallet-sized photo blown up too big for its frame, the two of us at maybe thirteen, sunburnt and grinning, his arm slung around my neck like it belonged there.

Dean’s thumb moves across the glass — right over my face in the frame, back and forth, like he's trying to memorize something he already knows by heart.

My own heart slams so hard it's audible, or it feels that way, loud enough that I'm sure he'll hear it, sure he'll turn around and find me standing here in the dark watching him do something private and unguarded and not meant for anyone.

I don't wait to find out.

I turn around and I go, quiet as I can manage on legs that don't feel entirely like mine, out the back door into the cold, my cigarettes shaking in my hand before I even get one lit.

***

2013

"You're not seriously going to the dance with him."

Dean's voice cracked on the word seriously, which was new — his voice had started doing that a few months back, dropping and cracking in the same sentence like it couldn't decide who it wanted to be yet — and I remember laughing at exactly the wrong moment, which made his ears go red.

"Why not? He asked. You didn't."

"That's not — that's not the point."

"Then what's the point, Harrison?"

We were fourteen, sitting on the hood of his dad's truck in the garage bay after hours, the smell of motor oil so familiar by then it barely registered anymore, and Dean was staring at his own hands like they'd personally betrayed him.

"The point is he's an idiot," he said finally. "The point is you deserve someone who isn't an idiot."

"So you're saying I should go with you instead." I meant it as a joke. I watched it land as something else entirely, watched his whole face do something complicated and fast before he shut it down.

"I'm saying you can do better than Kyle Matthews."

"Noted." I bumped my shoulder into his, the way I always did when I wanted him to stop looking like that, whatever that was. "You could just ask me yourself, you know. If you wanted to go."

"I don't — " He stopped. Started again. "We're friends, Ree. That'd be weird."

"Super weird," I agreed, too fast, and something in my chest did a strange little drop that I didn't examine, because I was fourteen and examining things wasn't really on the agenda yet, and Dean Harrison was just Dean, the boy who'd been there since first grade, and thinking about him any other way felt like it would break something I didn't want broken.

So I didn't think about it. I went to the dance with Kyle Matthews, who was in fact an idiot, and I spent half the night looking for Dean across the room and telling myself I wasn't.

I never told him that.

I've never told anyone that.

***

Present day

The cigarette helps, a little. My hands stop shaking somewhere around the second drag, and the cold night air does what it always does, sharp and clarifying, until I can breathe again without having to think about breathing.

I sit down hard on the porch steps and stare out at Frank Harrison's backyard, at the row of motorcycles catching moonlight under the carport, and try very hard not to think about what I just saw.

I fail immediately.

Why was he even looking at that picture? It's just a photo. We were thirteen. It shouldn't mean anything, and the fact that I’m trying to figure out what it means is its own problem, one I don't have the energy for tonight.

I don't know what to do with that. I don't know where to put it, next to everything else I'm not supposed to still feel.

The door behind me creaks open.

"Didn't know you still smoked," Dean says.

I don't turn around. I don't trust my face right now, not one bit.

"There's a lot you don't know," I say, and it comes out rougher than I mean it to, rough enough that he goes quiet behind me, and neither of us moves, and the cigarette burns down between my fingers while I wait to see if he's going to stay.

“Welcome home, Ree-Ree,” he says.

Then the door shuts, and he's gone.