The Wrong Kind of Right

chapter 7

The dock at midnight looked different than it did during the day — quieter, more honest somehow, like the lake only told the truth after dark.

I couldn't sleep. New town, old house, a summer that was starting to feel less like exile and more like something I didn't have a name for yet. I found Ethan already out there when I stepped outside, sitting exactly where we'd sat a few nights before, a beer he wasn't really drinking sweating in his hand.

"Can't sleep either?" I asked.

"Never really could. Not since—" He stopped himself.

"Since Claire?" I said it gently, testing.

He went still. I braced for him to shut down, walk away, do the thing he did whenever things got too close to real. He didn't.

"Maya told you," he said. Not a question.

"I overheard. I wasn't trying to."

He was quiet for a long moment, turning the bottle in his hands. "She left me standing at the altar. In front of two hundred people. Didn't even give me a real reason — just said she 'couldn't do it,' like that explained anything."

"I'm sorry."

"Everyone's sorry. Nobody knows what to actually say after that." He looked over at me, something rawer in his expression than I'd seen from him all summer. "You're the first person who hasn't tried to fill the silence with something useless."

"I don't really believe in useless silence," I said. "Sometimes there's nothing to say. Doesn't mean you're alone in it."

He held my gaze longer than was comfortable, or maybe exactly as long as it needed to be. "Why'd you really come here this summer, Aria? You could've stayed with a friend. Gone anywhere."

I thought about lying — the easy answer, the logistics, the convenience. But something about the dark, and his honesty, made me want to match it.

"My parents' divorce is finalizing this month," I admitted. "I couldn't be in that house while it happened. Couldn't watch twenty-six years turn into paperwork."

"I'm sorry," he said, echoing me, but it didn't feel useless this time.

"Yeah. Me too."

We sat there, two people carrying different versions of the same ache, and for the first time, neither of us tried to fix it or explain it away. We just let it exist between us, quiet and shared, which somehow made it lighter.

I didn't know it yet, but that was the night everything started to shift — not with a kiss, not with a declaration, just with two people finally being honest in the dark.