Scandalous

Chapter 37

The black car moved through the Sunday morning streets of Pasadena and Shae sat in the back with her hands folded in her lap and watched the city pass and felt her heart doing something she had not given it permission to do.

She had not expected him to answer.

This was the honest truth of it — the thing underneath the impulse that had sent the text, the layer she was sitting with now with the hills getting closer through the window and Terry navigating the turn onto Chaney Trail with the focused, wordless competency he brought to every drive. She had sent the address on a kind of impulse she hadn't fully examined before acting on, and she had sat with the phone in her hand in the quiet of the study and genuinely not known what she was expecting. Not this. Not see you then arriving in under thirty seconds, no qualification, no hesitation visible in the response.

See you then.

She had looked at it for a long moment.

She had changed her shoes.

The morning had started earlier and differently than she'd planned.

Her phone had rung at seven — not an alarm, which she had set for eight, but the specific ring she had assigned to Claire, which was the opening bars of something Claire had made her listen to in September and which she had decided worked as a ring tone because it was impossible to sleep through. She had answered it before she was fully awake.

"Happy birthday," Claire said, and then immediately — in the same breath, as though the greeting and the apology were the same sentence — "I'm so sorry."

Shae had sat up. Even half-asleep she could hear it — the specific, heavy quality of Claire's voice, the texture of someone who had spent the night not sleeping.

"What's wrong."

"I went to the doctor yesterday." A pause in which the sound of Claire's breathing was audible in the particular way of someone who has been breathing carefully all night. "Mono."

"Mononucleosis."

"The whole thing. Fever, swollen everything, I feel like I've been hit by something large and deliberate." A beat. "I'm so sorry, Shae. I had the whole day planned and I—"

"Claire." She said it in the tone that stopped the apology. "It's fine."

"It's your birthday."

"Birthdays happen every year. Mono is temporary." She pulled the duvet up. "Are you at home? Do you need anything? I can have Terry—"

"I'm home, my mom's here, I just — I wanted to call. I'm sorry." The voice had the thick, miserable quality of sick combined with guilty, which was a specific combination. "We'll do something when I'm better. Properly. I'll make it up to you."

"You don't need to make anything up. Go back to sleep."

"Happy birthday," Claire said again, quieter. "Seriously."

"Thank you. Sleep."

She'd hung up.

She had lain in bed for a moment in the quiet of the room and looked at the ceiling and thought about the beach and the beefcakes and the weed and the horror movie and the specific warmth of having a day planned by someone who knew her well enough to include the parts she'd pretend to resist and the parts she'd actually enjoy. She had thought about this with the particular, private ache of someone who is fine and knows they are fine and would have preferred not to be spending their birthday alone regardless.

She got up. She made coffee. She went to the study.

She had been sitting with her book for approximately twenty minutes when her phone chimed with a different notification — not a call, not Claire. The name that appeared in the preview was the one she spoke to least and thought about most in the specific, complicated way of someone who has arrived at a position on a person without having discussed it with them.

Her uncle.

She opened it.

Shae. Happy Birthday. Now that you're 18 you're officially an adult — so I've had the paperwork done. The house is being signed over to you, your name on the deed as of today. Your parents' inheritance has been transferred to your account — I've been holding it since you came to me, it's yours now. Should be more than enough to set you up. I'll keep the monthly allowance coming, same as always. If you need anything, text me. I love you.

She read it twice.

She sat in the study in the quiet of the Sunday morning with the phone in her lap and the book face-down beside her and read it twice and then looked at the wall.

She thought: this is what I wanted. The practical self — the one that had been operating since she was seven and had understood that the version of her that waited for someone else to manage things was going to wait a long time — recognized this immediately. The house. The inheritance. The financial independence that meant that the specific vulnerability of depending on a man she saw approximately four times a year was resolved, quietly and efficiently, by a text message on her eighteenth birthday.

She thought: this is what I wanted and felt something in her chest that was not gratitude and was not relief and was in fact the opposite of what the practical self had predicted.

She had been practicing living alone since the day he'd taken her in at fifteen. The house had always been hers in every way that mattered — she ran it, she knew it, she had filled it with books and the particular, personal order of someone who has lived somewhere on their own terms. She had not been depending on him. She had not been depending on anyone.

So why did the text feel like a door being closed?

She set the phone on the desk. She looked at the wall.

She wanted to call someone. This was the specific, inconvenient quality of the feeling — the rare arrival of something she wanted to say out loud to another person rather than process alone in the quiet of a room. She wanted to tell someone that she had just been officially given her independence by the man responsible for her and that it had felt like being handed a bill rather than a gift, and that she didn't fully understand why.

She thought about Claire. She looked at the phone and thought about Claire's exhausted, mononucleosis voice at seven in the morning and said no.

She thought about Gwen. She pulled up the last message — Gwen had texted yesterday, a brief happy-birthday-eve that was warm in the specific, elegant shorthand of a woman who expressed a great deal in few words. But beneath the text was a note Gwen had left two days ago: hospital appointment Sunday, don't fuss. Gwen would not want to be called during a hospital appointment and Shae would not be the person who called.

She sat with the phone.

She scrolled.

She stopped at his name.

She looked at it for a long moment — the specific quality of a decision she was watching herself make in real time, the way she sometimes watched herself and understood what she was doing and did it anyway. She thought about what it meant that his name was the one she had stopped at. She thought about four people on one hand and a Thanksgiving phone call that had lasted four hours and twenty-three minutes and goodnight, Nathan coming out of her mouth like something that had always lived there.

She typed: Hi

She sent it.

She had not let herself think past the single word.

Terry had been waiting at the bottom of the drive when she'd come out — not because she'd called him, but because Terry operated on a frequency that occasionally anticipated her before she'd made a decision consciously, which she had stopped questioning around the time she turned sixteen.

He'd looked at her when she got in. Not the mirror check — the actual turn, the full look of a man deciding something.

"Where are we going?" he said.

She gave him the address.

He put it in the navigation. He pulled out of the drive and through the gate and turned toward the hills without comment, which was the particular quality of Terry she relied on — the absence of the question she was waiting for, right up until it arrived.

"This man," he said. Not a question. The Millard Trail address sitting in the navigation and Terry's eyes on the road and the very specific quality of a man choosing his words.

"My English teacher," she said.

"I know who he is."

She looked at the back of his head. "Then why are you asking."

"I'm not asking," Terry said. "I'm starting a conversation." He navigated a bend in the road with the unhurried ease of a man who has been driving through Pasadena for years. "Do you trust him?"

The question landed in the car and sat there.

"Of course I trust him," she said, and she heard herself say it and heard the of course and recognized what it was — the slight snap of someone who has been caught thinking about something and is covering the thinking with the snap. "He's my teacher."

Terry raised one eyebrow. She could see it in the mirror.

"I'm just saying," he said, in the tone of a man who is saying more than just that, "be careful."

"I'm always careful."

"You are," he said. He took the turn onto Chaney Trail, the road narrowing as the hills rose around them, the trailhead parking area visible ahead. "Have you heard about the thing? The teacher from the school in Scottsdale. The one that's all over the news."

She went still in the back seat with the specific, controlled stillness she produced when she was feeling something she didn't want visible.

"Everyone's heard about that," she said.

"Just making sure you're thinking about it."

"I'm thinking about going for a hike," she said. Flat. Final in the way she made things final when she wanted a subject to close.

Terry pulled into the small parking area and put the car in park. He did not immediately unlock the doors, which was his version of continuing a conversation she had tried to end.

"Shae," he said. He used her name the way he had been using it since she was fourteen — without the prefix, without the formality, the name alone in the voice of a man who had been driving her to school and to Gwen's and to the bookshop and to every in-between place for years and had accumulated, in the process, a version of her that was more complete than most people's.

"I'm fine," she said.

"I know you can take care of yourself." He met her eyes in the mirror. "You've been taking care of yourself for a long time. That's what I'm worried about."

She looked at him.

Terry looked back with the patient, steady expression of a man who has said what he came to say and is not going to repeat it but is also not going to pretend he didn't say it.

She thought about her uncle's text. Now that you're 18 you're officially an adult. She thought about the house deed and the inheritance transferred and the specific, quiet finality of a door being closed at seven in the morning on her birthday by a text message.

She thought about that's what I'm worried about in Terry's voice and felt it land somewhere different from where she'd been braced for it.

She looked out the window.

Nathan's car was in the parking area. She recognized it from the school lot — the dark grey, the particular, understated quality of it, sitting two spaces from where Terry had stopped.

Her heart did the thing it had been doing since see you then.

"I'll text you when I'm done," she said.

Terry unlocked the doors.

She got out. She stood in the cold, clear December air of the hills above Altadena with the trail entrance ahead of her and the sound of the creek somewhere in the trees below and she breathed in the specific, clean quality of a morning that hadn't decided what it was going to be yet.

She walked toward the trailhead.