The Truth I Owed Him

CHAPTER THREE: THE NAME

I grabbed the phone out of her hand before she could stop me.

Vanessa Pierce — attending.

For a second the name didn’t mean anything. It just sat there on the screen, two normal words, no weight to them at all. And then it landed, slow, like a stone dropping through water, and I felt my stomach drop right along with it.

“Vanessa Pierce,” I said out loud, like saying it would make it make sense. “Vanessa Pierce. From the literary magazine. The one who used to wear the cardigans with the little pins on them.”

“That’s her.”

“She was two years below us, Cleo. She was a sophomore when we graduated.”

“I know.”

“She used to bring her own tea bags to school because she didn’t like the cafeteria coffee.”

“Mara.” Cleo put her hand over mine, gently, the way you’d stop someone from picking at a wound. “I don’t think the tea bags are the part that matters right now.”

She was right, obviously, and I hated that she was right, and I think some small, petty, exhausted part of me was grabbing onto the tea bags because focusing on something small and stupid felt a thousand times safer than focusing on the actual thing, which was: somewhere in the last ten years, Noah Calloway had fallen in love with a kind, quiet, tea-bag-bringing girl from two grades below us, and he was going to marry her, and I had absolutely no claim to feeling anything about that at all, and yet here I was, feeling everything about it, all at once, sitting at my own kitchen counter with mascara still half down my face.

“I don’t even know her,” I said. “Not really. I probably said ten words to her in four years of high school.”

“Does that make it better or worse?”

I didn’t answer, because I genuinely didn’t know.

I didn’t sleep that night. Not even a little. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling until the sky outside my window went from black to that flat gray color it gets right before the sun actually shows up, and somewhere around four in the morning I gave up pretending and just got my laptop out and looked her up.

Vanessa Pierce ran a little nonprofit now, something to do with literacy programs for kids in the county. Her photos were exactly what you’d expect from someone who runs a literacy nonprofit. Warm, a little goofy, a lot of pictures of her surrounded by kids holding books bigger than their own torsos. She looked happy. Genuinely, uncomplicatedly happy, the kind of happy that doesn’t perform for the camera because it doesn’t need to.

I hated her a little, looking at those photos. Not because of anything she’d done. Because she got to be that uncomplicated. Because somewhere along the way she’d built a life that didn’t have a ten-year-old lie sitting in the middle of it like a live wire.

I closed the laptop around five and finally, fell asleep. When I woke up it was past noon and my phone had four missed calls from Cleo and one text that just said: We need to talk about logistics. Call me when you’re up.

Logistics turned out to mean: what I was wearing, was I drinking, was I bringing a plan or just winging it, and most importantly, in Cleo’s words, “are you going to actually talk to him or are you going to spend the whole night hiding near the dessert table like you do at every single event we’ve ever been to together.”

“I don’t hide near dessert tables.”

“You once hid near a dessert table at our own cousin’s funeral, Mara.”

“There was a really good lemon cake.”

“There’s always a really good something. That’s not the point.” She was pacing, I could hear it, the particular rhythm of her footsteps when she walks and talks at the same time, which she does whenever she’s nervous on someone else’s behalf. “I need you to have a plan. Even a bad one. Because I know you, and if you walk in there without one, you are going to freeze up the second you see his face, and then you’re going to come home and tell me it just wasn’t the right moment, and then six more years are going to go by.”

She wasn’t wrong. That terrified me more than anything else she’d said.

“Okay,” I said. “The plan is, I get him alone. At some point in the night. Doesn’t matter how. And I tell him.”

“Tell him what, though. You still haven’t told me what.”

“I know.”

“Mara…”

“I know, Cleo. I will. I promise I will, before I tell him, I’ll tell you first, I just …I need to get there first. I need to actually be standing in that room before I know if I can do it.”

She went quiet on the other end of the line for a second, and when she spoke again her voice had changed, gone softer, the way it does when she stops being my hype-woman and just becomes my sister. “Is it bad?” she asked. “Whatever it is. Is it going to make him hate you?”

I thought about that question longer than I wanted to.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I think it might make him understand. But I don’t know if understanding and forgiving are the same thing, and I think I’m about to find out the hard way.”

The night of the reunion, I stood in front of my closet for forty-five minutes before Cleo finally walked in, took one look at the four outfits laid out on my bed, and picked the green dress without asking me a single thing about it.

“Wear this.”

“Why that one?”

“Because it’s the one you keep picking up and putting back down, which means some part of you already wants to wear it and the rest of you is scared to.”

I put it on. She zipped me up the back, and then she stood behind me in the mirror, the way she’s done since we were kids, her chin on my shoulder, and for a second neither of us said anything at all.

“You ready?” she asked.

“No.”

“Good. Means you’re taking it seriously.” She squeezed my shoulders once, hard, and then stepped back. “Let’s go before you change your mind four more times.”

We got in the car. The drive to the Lakeside Pavilion takes eleven minutes from my apartment. I know this because I have made that drive more times than I can count, half my childhood spent at that lake, and I spent every single one of those eleven minutes with my hands pressed flat against my own knees, trying to keep them from shaking.

We pulled into the gravel lot just as the sun was dropping low over the water, gold and heavy, the whole place lit up with string lights that made it look like something out of a movie instead of the same gym-turned- venue, Crestwood had used for every formal event since I was a kid.

And there, parked three spots down from us, engine just cutting off, headlights dying, was a truck I recognized instantly, in my body, before my brain had even caught up.

His truck.

He was already here.

“Cleo,” I said, and my voice came out so quiet I wasn’t sure she’d even hear it over the sound of her own seatbelt unclicking. “He’s already inside.”

She froze with her hand on the door handle, looking at me across the front seat, and I watched her face do the thing where she goes from joking-nervous to actually-nervous in under a second.

“Okay,” she said slowly. “So we go in. Right now. Before you have time to think about it.”

I didn’t move. My whole body had locked up, hands still flat against my knees, staring at that empty truck like it might tell me something if I looked at it long enough.

“Mara.” Cleo’s voice was sharp now, urgent. “Mara, look at me.”

I didn’t look at her. I was looking past her, out the windshield, at the door of the Pavilion swinging open right at that exact second and at the shape stepping out of it into the gold light, scanning the parking lot like he was looking for someone, like maybe, somehow, some part of him already knew exactly which car we’d be sitting in.