UNCLE ROGER'S BIGGEST SECRET

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Midterms swallowed the next two weeks whole, the specific, narrow tunnel vision of syllabus week promises finally coming due, and my life shrank down to the café, the library, and my own apartment. Zed and I still saw each other, but in smaller doses, a dinner squeezed between his internship hours and my closing shifts.

"I feel like I haven't seen you in a year," he said, sprawled on my bed while I highlighted a textbook chapter I should have read two weeks earlier.

"It's been four days."

"Four very long days." He nudged my foot with his. "How's the internship going, by the way. You've mentioned it like twice since the barbecue."

"It's good. Busy. Roger's got me doing actual work, not just coffee runs." He rolled onto his back, staring at my ceiling. "We're bidding on this big contract right now, and there's a rival firm trying to undercut us. Renata Silva, she and Roger apparently have history. He gets this look whenever her name comes up. Jaw goes tight."

I thought of Roger's face at dinner when Nora had mentioned the same contract, the same tightness he'd tried to smooth over. "Sounds stressful for him."

"He's handling it. Speaking of, my mom wants to do a whole family thing at the lake house before it gets too cold. You in?"

"When is it?"

"This weekend, actually. Short notice, but she's determined." He sat up, checking his phone. "Everyone's invited. Sofia, Gigi, Grant and his family, Roger if he can pull himself away from the office."

"I'll check my shifts, but yeah. I've never actually seen a lake house that wasn't in a movie."

"It's not fancy. Questionable plumbing, a dock Sofia insists is haunted. But it's got a certain charm." He smiled, something soft crossing his face. "Some of my best memories are up there. I want you to see it."

I ran into Caleb the next afternoon in the hallway outside our shared lecture, and mentioned the trip in passing, the way you mention plans to someone whose opinion doesn't really carry weight either way.

"A whole weekend with the extended family," he said, adjusting his bag on his shoulder. "Brave."

"It's fine. I like them."

"That's what people say right before something goes sideways in a lake house." He grinned to show he was joking, mostly. "Have fun. Try not to get eaten by the haunted dock."

"You heard about the dock."

"Everyone's heard about the dock, apparently, it's basically local legend at this point." He waved as he peeled off toward his next class, and I laughed and kept walking, and didn't think about him again until much later that night, an unrelated stray thought while I was packing, wondering idly whether he'd been serious about the practice exam he'd promised to dig up.

I got the shift covered by Wednesday, and by Friday afternoon I was throwing a bag together, Mia perched on my bed critiquing my swimsuit choices with the seriousness of a woman being paid for her opinion.

"Not that one. That one's for a pool, this is a lake, lakes have a whole different energy." She tossed a different suit at my head. "This one. This one says I am relaxed and unbothered and definitely did not spend forty minutes picking a swimsuit."

"You're unwell."

"I'm thorough." She flopped back against my pillows. "You nervous? Whole weekend with the family, not just a dinner."

"A little. It's different, staying over. More time to say the wrong thing."

"You'll be fine. You're annoyingly good at this stuff." She grinned. "Go forth. Text me if the dock's actually haunted."

The lake house sat at the end of a long gravel drive, a wide wooden place with a wraparound porch and a dock that did, admittedly, have a certain crooked, waterlogged menace to it, and by the time Zed and I pulled in, half the family cars were already there, Sofia's music drifting out an open window, Nora directing a cooler toward the kitchen like a woman marshaling troops.

"This is it," Zed said, grabbing our bags from the trunk, something easy and unguarded in his face that I didn't see as often back on campus, buried under internship stress and business school ambition. "Grandpa built half of this himself. Badly, according to my mom, but he built it."

"I love it already."

"Wait till you see the loft. Sofia and I used to have wars up there with couch cushions. I have a scar on my elbow from a particularly aggressive one when I was nine."

"A scar from a couch cushion war."

"It was a very serious war."

Inside smelled like cedar and old sunscreen and something Nora already had simmering on the stove, and Sofia met us at the door in a bathing suit and an oversized T-shirt, phone in hand as always, already narrating the weekend's agenda before we'd even set our bags down. Gigi had claimed the best chair on the porch and did not intend to relinquish it, a paperback open on her lap that she wasn't really reading, more interested in commenting on anyone who walked past.

The weekend unspooled easily after that. Saturday was sun and lake water and Gigi refusing to leave her lounge chair except to reapply sunscreen and deliver opinions about everyone's swimming form, Sofia dragging me into the water despite my protests that the lake was, in fact, freezing, Zed teaching me to skip stones with limited success on my part, every one of mine sinking on the first bounce while his skated four, five times across the flat gray surface.

"You're not snapping your wrist," he said, standing behind me, adjusting my grip with a patience that made something in my chest go warm and simple. "Like this."

My next stone skipped twice. I considered it a personal triumph.

We spent the afternoon floating on the two ancient inner tubes that lived in the boathouse, drifting further out than we probably should have, the sun warm on my shoulders, Sofia periodically shrieking about something in the water that turned out, every time, to be nothing more than a stick. Grant showed up around noon with his wife and two kids who immediately vanished toward the dock with Sofia in tow, and the porch filled up with the low, easy noise of a family settling into a weekend with nowhere particular to be.

Roger arrived Saturday afternoon, later than everyone else, still in the half-rolled sleeves of someone who'd come straight from a work call, tension visible in his shoulders that took most of an hour by the water to loosen. I watched him from a distance more than once, the way he sat a little apart on the dock even once he'd changed out of his work clothes, the way Sofia had to practically drag him into a game of cards after dinner, and told myself it was just curiosity, the ordinary interest you develop in someone once you've started to learn the shape of their family.

Dinner that night was loud and easy, the whole family crammed around a long table on the porch as the sky went orange over the water, Gigi holding court again about some scandal from decades ago that half the table had clearly heard a dozen times before, Nora refilling everyone's glass whether they wanted it refilled or not, the citronella candles doing a mediocre job against the evening bugs. I ended up seated near Roger by nothing more than the arbitrary geometry of a table too small for everyone, and at one point, reaching for the same serving dish at the same moment, our hands brushed, brief, accidental, and neither of us said anything about it, and I spent the rest of the meal aware of exactly where his hand was resting on the table every time I glanced over, which was more often than I meant to.

I texted Mia from the porch after dinner, everyone else drifting toward the fire pit Zed's grandfather had built decades ago out of stacked stones.

"lake house is gorgeous. dock is in fact slightly haunted looking, will report back."

"take pictures!! also drink water, you get weird when you're dehydrated and around a lot of people"

"i do not get weird"

"you get VERY weird. anyway have fun. tell zed i said hi"

By Sunday morning, the house had settled into a slower rhythm, people drifting in and out of sleep, coffee, the dock. I woke early, before Zed, the cabin quiet except for the distant sound of someone already up and moving downstairs, a low murmur of a coffee maker working through its cycle. Sunlight was just starting to come through the thin curtains, pale and gray, the kind of early light that made everything feel suspended, not quite the day yet.

My body still ached pleasantly from a full day in the sun, sand still gritty somewhere in the sheets despite my best efforts the night before, and I decided to shower before the whole house was awake and fighting over hot water. I eased out from under Zed's arm without waking him, grabbed my towel and a change of clothes, and padded down the hall in bare feet, floorboards cool and slightly uneven under me, toward the bathroom Nora had pointed out the night before, the one attached to the guest wing, the one she'd said was free, separate from the one everyone else would be lining up for.

The hallway was dim, curtains still drawn in the rooms I passed, the house holding that particular hush of a building full of people who hadn't yet decided to be awake. I could hear the faint hiss of water running somewhere ahead, and assumed, without really thinking about it, that it was the pipes settling, or maybe someone in the kitchen below, the old plumbing Zed had warned me about making its usual complaints.

The door wasn't locked. I know that now, turning it over the way you turn over the one detail that could have changed everything. I didn't check. I just pushed it open, already half out of my sleep shirt, already thinking about hot water and nothing else, and the door swung wide before I registered the sound of the shower already running, before I registered the shape of a man standing under it.

For a second my brain simply refused to process it. Steam fogged the glass just enough to soften the edges of him without hiding anything, water sheeting down a broad back, over the hard line of his shoulders, down the ridged muscle either side of his spine to where it dipped in at his waist. Not Zed. My whole body understood that half a second before my mind caught up, some older, dumber part of me already cataloguing the differences, the extra inches of height, the width of him, before the rest of me screamed at myself to look away.

He turned at the sound of the door, unhurried, like some part of him hadn't fully registered yet that anyone was there, and for one suspended, terrible moment there was nothing between us and the glass but water and steam. Roger. I saw all of him, older, harder, more finished-looking than any body I'd ever let myself study this closely, and my mind, without asking my permission, without any decency at all, ran its own quiet, mortifying comparison against every night I'd spent with Zed, found itself somewhere it had no right to go, and I felt heat flood up my throat into my face that had nothing to do with the steam in the room.

My mouth had gone dry and impossibly not dry at the same time, some frantic, useless swallow working its way down my throat like my body thought that would fix anything. It didn't fix anything. Nothing about this moment was fixable.

Neither of us moved.