In His Bed

Chapter 10: Fairview Calls

Aria

The call came on a Saturday morning, while I was standing in my kitchen trying to decide whether the faint queasiness I'd been fighting all week counted as morning sickness or just dread.

"Aria, honey." My mother's voice, warm and familiar and immediately, reliably capable of collapsing thirty years of distance into a single syllable. "I need you to come home for your aunt Louise's anniversary dinner. It's the fortieth. She'll never forgive either of us if you're not there."

"Mom, I've got a lot going on right now."

"You've always got a lot going on. That's not new information." A pause, and I could hear the specific, careful softening in her voice that meant she already suspected something. "Is everything all right?"

"Everything's fine." The lie came fast, practiced, the same reflex I'd used my whole adult life to keep my mother from worrying about things that weren't fixable over the phone. "When is it?"

"Two weeks. Saturday." Another pause, this one heavier. "You'll bring someone, won't you? Your aunt's been asking about your life for months and I never know what to tell her."

I closed my eyes. "I'll think about it."

I hung up already knowing, with the particular dread of someone who'd spent her whole life understanding her hometown's specific gravity, exactly what "thinking about it" was going to amount to.

I told Stan that evening, mostly because avoiding it felt like its own kind of lie, and watched something complicated cross his face at the word Fairview.

"Your aunt Louise," he said slowly. "The one with the lake house."

"You remember that?"

"I remember everything about that town, Aria. Some of it I'd pay real money to forget." A dry, humorless almost-laugh. "When is it?"

"Two weeks. I wasn't going to ask you to come."

"Were you going to tell anyone why you weren't bringing someone?"

The question sat there, more pointed than it seemed. I hadn't thought that far ahead, hadn't let myself think past the immediate discomfort of the invitation itself, and Stan watching me not have an answer told me he already knew exactly what I'd have said if pressed. Nothing. A vague deflection. Twelve more years of nothing.

"I don't know," I admitted.

"I could come." He said it carefully, like he was testing the weight of the offer before he fully committed to it. "Not as a performance. Not because either of us owes Fairview an explanation. But because you shouldn't have to walk into that town alone carrying something this big, and because, frankly, I'd rather be standing next to you when people start doing the math on the timeline than let you field it by yourself."

"You hate Fairview."

"I hate what happened to me in Fairview. That's different." Something old and tired moved behind his eyes. "The town itself is just a town. It's the people in it who make it complicated."

I studied him for a long moment, weighing the offer against every instinct that told me bringing Stan back into that specific world was asking for exactly the kind of collision neither of us was ready for. "You understand what you're walking into. Everyone there remembers exactly who you were at seventeen. Some of them still blame your father for half the town's bad decade."

"I know."

"And Marcus Aldridge's family still has a house two streets over from my aunt's."

Something flickered, fast and unmistakable, across Stan's face at the name, gone before I could fully read it. "I know that too."

"Then why would you volunteer for that?"

"Because you're not going to face any of it alone if I can help it." His voice had gone quiet, certain in a way that left no room for the deflection I half expected. "I told you I wasn't going anywhere. That includes the hard parts. Especially the hard parts."

I felt something in my chest loosen despite every warning bell telling me not to trust it yet. "My mother's going to have opinions."

"I imagine she will."

"She's going to ask questions you're not ready to answer."

"Then I'll answer the ones I can and be honest about the ones I can't." A ghost of his old, easy confidence resurfaced, the specific charm I remembered from before either of us had learned to armor against it. "I've survived worse interrogations than your mother's dinner table, Aria. Boardrooms are scarier."

"That is objectively not true and you know it."

"No," he admitted, and something warmer crept into his voice, "it isn't. But I'm still coming."

I called my mother back that night, and told her, carefully, that I'd be bringing someone after all, and listened to the sudden, delighted surprise in her voice with a complicated mix of relief and dread I didn't fully have a name for.

"Anyone I know?" my mother asked, too casually.

I closed my eyes, and thought of a treehouse, and a hallway, and twelve years of careful distance about to collapse in front of an entire town that had never fully let either of us go.

"You'll remember him," I said finally. "It's Stan. Stan Montenegro."

The silence on the other end of the line lasted just long enough to confirm exactly how complicated the next two weeks were about to become.