I fold my legs onto the chair, watching the mountain. There’s a mug of coffee cradled in my hands, though it’s already ice-cold. The mountain’s blue, then silver, then pale yellow as the sun comes up behind me, washes it with light.
I take a sip of the disgusting coffee and make myself the colors change, committing myself to it even though I don’t like sunrises.
I’m not a morning person. I’m not getting up early t0 rejoice in the promise of a new day while breathing in hope and light or whatever shit morning people do. If I’m seeing a sunrise, it’s probably because something’s gone wrong and I never went to bed.
For instance, right now.
I take another sip — ugh — pull my feet up further, onto the cushion covering the metal chair. It doesn’t help the cold but it gives me something to think about it, at least.
I couldn’t sleep after Seth left. I didn’t bother trying. I put all the shit back in my box. I put the box back. I stormed around the condo for a little while before remembering that the lobby has free coffee starting at five in the morning, so I threw a robe on over my sweater and came down here.
And now I’m sitting on the balcony, overlooking the town, watching the sun come up in the freezing cold because it feels like what I want right now.
I want to sit here until I can’t stand it, then go roast myself by a fire. I want to get drunk and just off a ski lift, just to see what happens. Get a full-face tattoo. Run naked through town. I want to do something reckless and destructive and transformative, because right now I’m so fucking tired of myself I can’t stand it.
Behind me, the balcony door opens, and I sigh into the coffee mug.
“Hey, Freckles,” my dad says.
I turn, surprised.
“You’re not cold?”
“Hey,” I say.
“Well, here’s a blanket,” he says, and hands me one, thick and woolen with a geometric pattern. I recognize it from the penthouse.
“Thanks,” I say.
He settles in the chair next to me, fully dressed in slacks and sneakers, a puffy parka, coffee in a travel mug. I’m still in pajamas, a giant sweater, a robe, and slippers. We must make a hell of a pair right now.
“Your mom and I got into a fight up here once,” he says, leaning back, sneakered feet crossing at the ankle. “We were here for our first wedding anniversary. I think you were about six months old.”
I was born about six months after my parents’ wedding, and yes, that’s why they got married.
“What about?” I ask, eyes still on the mountain.
He sighs, laces his fingers together around the mug he’s holding.
“I don’t even remember,” he says, thoughtfully. “That might have been the one over the eggbeater.”
They divorced before I was two, so it’s not exactly a secret that they didn’t get along.
“Sounds travels, huh?” I say, looking into the mug. I don’t want to have this conversation, but at least it’s with my dad, who’ll relay it to Vera, not with Vera herself.
“A bit,” he says.
“Sorry,” I say, and tilt my head back against the glass wall behind me. “I know it’s… I know I’m me. Sorry you had to hear that.”
He reaches out, over the arms of our chairs, and puts an arm around me.
“It’s great that you’re you,” he says, punctuating it with a shoulder squeeze.
“It doesn’t feel like it,” I say, too tired and spent to do anything but tell the truth. “It mostly feels like…”
I trail off, my mind blank as the morning sky.
“… I do everything a little bit wrong, and that spirals into me doing everything a lot wrong,” I finish.
There’s a long, considered silence.
“I wish your mom was still around,” he finally says. “I miss her sometimes, even now.”
I exhale, my breath blurring the sky.
“Me too,” I say.
“You’re so much like her,” he says. “I think by now, you’d be great friends.”
I can’t help but laugh, my head still back against the wall. When she died I was fifteen, and I was an asshole in all the ways fifteen-year-olds can be assholes, so we were going through a rough patch.
“Well, we had a lot in common,” I say.
“I mean it,” my dad says.
“Thanks,” I say, then take another sip of cold coffee. Grimace. “I just feel like such a fuck up.”
“Freckles, everyone sitting on this balcony right now has gotten into a shouting match with a parter in the dead of night,” he says, sounding very stoic. “It’s just the way of things. Besides, you can’t fuck up badly enough that I won’t still love you.”
I shift positions so I can lean my head against his shoulder and close my eyes.
“I love you too,” I say.
We stay there like that for a few minutes. The sun keeps rising. I wonder if Seth’s back in Sprucevale yet, or still on the road, or even going back to Sprucevale, or maybe he’s already in a cheap motel —
“Can we go back inside?” I ask, cutting off my own train of thought. “It’s kind of cold out here.”
“Thank God, I thought you’d never ask,” my dad says, already standing, offering me his hand. “How about I take you to breakfast? There’s a great hole in the wall that Vera never wants to go to.”
I wrap the blanket around myself and shuffle toward the door.
“Sounds perfect,” I say.
Chapter Forty-Four
Seth
By seven-thirty that morning, I’m on the outskirts of Sprucevale. The drive should have been longer by an hour, but I did ninety the whole way back and only stopped once.
I want Snowpeak, West Virginia and skiing and Delilah and her family in the rearview mirror. I want to stop hearing her say I just want you gone. I want to stop seeing the look on her face when she mentioned Mindy’s tattoo.
Even her car smells like her. It feels like her. There’s a hula girl on the dashboard and her sunglasses in the glove box along with three half-empty bottles of sunscreen and it all reminds me that it happened again.
After everything, it happened again. We fucked and we fought and now I’m driving away from her, furious and heartbroken, like I’m stuck in some nightmare time loop. I can’t believe I’m not used to it by now. I can’t believe that I don’t have a system for dealing with my post-Delilah weeks; a Gantt chart or something that says sleep for eighteen hours and then bake three cakes, play video games, take up Crossfit. Find someone new for a night.
Only this time is worse, because this time wasn’t two nights in some motel. This time was nearly two months. This time was square dancing and ice skating and hiking and cooking, movie nights on the couch and driving to the mountains just to see the sunset.
This time hurts in a new, astonishing way.
I’m a few miles from my house when I realize my problem: I’m still in Delilah’s car, not my own. I could park it at my place, but I don’t want to text her about it. I don’t want to look out the window and see her getting into it. I don’t want to think about this car ever again, so instead of going home I pick up my phone, think for a moment, and then call Levi.