Archive of Our Own ^beta

Four years gone, Beck still haunts the summer house. 

There’s a reason Laurel doesn’t stay there anymore when she visits, and it’s not just to give Belly the privacy she feels she deserves. Before that summer house belonged to the kids, it belonged to Beck. Laurel has gotten better at grief; she’s done two successful book tours with the book she wrote with Susannah’s blessing, she’s tried her hardest to show her kids that she has big and complicated feelings, she’s attempted not to just hold all of her grief in her chest and let it rest on her face. But she is not perfect. Before she was a mother, she was Beck’s friend. Before she loved anyone, she loved Susannah. And the summer house is the one place where she can’t escape that. 

But her daughter is marrying Susannah and Adam’s son. Not the one she and Beck had smiled at each other knowingly about, but one of them all the same. She can’t avoid the summer house. Not this summer. 

She had intended to grab her dress for the ceremony and leave, escape back to the hotel and, just maybe, back into the haven of John’s familiar arms for the evening. But she is caught in a tide of emotions as soon as she steps through the front door. The dress leaves her mind. She walks through the first floor instead, her feet tracing the path without having to think about her route at all.

Laurel can’t forget what the summer house looked like all those years ago, empty thanks to Julia’s acquisition. She hasn’t spent very much time here since, but she can tell that it has been put painstakingly back into place, an exact copy of what Susannah had once made it. Everywhere is a shadow of her, even though Laurel knows it was not Beck who last put everything in place. It was Conrad. It had been him four years ago, and maybe all these recent touches are his, too–hydrangeas in all of the vases, freshly painted baseboards, new photos of Susannah propped up on odd sidetables.

Laurel pauses in the kitchen. She expects to see someone sitting on the island. That is where Beck had sat a million times, a glass of red loose in her hand, arms wide and ready to hold her tight for as long as Laurel would let her. Or maybe Belly, always ready with a question and a responding laugh that would fill the air and make this house feel like magic once again. But the kitchen is empty, save for the photographs and portraits that hang on the pale green expanses of the walls. Around her is Belly, growing up, taking her place. There are fewer photos from after Susannah’s death, but the few there are display Belly and Jeremiah all over each other. Laurel traces one finger over the image of her daughter. She’s not sure if it’s just her, but Belly seems a little dimmer in the new photo than in the one that abuts it of her at sixteen, smiling at someone off camera and absolutely radiant. 

Her eyes drift past the photos and out the back door. Most of the outside lights are off, but she can see the rough silhouette of a figure in one of the poolside chairs. She steps closer to the door, squinting her eyes.

She sees Conrad, reclined, holding his arms loosely around himself. Her special guy, who has never been able to keep his feelings off of his face. 

She grabs two beers from the fridge and heads out to see him. 

On the eve of Adam and Susannah’s wedding, Laurel snuck from her hotel room and lit a cigarette. 

John was somewhere inside, dozing. A few hallways away, Susannah lay in her bridal suite, hopefully long at rest for her big day. Laurel didn’t know where Adam was, but she had a hard time mustering the energy to care. 

She knew that she could have woken John and asked him to stand with her, shoulder to shoulder. He would have wrinkled his nose at the smoke curlicuing off into the night sky, but he wouldn’t have said anything about it. He would have been happy to stand as her silent companion until she let out one sigh too many, and he would gently prod until she explained. But she wasn’t in any mood to explain how she was feeling, no matter how many sighs her boyfriend allowed her first. She wasn’t even interested in having her feelings flanking her, omnipresent whispers in her brain. 

So she stood in the shadows of the parking lot and peered up at the sky, washed out of any stars in the omnipresent lights of Boston. 

A third of the way through the cigarette, she realized she didn’t want the rest. Beck always took more than half, and it had been a long time since Laurel had smoked without her. She wondered if she’d have to get used to finishing her own cigarettes. Something ached in her chest, tracing the path where the smoke had entered her lungs. 

She hadn’t smoked before she met Susannah. When she had gone off to college, she’d been more sheltered than she wanted to admit, desperate to appear normal and cool and mysterious all at the same time. At her first party, she had slipped outside when the combination of liquor and heat and noise had gotten to her. Before she could catch her breath, there was a blonde at her elbow, a head taller than her and glowing like the sun had stepped out onto the city street at midnight. 

“Want a cigarette?” She’d said, proffering the box of Marlboro Lights to her. It shone in her hand like a sunbeam. 

Laurel had always been so good at saying no. She tried to muster the courage to say it then. But as she stared into this woman’s face, she realized that she wouldn’t even know where to begin. 

“Sure,” she had said, instead, and they shared one, passing it back and forth like they had done it a million times already. Laurel’s heart had felt like it would pound out of her chest. As it got shorter, she breathed in too deeply, and doubled over right there on the street, hacking up a lung. She expected this sunshine woman to cringe away, but instead she felt a hand on her back, reassuring and soothing. 

“It’s not your first, is it?” she asked. 

Laurel shook her head insistently, but the woman laughed at her. “It is. Oh no. I’m a bad influence.”

“And I guess I’m a bad liar,” Laurel said, finally recovering breath enough to speak. 

The woman smiled. The light ebbed and flowed around her, as though to her will. Laurel never thought the night could be that bright. “At least we can be bad together.” She plucked the cigarette from between Laurel’s fingers. “It’s alright. I like finishing them off.”

Laurel looked down at the cigarette. Marlboro Light, the only kind she’d ever smoked. She’d thought they were rich girl cigarettes, and they were. But she didn’t mind those things the way she once did. Now they reminded her of Susannah, of the vows she was hours removed from giving in a three-hundred-year-old church bedecked with beautiful garlands. She let it burn down to the filter, and then, with an air of finality, she dropped it to the ground and crushed it beneath her heel, thinking of where her life would be in twenty-four hours. 

The next morning she would get up, help Beck prepare, watch the stylist pin up her hair and think back to all of the times she had tried and failed to help her tame her hair back into a cascading bun. She would pop a bottle of champagne and hold her tight in those last moments they had together, just the two of them. Laurel breathed in, savoring the smell of the parking lot and the lingering ash. 

For a moment, she let herself wonder what might have happened the next morning if she entered Susannah’s room and just wrapped her in her arms. If she rested her head on her best friend’s shoulder and sobbed for the future that was no longer available to them, houses that belonged to each of them rather than them as a whole, husbands and children who would be expected to hold all of the secrets they had once cradled between themselves. She wondered if it would have made any difference at all, or if for the rest of the day her best friend would have had a strained, strangled look in her eyes as she took her vows. 

Laurel wrapped her arms around herself and went inside. 

The next day, she was the maid of honor that Beck needed. She smiled in the pictures and held the bouquets and pretended like there was nothing else she would have preferred to do. Because there wasn’t. Susannah was the person she wanted to be with, the person she found herself itching to reach for, even in the dead of night with John alongside her. There was nothing that she wanted more than to be there with her on this special day. 

She could almost convince herself that it was her special day, too. They had always shared things like that, after all. Susannah had made sure of it. 

At the end of the night she brushed Beck’s blonde hair back off of her shoulders and sternly told Adam to be good to her. Susannah squeezed her hand so tight that it felt like a jolt, like she was trying to wake her up from a nightmare. Then she let go. 

John put his arm around Laurel during the taxi home, and she tried her best to keep every thought in her head off of her face. 

At first, Laurel couldn’t imagine what would come next. Life after marriage had seemed like a fenced-off future that she couldn’t see around, much less scale herself. It wasn’t long before Susannah called her and begged her to come over. Laurel had been in the midst of packing, preparing for a relocation to Philadelphia for her and John’s new tenure-track jobs, but she dropped it all at once and hopped on the Red Line to Susannah and Adam’s new rowhouse. She was greeted at the door by Beck, radiant with a wet face, her smile cracking open like sunlight and spilling out of her house, light and airy. Laurel was barely inside before she had a pregnancy test shoved into her hands, and they collapsed in a heap in the entryway, crying and inconsolable.

“What does Adam think?” Laurel said sometime later, when she had dried Susannah’s face and they had caught their breath.

Susannah shook her head, slow and serene. “He’s at work. I haven’t told him yet.” She reached forward, grasping Laurel’s face between her hands. “This is ours.”

And it was. Not in all of the ways, but in some of them. Adam had never been attentive, but where he failed, Laurel excelled. She spent her fair share of nights in Boston combing through parenting books and vetting strollers while Susannah smiled and told her that it’d get done. Laurel made sure of it. 

And then the unexpected happened, and she and John got married in a quiet little ceremony in the basement of her parent’s church, and Beck stayed as many nights in Philadephia as Laurel had in Boston, making nausea-friendly recipes Laurel’s mother had given her and coaxing her through the worst parts of morning sickness. Laurel watched as they both settled into this milestone, Susannah with a fervor she had never seen before, herself with an unsettling fear of everything that still had to be done.

Those months passed like water down the windowpanes. There were times when Laurel could barely think of who she had been before Susannah’s wedding and her own, a woman wrapping her arms around herself for some proxy of comfort, staring up at the sky and wishing it was full. That new life of hers wasn’t as bad as she had once thought. At least, that’s what she could tell herself.

When Adam called to tell her Susannah was in labor, she and John rushed to Boston. She would have driven herself, but John was far too considerate to allow his new wife to go alone. He didn’t blink when she went in alone to see Susannah.

It was there that Laurel saw Conrad for the first time, curled up in his brief stint in an incubator alongside Susannah’s bed. It wasn’t a stretch to say she fell head over heels. At least some of it was the fact that he was the first baby, not just for her, but for Susannah, too. But even before she could hold him, hear him cry, she knew that she would always have a special place in her heart for the boy curled up in front of her. Then she sat on Susannah’s bed and drew her head against her shoulder, both watching in astonishment as the miracle in front of them pried his feeding tube out with his pinky nail. 

“He’s a fighter already,” she’d said.

Susannah smiled in return, eyes misty with tears. “I wonder who he got that from.”

“Oh, don’t cry, Beck,” she said, imploring, her own eyes already filled with tears. Before they could fall, baby Conrad fussed, absorbing both of their attention entirely. 

Before long, he was cleared to be out of his incubator and passed between them. He calmed immediately in the circle of Susannah’s arms, even with more than a few tears falling around him. When Susannah’s arms tired, she passed him along to Laurel. For a moment, Laurel struggled to hold him, still not used to the swell of her stomach or the new wedding band on her hand. For one horrible second she was totally at odds with her body and its alien additions. But then Conrad settled in her arms, eyes blearily gazing into her own, and she felt herself relax back against the bed, Beck’s hand wedged at her side.

“He really is perfect,” she whispered, trying her hardest not to cry over the impossibly tiny baby she held in her arms.

“Do you think I should have him model?”

This startled a laugh out of Laurel, though she tried to stifle it for Conrad’s sake. “Don’t you want him all for yourself?” And, some seconds later, “And Adam?”

“It seems wrong to deprive the world of him.”

Laurel smiled, first at the baby and then at her best friend. Even in harsh hospital lighting, just looking at Susannah was like dipping into sunlight. “Give him a minute to breathe, Beck. He’s still getting used to it.”

“But he’s so good at it,” Susannah said, dissolving into tears again. Laurel passed him back to his mother and pressed a kiss to her forehead.

Her time with Susannah and Conrad was, for a time, peaceful. She and John spent their winter break in Boston, helping out with the newborn. Adam seemed at times incompetent, at times elated, and mostly happy to leave the grunt work to Susannah and, occasionally, Laurel. She considered confronting him about it, but each time she tried to, she fell short. She could see the look on Susannah’s face when she was with her son, like he was the only being in the world. Adam couldn’t ruin that for her. When Laurel would stare at him, insults building in her head, she would see Susannah from the corner of her eye, giving the slightest, near-imperceptible shake of the head. 

Laurel didn’t have any comparison for what she felt towards this new baby yet. After Steven was born, she would know that it wasn’t quite that he was a son to her. Her love for him was not so all-consuming, so full of purpose and truth and rightness. But her world did have a way of narrowing down when Conrad needed something. She could read the differences between his cries with more ease than she would have expected, whether he needed food or a change or just to be held. When Susannah was wracked with guilt at the odd hours of the night when Conrad cried, Laurel would gently ease him into Susannah’s arms and give her what she needed to help him. 

That was something she would grow to understand with her own children, too. But none of them were quite as innate as those first weeks she spent with baby Conrad.

Then came Steven, and Jeremiah, and, finally, Isabel. With John away on a work trip, and Isabel’s appearance being sudden and far too early contrasted with Steven’s, which had been far too late, Susannah was the only person who could get to her on time. She had loved having John with her when Steven was born, a calm beacon in the many, many hours of night that her labor had been. But to have Susannah with her, holding her hand, was something else entirely. Things were always easy around Susannah. 

When she held her daughter in her arms, Susannah stroked Laurel’s hair back from her sweaty face, cooing over the newborn, calling her our special girl. 

Weeks later, when Belly smiled for the first time, John snapped a picture. Laurel cried, then mailed Susannah a copy: our girl’s already finding joy. The first time Laurel brought Belly to the summer house, she saw that picture hanging in the kitchen, her daughter lighting up the room like one of the sunbeams filtering in through the windows. 

Susannah scooped Belly up into her arms and danced with her around the kitchen, their giggles harmonizing with each other and filling all the space up to the ceiling. 

When Laurel wandered into the kitchen that night for a midnight snack, she felt a twinge in her chest to find it quiet. For all of her practicality, she was somehow surprised that their laughter wasn’t still magically bouncing around the summer house, filling it with light.

Before Belly found words, and when Steven was so full of them they were liable to spill out at any moment, there was a summer when most of the words Conrad spoke were to Laurel. 

Susannah captured some of it on tape, videos that Laurel had trouble watching back later, too full of a sticky-sweet sense of nostalgia. Nearly every morning, she awoke to a polite knock on her door and Conrad spilling inside, words tumbling from his mouth–a recounting of his dreams, a fact from the book his mama had read him before bed, question after question about if they could dig in the sand that day. She would ruffle his hair then tuck it back, asking him if he’d spent all night fighting monsters to get it that messy. He would laugh and say, “No, Laura, it was you!” and giggle until he nearly fell out of bed. He would run to show her each of his toys on days at the beach or curled up in Susannah’s living room, and ask to watch her type as she wrote, only to drift off with his face pressed against her arm.

By the time John arrived, there wasn’t a square inch of bedroom free from one of Conrad’s beach treasures. “I do hope he gets a little better at discernment as he gets older,” John had said, examining a cracked fragment of a seashell, then climbed into bed.

When Conrad was almost ten and Belly newly eight, John and Adam came to Cousins for the fourth as they always did. Those two and their moms sat around a flickering campfire, while Jeremiah and Steven bolted off to play catch with Adam. He’d spent a few fruitless moments trying to convince Conrad to come with them, but his focus had been unshaken from tying and retying the knots he’d learned in scouts. Belly was rapt on his every word and movement. Laurel and Susannah looked on fondly, Susannah trying to egg Belly into tying friendship bracelets out of the thin rope instead. John snapped a photo or two, the final images of which she wouldn’t see until she crawled into bed that night to see John sorting through his shots on the digital camera. 

“It’s uncanny,” he said to her, propped up on Susannah’s blue and white pillows, in the room that was mostly Laurel’s and occasionally his. “Look at this, Laur.”

He angled the camera screen over to her, then pointed out the lines of their eyes; Laurel, buried deep in her manuscript review, Conrad focused on his ropes, and Susannah and Belly’s eyes trained on each of their faces like they could never look away. 

“It’s like looking at a mirror image,” John said, tabbing to the next photo. The scene was much the same, but this time Susannah was looking at Conrad with undisguised approval in her eyes. In the third, Susannah leaned over to Belly, cupping her cheek in her hand. Belly was melting into her touch, softened at all of her sometimes-rough edges.

Laurel hummed in response. There wasn’t much she could say to refute it. “Cute photo.”

Susannah started teaching the kids to dance when they were little. 

She didn’t dance like she had when they were in college, wild and uncontrolled and unabashedly taking up space. She saved those moments for when the kids were tucked into bed and she’d throw her arm around Laurel and drag her around the kitchen, forearms wrapped around her neck, holding her even tighter than John did when they slow danced in Philly. 

With the kids, her movements were precise, meant to be mimicked. Conrad was the best at it, following his mom’s lead with careful precision. Belly took to it with the most fervor, to the point where Susannah got used to putting away all of her fragile items any time the record player was plugged in.

Laurel rarely joined in, but she liked to sit on the sidelines, watch as the four kids danced around each other and Susannah. Sometimes Conrad would try to sit it out with her. While she was more than content to have him by her side, watching her proofread and lacing the words together in his head, more often than not Belly would grab his hand and make a show of pulling him from the couch until he finally gave in, a smile almost identical to hers taking over his face. Sometimes she pulled Laurel up, too, and helped her spin around and around until the world was starry.

Laurel’s daughter was stubborn, like her, and wilted at the first sign of trouble, like Susannah. She could count on one hand the number of times anything between them had looked like a fight. “I don’t think you’re capable of it,” Laurel said once. “Too much sunshine between you two.” But Beck was wrong sometimes. So, too, was Belly. 

Their biggest fight was fought by proxy, with Laurel and Susannah trading most of the blows. Adam’s infidelity and John’s new girlfriend and Belly’s drunken tumble and Beck’s shattered cake stand all exploded into something horrible, something uncharted for them both. For once, caring for Susannah felt like a weight, not an inevitability. 

“But I know how you love to fix things,” Susannah said, harsher than Laurel had heard her in a long time. 

Even then, Laurel wanted to grab her, to hold her close, to shake her back and forth. It’s all I know how to do, she wanted to say. The only way I know how to hold you close. Even in her indignation, sickness starting to crest in her, Susannah was beautiful. This house she had made her own seemed to bend to her will, like she had been painted into it, created to fit there. 

When they had been younger, stupider, more wild, Laurel had spent one of the nights they were supposed to be together dancing in a stranger’s arms. When she’d disconnected from him, Susannah had been immediately at her side, arms sliding possessively around her waist. 

“He’s buying our drinks,” Laurel said, feeling like she had been caught in a misdeed. 

Susannah’s nose found purchase in her neck, her fingers flexing across the skin of her stomach. “It was hard to watch,” she admitted, tone low, confessional. Laurel forgot how to breathe. 

“Am I that bad of a dancer?” she said at last. 

“With him.” Susannah pulled away suddenly, abruptly. “But not with me.” The music had been too loud. Susannah slipped from between her fingers. 

She’d felt a horrible echo of that night during their day at the dive bar, where Susannah danced and danced and Laurel had been left to stare and wonder how much time they had left. Wonder if she had looked the same to Susannah when she danced with men, so wrong, so unnatural.

They weren’t those young girls anymore. They had children, children they loved as much as if they had raised them all in the same nest, helped them through each of their nights together. Susannah was sick, and it was not fair, but it was true. 

For once, Laurel felt very much like Beck. She didn’t want to admit that their lives were changing yet again, one of the million times their paths had branched off and segmented back together. She wanted things to just be easy, the way they were when Susannah was well and the men were gone. Or maybe even the way they had been at home, with John. Frictionless. Not capable of tearing open her chest. 

So she unplugged the record player, and she left. She fucked Cleveland Castillo in her car, then again the next night, in a lake, bathed in starlight. Laurel could act like Susannah when she wanted to. She could convince herself that her life was exactly as it appeared. 

“There were always three people in our marriage, Laurel,” John said to her in that final summer. It was not cruel. But in her worst moments, Laurel didn’t think it was true. In her worst moments, she didn’t think she had ever been in her own marriage. She thought that sometimes at her best, too.

Susannah always gave Belly what she wanted. Laurel figured that she did the same with Conrad. It’s just that what Belly and Conrad wanted was so different. Conrad wanted to be able to say no, to hold onto his own definition of pride. Belly wanted to bloom under the spotlight, recognize her exit from her cocoon, march forward on a path paved with yes es. 

Laurel may not have understood Conrad’s joy in collecting things, but she understood his dedication, so she spent many evenings helping him sort and label and slot. Susannah may not have understood Belly’s limitations, but she did understand her potential. She’d sit on the pool deck and time her laps, coaxing her into new records for holding her breath. 

“Don’t you think it’s a little much for him?” Laurel asked once, when they’d sent the kids off to the mall together, making Conrad promise to watch over them all. 

“Don’t you think Belly’s too young to sleep on her own?” she’d asked another time. 

“They’ll be fine,” Beck said, again and again. “Don’t worry.”

Maybe Laurel was right. She probably was. But being right was so inconvenient, the same way the desire in her hands to reach for Beck was inconvenient, the same way it took many more movements to light a cigarette than to let it rot in its pack. 

It had felt like Laurel had barely blinked in their new lives before she got another phone call, this one infinitely worse than the first. 

That time, Laurel didn’t rush to Susannah’s door; there was no train line for her to hop onto, and her two children were down the hall, needing her to be there when they awoke in the morning. Instead, she sat on the couch in her living room and let Susannah speak. That was what she had always done; she filled the silences, and Laurel listened. Laurel didn’t let herself consider what that would mean now that Susannah was sick. 

“I’m here,” she said, again and again. “I love you. I’ll be there as much as you want me.”

Need me, she didn’t say. 

Eventually, Susannah tired out and went to bed. When the phone line went dead, Laurel let her cell drop onto the couch cushion next to her and buried her head in her hands. The sob that escaped from her didn’t surprise her in the least. She half expected John or Belly to hear her, to wander into the living room and ask what was wrong. 

Laurel couldn’t have that. She slipped into the backyard, cried into her hands, and, when the tears subsided, looked up at the few stars that could twinkle their way through the light pollution. 

Beck’s first period of sickness was, in hindsight, almost a bright spot. Laurel woke most days with a sort of leaden weight in her chest, but nearly every day, there was good news. Susannah’s prognosis got better. Laurel found more and more days to make it up to Boston, and realized by degrees that if it weren’t for Belly and Steven at home, she might not have missed Philadelphia at all. 

It wasn’t John’s fault, exactly. He was a good man. It was just that, even in her sickness, even outside of those shared summer months, it was becoming clear that he was not Susannah. John didn’t need her. She couldn’t hold his hand when the pain got bad and help him sort through his medication. Once upon a time, she hadn’t needed to do those things for Susannah, either. But it was much less about the act and much more about the ease. 

If it were John who needed her, Laurel wasn’t certain she would have been able to bring herself to help him. Fixing things had always been easy when Susannah was the one who needed help. 

That is not to say that caring for Susannah couldn’t be frustrating beyond belief. Beck refused to consider getting her affairs in order or sorting out the house. She insisted on hand-arranging flowers each day and cleaning the house by hand, no matter how weary she would be afterward. She let Adam pull away and shun her and the boys. She would accept Laurel’s help and then pretend like she hadn’t needed it. She acted like there was not a single cloud in the overcast sky; it would clear, she said, and so it was like the sun was out already. 

In the early days, when Susannah was at her sickest and they did not yet know if she would get better, Laurel had once left the room in a haze of angry tears. The frustration and worry and sadness had overwhelmed her, and she hadn’t wanted Beck to see. But Susannah had followed her, uneven and wincing, and grabbed her wrist between her fingers.

“We’re going to sit,” she said. “And we’re not going to say anything at all.”

And they did, sinking onto the closest couch, Susannah’s hand wrapped gently around Laurel’s shoulders. 

After a few inconsolable minutes, Laurel said, “I just don’t want to miss you.”

“Then don’t,” Beck responded. And then, with a squeeze, she told her to get home to Steven and Belly. “They’ll need a hug from you, too.”

Laurel didn’t mind. She went home and she hugged her children tight. It wasn’t long before she was back at Susannah’s side, the clouds parting just a little overhead. The storm was worth the woman she loved a million times over. She couldn’t ever stay mad at Susannah. 

But Beck’s second sickness was something else entirely. 

Laurel had never realized before then how different acceptance could look. Laurel understood that this was her lot in life, carefully restructured their day-to-day, and did not let her thoughts stray to what would come next. Susannah pretended like nothing had changed, but spoke easily about being at the end and showed not one ounce of fear. 

Fear seemed like the only thing Laurel could feel. Dull, unending fear. 

“What does it feel like, being in love?” her daughter had asked her, in that final summer. They were in Susannah’s kitchen in the Beck house. Things were not quite okay, but they had not yet gone horribly wrong. Susannah was alive only a few rooms away. The summer house was airy and bright with her magic. In the kitchen light, Belly looked every bit the sixteen-year-old she was. The glint in her eyes took Laurel right back to the Susannah she had met on the curb of a busy street. She ached. “When you were? With Dad?”

“Safe,” Laurel responded. “Comfortable. Like a campfire I knew would keep me warm through the night.”

Belly shook her head, playing absently with her spoon, sloshing the milk back and forth. “Have you ever been in real love? The fireworks kind?”

Without thought, Laurel reached a hand across the island, stilling her daughter’s nervous movement and comforting her in the space the question had left behind. Even curled in on herself, ashamed and laid bare in the kitchen lighting, there was something to Belly that couldn’t help but remind Laurel of the sun. She had some unfailing belief in good. Of course Belly believed in fireworks love. Of course she was trying to comb out whether that was what she was feeling. 

Steven would never have asked her that question. He was steady, like his father. When he loved, he loved like that glowing fire. Laurel could admit that the similarity was comforting from her firstborn. Sometimes it hurt a little bit to look at Belly, stare at her in her entirety. But Laurel had plenty of practice looking into the sun. 

“Once,” she admitted. She drew her hand back, busied herself with the bowls, then stilled. When she looked up, Belly was staring right at her, brown eyes imploring, hooked onto her every word. “But it was never going to work out. The fire would’ve burned us both alive.”

Five years later, at a bar in Palo Alto, Conrad Fisher sits with Agnes, fingers tracing circles in the condensation of his beer bottle. 

“Have you ever been in love?”

The bar light is dim; when he tries to deflect, Agnes waves it off, her red hair stark around her pale face. She has a way of putting him in his place. He smiles at her. 

“Once,” he admits. 

For years, Conrad lives in a tepid acceptance of that fact.

Once the summer house is safe, the motel is paid for, and Jeremiah and Belly have driven off into the sunset, he books a flight to California and sublets until Stanford’s student housing opens. He finagles his way into a summer internship in a lab and counts the days until his classes begin. When his classes start, he tries his best to be unlike what he wants to be: withdrawn, moody, unwilling to speak. Melancholy, his mother would’ve said. Laurel might’ve preferred avoidant. 

Conrad lets life flow around him like a tide. He puts in his own strokes as often as he can remember to, as often as his arms listen and let him.

His first day in California, Laurel had called him, sometime after his flight had landed and he’d settled into a hotel for the night.

“I figured you’d know that Belly had made it home safe at this point,” she’d said to him, somewhere between a laugh and a grimace, “but I wanted to let you know anyway.”

“Thanks. Jere let me know.” He tried, really tried, not to sound miserable as he thought of it.

“Where are you, Connie?” Her voice was softer than it had been moments before. “Off to Stanford already?”

He swallowed. “I wanted to get a head start.”

“And you’re not going to be lonely out there?”

There was an edge to her voice, one that sounded a little too close to one he’d heard in his own. He had a feeling that if he said he was worried, scared, alone, she’d be finding a way to book a flight and come out to see him. 

But she couldn’t. She had Steven to worry about, and Belly. Belly, who definitely needed her much more than Conrad did.

“I’ll be fine, Laurel,” he said finally. “I’m excited.”

“I know you will be. But you don’t have to be right now.” She sighed down the line. “I miss you, you know that?”

As sudden as a lightning strike, a sob broke from his mouth. He pressed his fingers to his lips, quivering with the force it took to suppress another noise. 

“Conrad?” Laurel said, concern flooding her voice.

“I miss you, too,” he said, quickly, all in a jumble. The muscles in his neck strained. “I’ve gotta go, but I’ll call you soon.”

When he hung up, the tears retreated, like without Laurel to hear them, they had no reason to come out of hiding. It still took him a good, long while to breathe through the tightness in his chest.

And call her he did. After some time, he was no longer greeted with a concerned “Conrad?” but rather an exuberant “Connie!” She called him, too. That might’ve been why he was so good at remembering to return the favor.

He didn’t get many calls from the East Coast. His dad called once in a while, just to check in, and Jeremiah a little more frequently, mostly to complain about their dad. His conversations with Steven petered out, as did the few friends he’d made at Brown. 

It is easy, then, to simply exist with everything he feels locked up inside of him. With time, he makes friends, finds a therapist. He carries both his new life and the old one in his heart. 

He thinks of Belly. 

He wants her. He hasn’t been able to stop thinking of it, no matter how many thousands of hours and miles he puts between himself and that night in the motel where Jere’s snores filtered through the room and Belly’s breathing had been far too controlled to be asleep. He wants her so badly that sometimes when he closes his eyes, he can see her face, like she is etched into his retinas. He sees her doe eyes against the white pages of his textbooks, feels the ends of her hair against the sides of his fingers when he raises his arms to hug someone else, swears he can hear her laugh from clear across every cafeteria and bar and shop he enters. It’s a miracle that these things are all hallucinations, that he knows they can’t be true. But it doesn’t stop desire and dread from blooming in his chest every time she haunts him. 

Wanting her is easy. He’s done it for his whole life. 

At some point, he realizes he won’t be able to stop. Conrad gives himself permission, grace, to let it happen. 

And so he does. He sleeps, he studies, he eats, he runs, he sees his friends, he wants Belly. She is a part of his day that he cannot schedule, but she sneaks her way in anyway. No matter how many hours pass. No matter how many miles lie between them.

His life continues, with school and research and med school applications all in due turn. He goes on a few dates, all of which go nowhere, until he gives up on going on any dates at all. He fills his evenings with friends and sunsets and the occasional phone call until they don’t feel anything close to lonely. He goes to therapy, tries and fails to say her name. Speaks a lot about his mother, though. 

Conrad lives. By degrees, he realizes he still wants to.

But there are those days when grief bowls him over. It is easy to forget, sometimes, how quickly everything fell apart. How at the beginning of the year he had everything and by the end he had nothing at all, empty hands, a future he had to carve for himself, a sick hole of desire in his chest, an empty pocket in his head. It’s easy to forget until it’s not. 

There are those days when Conrad is horribly lonely, and California feels like a different planet. 

Sometimes he calls Laurel. She never asks him too many questions. Neither of them has ever been good at filling the silence. But they speak all the same, let conversation flow like a cloud releasing raindrops under too much pressure. He asks her about her new book and her classes. She asks about his studies and his applications. They speak very little about what they have lost. They know it all already; there’s no use in saying it out loud. For other people, maybe. But it’s enough for him to know that she is there, that she’s lost these things, too. He doesn’t have to explain anything to Laurel. When she calls him, he can sense that same cloud around her, unspoken to anyone else in her life.

Sometimes he puts on Casablanca and wishes he could understand the same way his mom did. 

When Conrad was young, his mother told him that someday, someone would make him feel fireworks. 

“When you do, Connie,” she’d said, “You hold them close. And you don’t let them go, no matter who tells you to.”

Conrad had felt the corners of his mouth turn down, and his mother had seen the worried slant of his face and laughed. 

“Is that what you did?” he’d asked. 

She’d smiled and smoothed his hair back behind his ear. “Not close enough.” Her eyes were kind. “But I know you won’t make the same mistake. You’re much braver than I am.”

Just once, Conrad had seen his mother and Laurel dance around the kitchen in the summer house, long past the time when he was supposed to be asleep. He’d felt a flash of jealousy, watching them skip and swing and collapse into a puddle on the floor, laughing. Laurel had reached over and brushed a wayward strand of hair out of Susannah’s face. They breathed as though they were one, the set of each of their shoulders matching the other. 

He had looked away, feeling heat rise to his cheeks, and had run back up the stairs as quietly as he could. Like he’d seen something he wasn’t supposed to. Like he’d seen something he would understand far too well one day. 

Conrad broke his arm when he was ten. It was the first time he cried in front of Belly, at least since they were both little and had cried as their only means of communication. She had been the one to find him after he’d taken a tumble in the driveway. His face had been loose and unshuttered, he knew, but the second he heard Belly’s footsteps on the concrete, he breathed in deeply, stilling himself.

“Conrad?” Belly said. Her eyes were wide behind her glasses, magnified impossibly. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he said stiffly. He’d already shoved himself into a sitting position, and he wiped furiously at his face, trying to clear it of tears. Every movement jostled his arm, though, which only made him want to cry more. Instead, he stood, using his good arm to brace against the ground.

“You fell pretty hard. Are you sure?” Her hand was at her mouth, biting her nails. She knew something was wrong. She must have. But she always listened to him.

“I’m sure,” Conrad said. He brushed past her as quickly, ignoring her “it’s time for dinner” as best he could. He wove his way around the adults and into the dining room. 

He wasn’t sure, exactly, what his plan was. Act like normal and hope it gets better? Be tough? It couldn’t have been a real emergency, he thought. It would go away soon. 

His mom frowned at him as he stepped into the dining room. She took in his pale face and busied herself with making him happier, putting on a record that she knew he’d like, but all it did was deepen the frown on his face. 

It was Belly who’d whispered “no, no,” as Conrad sat heavily at the table, and struggled to break her eyes away when he returned her stare.

“What’s wrong?” She finally blurted, drawing all the attention in the room to her. 

“Belly,” Laurel chided. “Where is this coming from?”

“He’s acting weird and you’re all pretending like it’s normal,” she said, staring accusingly around the table. There were moments where she would say the hard things, the things no one else wanted to. But he was surprised, all the same. He’d barely recognized something was really wrong himself, so singularly focused he’d been on acting like nothing had changed in hopes that everyone else would follow suit. 

“Connie’s normal,” Steven said from his place at Conrad’s side. He reached out, quick as a bolt, to slap Conrad’s arm. Stars exploded under his eyes. 

Everything got very loud, then. He knew he swooned, head dropping back against the seat of his chair. His mom was by his side when he came to, her hands on his face, smoothing his hair back. The kids were all shouting, and through the din, he could hear Steven’s apologies and Belly’s incandescent disgust about the fact that her brother had hit him. Distantly, he heard Laurel dealing with her children and Jeremiah. 

“Oh, Connie,” his mom said, and it was clear that up close she could see the bruise blooming on his arm. She crumpled into tears, reaching for him instinctually, but he cringed away. 

“I’m fine,” he said, voice furious against the cascade of his tears. 

“Why did you lie?” Belly demanded, breaking free from her mother’s grasp. 

“I-” he started, choked up, turned back. “I’m fine,” he mumbled finally, convincing no one in the room. 

“Belly.” Laurel’s voice cut through the room like a knife through butter, calm and reassuring. “What are you talking about?”

“Outside. He lied to me. He said he was fine!”

“About what?” Even in his haze of pain, Conrad could hear the strain in her voice.

“Conrad fell on the driveway,” Belly tattled, “and I asked him if he was okay, and he said he was, but—”

“I am!” Conrad cut in. 

“You’re not,” Laurel said. Conrad looked at her. Her mouth was set, eyes soft. 

His mother tried to get him in the car, but had too much trouble trying to help him walk there; her eyes were so blurry and her limbs so weak with the weight of her tears that she could barely stand herself. She tried to call an ambulance, instead, but Laurel had laughed that idea off. She had let Susannah hold his face in her hands for a few moments, apologetic and overflowing with love, before she commanded Susannah to stay with the other kids. Then Laurel eased Conrad into her car and took off driving, taking the turns as gently as possible to avoid jostling him. 

It was quiet for a long few moments. Laurel let him sniffle until his tears dried up. Then he sat with something he could later name as shock. His arm didn’t feel like it belonged to him; it felt like he was a different boy, with a different body, and was just hanging out in this one for a little while. 

“Why’d you stay quiet?” Laurel asked him. Conrad saw her eyes cut to him briefly in the rear-view mirror, but it was only for a moment. “Why didn’t you tell us you were hurt?”

Conrad struggled with the words for a moment. His tongue was heavy. “I thought it would go away,” he said finally, barely more than a mumble. 

“You should’ve told us anyway.” When he looked up at the mirror that time, she was already looking at him, her eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “Always. Even if it only hurts for a little bit. Okay? You shouldn’t be spending any amount of time in pain by yourself.”

Conrad nodded, and then winced. Any movement at all hurt his arm. 

“It’s not a bother, Connie,” Laurel said. “You’re never a bother.”

He is back in Cousins, and he is back with Belly. 

He doesn’t particularly want either of those things.

In a sense, he does not want them for selfish reasons. He was fired from his clinic job because, as Agnes told him, he couldn’t get a check on his emotions for long enough to be a good doctor. He has no reason to go back to California, not yet, and so he resents Cousins and the house that is always there for him. And most selfishly, he still loves Belly. She loves his brother. She is going to marry him, and so Conrad has no reason to stay. 

But there is something he forgot about being with Belly: it is so easy. 

It is always so easy with Belly. It is so easy to look at her, to hold her, to see golden paths light up with all of the ways he could fix it, whatever the thing is that is eating away at her. And he is so very good at it. Sometimes it feels like the only thing Conrad was made to do was to look at her, to hold her, to make things right. 

It is all so easy with her until it isn’t, and then it is very, very hard. 

Because he fucked it up a million times over, he knows. Can’t begin to count the number of times he’s forgotten what the route of his drive looked like, since the whole time all he could think of was Belly. That look on her face as she turned to stone, when he took away whatever hope had remained in her that maybe he really was the one to put each star up in the night sky just for her. She’d never looked more like the expression he saw so often in the mirror. Conrad can’t remember how many parties he’s left when he was in one drink too many and couldn’t rid himself of the compulsive urge to apologize. Can’t begin to think of what would have happened if he could just remember what he said that goddamn night, could have forced himself to hold her a little tighter on the dance floor, could’ve cried when they went outside, could’ve said she’s almost gone, Belly and had that explain one tenth of why he was so fucking hollow, why his hands didn’t work right, why he couldn’t stop dissapointing her. 

He’s blocked out all the specifics now, some haze of anhedonia and grief and desire twisting into a toxic cocktail he had to suppress so he could make it across the country with his head held aloft. What he can remember is that easy hadn’t meant anything when every day felt like a waking nightmare, rolling into the next with a horrible sense of dread for what was sure to come and what he was certainly failing at in the meantime. 

Knowing Belly, understanding her, loving her was as second nature as breathing. But breathing didn’t always come so easily to Conrad. Those last weeks of their relationship were like a never-ending panic attack. He hadn’t recognized himself when he looked in the mirror, couldn’t remember when he had fallen asleep or woken up, and failed to read anything other than disgust, pity, and confusion on the faces of everyone around him. Everything had been hard. It wasn’t Belly. It was Conrad, and his grief, and the parts of himself he had to sacrifice to keep moving through those worst months of his life. And that had been the hardest part–that it had nothing to do with her. 

Before, even when they had bickered, there was something natural to the flow of the words, the way anger ebbed and flowed between them without ever doing any real damage. She'd done that to him, too, with her joy. Her sadness.

In the early days of his therapy, he had tried to bring himself to say her name. He wanted to know where he’d gone wrong, why even months later he couldn’t so much as think her name without a pain in his chest. He never brought himself to. It was as though the dam that had welled up his emotions and his words in their last weeks together had made itself a permanent home at the base of his throat. 

But that magnetism between them never fully left him, even when that dam had choked off his words. The pull was still there, the stretch in his knuckles that tied directly to her fingertips, her shoulders, the line of her jaw. He didn’t think it had for her, either, if her eyes tracking the side of his face or the quiet and enduring memories she pulled out at odd moments were anything to go by. But his grief, and hers, had made acting on it impossible. He couldn’t bring himself to seem weak or human. He wanted to be the same person who had hung the stars in the sky for her. But he wasn’t. Maybe he never had been. 

Everything that had been easy was hard. Maybe, if he cared about her just a little bit less–if he hadn’t worried through too many sleepless nights about what it would have meant for him to rest his head on her shoulder and cry, if he thought about her a little less, if the idea of telling her bad news didn’t seem akin to plucking the hope from her chest and snapping it in half–it could have continued to be easy. Maybe he would have seemed less cold and uncaring, more human. And maybe if she had cared a little less about him in return…

But he couldn’t know how much she had cared about him. Not really. Enough to want to help him. But he had thought he was beyond help, back then. She had all but begged him to let her weather the storm along with him, to trust her to hold him through sunshine and snow and rain. He’d tried. It just hadn’t been enough.

Now four years have passed from that night in the motel, and he is back in Cousins. Things are as easy as they always have been with her. But he fucked it all up four years ago. And so, incrementally, things are hard. 

There are moments where he thinks he can finally cut his losses, like when she and Jere sit in the pool and mock him so loudly he can’t drown it out. It is so beyond what he believed it would be that it feels like the visualization exercise his therapist had tried and quickly discarded, where he would have to explain the worst-case scenario of any event that was bothering him. She is cruel this summer. He can’t remember a time she has ever been cruel, not like this, not without reason. 

Maybe, he thinks, she has changed. 

And then she dons a cherry-print dress and curls up in her bed and cries. It is private, and Conrad feels like he is intruding, the same way he’d butted in when she was thirteen and he’d walked in on her crying at the end of Singin’ in the Rain and he couldn’t find it in himself to tease her for being sensitive, not when he couldn’t have survived it if it were the other way around. Conrad doesn’t mean to see her cry, but her door is open, and that damn magnetism is always against him. 

As he leans against the door frame, hand ghosting the panel, he realizes that this is her. Belly. That beneath whatever change he thinks he’s seen, there is still the girl who called him from the curb and talked about wanting to marry someone who could give her fireworks, someone who had the capacity to burn her as much as cherish her.

So he stays, and he notices.

Belly will not look him in the eyes, or she won’t look away from them, like she’s reading his thoughts through his pupils. He stumbles over his words. She won’t eat, carries her worries in the set of her shoulders and in the too-easygoing cheer of her voice. 

When he walks in to see her sitting on the kitchen island, for a moment, it is like seeing a ghost: his mother in that last summer, lost in thought, setting her shoulders just like that when she saw him enter the room. 

He tucks his hands in his pockets around her, in hopes it will make him think of holding her less. Or perhaps make it simpler to abstain. 

“Belly, I don’t think you know the effect you have on people.”

He was seventeen, and she was sixteen, and looking back it was all so achingly simple. He loved her, though he couldn’t say it to himself yet, but he’d worn in on his face as long as he had been alive. She loved him, and admitted it probably hundreds of times over, though never to his face.

She blinked at him, rapid. He couldn’t have looked away if he wanted to. “The effect? I don’t know what you mean.”

But she did. He knew it for sure, because he could read it in the lines of her face, through the dilation of her pupils. They were so wide they swallowed her irises whole. She can’t lie to him like he can’t lie to her, has never been able to lie to her, not when he was ten and broke his arm, not when he was eight and cried about Rosie the dog, not when he was fifteen and he asked her on a date and then tried to pretend he hadn’t. She knows all of these truths about him, no matter how deeply she buries them, no matter how many excuses she conjures to make that less real. That was no less true at sixteen than it is at twenty-one. 

So he said, “You do,” and she didn’t deny it. She took him at his word, as she always did, and she did not push further, which he knew she could have, if she’d wanted to. 

It was all so simple. How much heartache could have been avoided if he’d leaned forward a little more quickly, if he hadn’t taken it back the next day, if she hadn’t called him on it, reading the truth from his eyes as she always did? If she had trusted him a little bit less and kissed him the next morning, told him not to be such a baby about it?

He doesn’t like to think about it. But he does anyway. And then he tucks it away, carefully, like setting a vase in the sunlight for the cut flowers to crane towards. If he arranges them just so, he can pretend like the facade will never shudder. 

When they’re driving to Michael’s, there is a moment where he slips. 

The whole day was a slip-up, really, a million mistakes folded over each other until he could barely remember them anymore. But they talk, and it is easy, and he helps her, and it is easy, and Conrad cannot ever imagine giving this up, the intoxicating high of just being near her, the woman she has always been. 

When she’s driving, without thinking, his eyes drift to her. 

The song on the radio is imploring, but he can’t even hear it. All he can see is Belly, the cut of sunshine across her profile. It hurts his eyes. 

She turns her head, eyes mostly trained on the road—she really is a better driver, now—but sliding over to him for the barest of seconds. He drops his eyes, but can’t stop his mouth from perking up into a small smile. He doesn’t see her face, but he knows hers perked into the same smile, the same way they’d turned at the same time to look as the bike shifted in the backseat, the same way they’d flexed their fingers at the same time in the florist’s shop, shrugged their shoulders identically in the kitchen. 

It’s quick, and then it’s gone. 

Later, he’ll blame the wine, and then he’ll blame himself, because the same thing happens at dinner. Their easy conversation splashes to a halt, and he barely notices, stuck staring at her, drinking her in with an abandon he hasn’t allowed himself for four years. 

She gestures to the table with her glass in hand, teases him in a way that curls at the edges, voice lilting and lovely. “It’s totally killing you not to clean that up,” she says, and though he hears the words, he can’t imagine what they are referring to. For a moment, his entire world is Belly and the smile lines around her mouth.

“Clean what up?” He says. Somehow, distantly, he hears the breathless words fall from his mouth. 

“The wine I spilled,” she says. “You just wanna wipe it up so bad.”

“I didn’t even notice,” he replies, something gentle invading his voice. 

And he hates himself, the way he lost her for being so horrible at keeping his emotions off his face and even worse at trying to explain them. That when he had her, he couldn’t show them to her. That now that he doesn't, he can’t control himself for long enough to stop.

He thought his willpower had grown over four years, but here he is in Cousins, softened to taffy in Belly’s hands.

It gets harder to call them moments. 

After a day with him, she eats, first the peaches and then a full meal. But it does not get better. She does not stop fading, this wedding cording stress through her like a marionette. 

In his doctoring class, where bedside manner became the topic of conversation for a bunch of stuffy Stanford students who rarely had their noses out of their books, they had discussed end-of-life care, including support for family members who were caretakers and those who weren’t involved in day-to-day. His exam on that unit had included two actors at their father’s bedside, one who was caring for him every day and one who had just flown in to see him. The new addition had been convincingly worried, had told Conrad that she didn’t think her sister understood just how bad he’d gotten. “She’s too close to it,” she’d said, tone low and conspiratorial, exactly as wooden as their scripts always allowed for. He’d taken extra care in the conversation as he discussed their care options, mindful of which one he was speaking to and how advanced they believed their fictional father to be. There was a reason his doctoring professor had given him top marks. 

He looks at the untouched plate in the fridge, and he reaches out to the only person he can think to. 

One of his first memories is at the summer house with Laurel and his mom. He’d been toddling in the waves, only to get bowled over by one that had felt giant to him at the time. Before he could panic, he felt arms grip him and pull him up, laughing and ebullient, his Laura come to save him. Seeing her joy, he had calmed, knowing that he was safe, and Laurel had passed him into his mother’s arms.

At the diner halfway between Cousins and Philadelphia, when Laurel hugs him, he still feels like that kid in the water.

And then he reminds himself why he’s there, and who for. He orders them each a burger, knowing she’ll refuse, and passes them his card before she can begin to balk. She smiles across the table at him, but hides it quickly with her downcast eyes. She has always been polite like that. Letting him shrink back in the moments where he needs to.

They speak of nothing, and then they speak of the wedding, which it is clear Laurel would prefer were nothing, too. He can’t blame her. 

“Jeremiah is not thinking this through,” she says, carefully stepping around Belly. She doesn’t need to say that Belly isn’t thinking it through. They both know it’s her stubbornness spurring her into action. 

But Conrad doesn’t want to talk about his brother. He knows Laurel doesn’t want to, either. So he speaks of Belly, the taboo lying on the table between them. At just the mention of her name, Laurel softens around the eyes. When he describes her, the shell of who she has been, he doesn’t see anything close to surprise on her face. For as much as Jere and Steven seemed not to notice any differences, Conrad has a feeling that Laurel has been watching them up close with a distrustful eye for all of these years. 

And then she asks to speak candidly. Conrad doesn’t want to say no to her, doesn’t have anything to hide, so he agrees. 

“What’s your investment in all of this?”

“I just want her to be happy.”

“Just her?”

He shifts in his seat, considers for a moment how truthful he is actually bound to be by his promise. “Jere, too.”

“And what about you, Conrad? When do you get to be happy?”

He doesn’t want to answer. Laurel knows that already. They are good at letting things remain unspoken between them, understood all the same. 

Twenty-four hours before everything changed between the two of them, Belly put on a jaunty song and swung him around the summer house kitchen until he had no choice but to skip and smile and overcorrect to stop himself from falling to the floor. 

When he’d taught her those steps, after his mother had taught him, he’d tried to do so carefully, gently, light brushes and hesitant holds. There was a part of him that couldn’t believe he was touching her like that, not the way a child teases a child, but rather how two people learn to harmonize. She’d been gentle in return, hesitant. The way she’d touched him made him feel delicate, spun from molten glass. 

She was not gentle with him that evening, nor had the laughter spilling from her mouth been graceful. But she was real and warm against him. He had convinced himself a thousand times over that he had never really touched her at all. But she swung him in circles, and tossed him a burger that he caught with ease, and the phantom of her against him was so strong he felt it thrumming through his arms, like if he didn’t reach out and touch her the world would crack at the seams. She was real. He’d had her. So long as she was in front of him, he still had her in the ways that mattered. She was safe. She was alive. She could still look him in the eye. 

He didn’t reach for her. At least, not in the way he wanted to. Her laughter slowed. She put him back to work, and then she smiled at him. “We’ll get you through,” she’d whispered. Like his mistakes were their burden, not just his. 

Thank you, he’d mouthed. 

He had reached out, brushed a strand of hair back from her face. Her mouth had settled into a faint line. They exhaled at the same time, long and slow. He wished he’d said it six weeks before. He let his hand linger for a moment at her face, considering the things his mother had told him. He wondered if he was as brave as she’d wanted him to be.

A day later, he lay on the floor of the motel room, cast in red and gold light from the streetlamps outside. 

“I want you,” he said, and he ached with the truth of it. It hadn’t even been a year since he’d said it to her on the beach, but it felt like he had lived a lifetime. Wanting her, having her, had been lucky enough for a lifetime, but if there was one thing Conrad learned in that year, it was that he would never, ever be satisfied. It was why he was convinced, down to his bones, that he was selfish. He had had everything he could ever want in his hands, and he’d slipped, and he was selfish enough to ask her to forget it. To be with him anyway. To not count his blessings that she’d wanted him in the first place, present or no. 

But even then, he knew that they would always be the what if, the itch in his hands that so inconveniently longed to reach out and touch her. Even on that raining prom night, when his pain had been such a roar that he could barely hear around it, he had wanted to reach for her, cursed his hands that betrayed him and failed to listen. 

She was so close that he had to close his eyes against the thought of it, their proximity. 

It would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to shift and to reach. But he stopped himself. He couldn’t see her eyes. Couldn’t know if she wanted that. Couldn’t tell if her head was angled the same way his was, a mirror, or if their days of reflecting each other were dead and gone.

Everything that had been easy was hard. He had only himself to blame. 

But it is the wanting that drives him mad.

Conrad hasn’t prayed since he was a child and his mother stopped dragging them to the Episcopal church down the block for Sunday mass once her mother had passed. He can recall early hours of Sundays where he knelt in his choir best and silently wondered if he was supposed to be doing something. Maybe Conrad had never really prayed, then. Only ever pretended at it. 

But in Cousins, with Belly, every thought in his brain becomes some sort of refrain that he cannot quiet. He does not kneel, does not hold his hands aloft, does not speak to any god that he can name. But Conrad cannot think of another word for the ferocity with which he wants, and hopes, and begs for things to be different. 

It starts after the peaches, when he takes off his shirt and feels the sticky sweet residue that has transferred from Belly’s chin to his shirt to his stomach. He is struck with something in that moment, having to close his eyes against the force of it, like when he was eighteen and heartsick and wanted her so badly he thought it might kill him. He is bowled over by it, and it takes everything in him to hold back the rush of images that accompanies it, the underside of her jaw, the hint of teeth through parted and gasping lips, his wrist slick with her–and he keeps it at bay. Breathes in and out. Asks for it to go away. 

It does not. 

After the peaches, she is gone for two weeks, and when she is back again, she hugs him just once the way she used to, throwing herself at him and trusting that he’ll catch her, wrapping her up so completely that one hand will be on each of her sides, her shoulder blade, her waist. For a moment, there is no history between them. He wonders why the universe would deny him this, the perfect peace he feels with her arms wrapped around his neck. 

She cleans up his surfing wound, breathes like she has just run a marathon. He prays for clarity, to know what he is supposed to do. He is desperate, and he is lightheaded, and the room smells of metal from his own blood. He’d cut clean across his palm if it meant she’d let him return the favor, wrap a bandage across her thigh, lay his head on her shoulder again. Hell, he’d do it for one kiss, where she leaned in and he didn’t put his hand between them as a barrier, use her to stand, to walk away. He’d do it just to look in those eyes again, lidded the way they used to be, all pupil like a churning ocean. Conrad lies down in his bed, and he cannot sleep. He asks, over and over, if he did the right thing. He can’t even look at the bandage on his thigh. Clarity never reaches him.

And then he hears about Cabo, and the dam breaks. He pours his heart out on the beach and then holds himself through the aftermath, something that is half panic attack and half four years of denied relief, as horrible as it may be. In the morning, he braces himself against the counter, tries to take it back. And then he doesn’t. They are in sync, shoulders and voices moving in the same patterns. He reads the truth in her eyes like he knows she can from him. 

"Don't be with him," he says, and what was once a silent prayer is put out, dragging her down like wristweights. "I will never not love you," he says, and it is real, as real as it was when he lulled himself to sleep with it every night.

Conrad prays. He drives to get her muffins, hoping she’ll eat them. He doesn’t know what else he can do. 

This is me holding on, he thinks. On the beach, when he grabs her arm, asks her to look into his face as he confesses away the four years of distance that lay between them. In the car, when he admits that he was fired, that he doesn’t feel cut out for this life of his, when he lets her convince him that maybe he is. On the streets of Cousins, where he relearns that he can’t lie to her, tells her she deserves everything she has ever pictured. He’d failed to live up to his mother’s wishes five years ago. But it is better late than never.

It is only once he knows the extent of his brother’s sins that he lets himself truly, consciously, ask for it. When he finds out that Jere not only helped her into this new version of herself, half her and half him, but couldn’t have even been decent enough to remain faithful. He feels ill, like he is seventeen again and his world is crashing down around him. 

Let her walk away, he asks. Let her think, let her become herself again. Please. Let her run as far as she needs to be assured, to believe that she can do it. 

He asks for it at every moment. Every time he’s driving, standing, or moving. At her rehearsal dinner, Conrad locks eyes with her from across the room and hopes she can’t read how much he is begging, how he can’t turn it off. 

Belly sighs without opening her mouth, as though melting forward towards him. She does not look away. Her gaze turns from something torn, disappointed, to something entirely heavier. Her eyes catch his cheekbones, curl down his black shirt, trace the line of his arm, past his watch, to his fingers around his flute of champagne. He couldn’t miss her little shudder, not if he had been bleeding out on the table, not if the earth had erupted below him. 

Oh, that shudder. 

Conrad had always done a poor job of telling Belly no, of holding anything back from her. Where he failed with his words, he tended not to with everything else. He’d never made her work for it because he wanted to. He did it because he saw what it did to her when he pulled back, forced her to trail back after him and adjust for the lightest of pressures to reward her effort. He’d seen the clouds in her eyes, the way she became heavy and liquid in his too-gentle hands. 

It wasn’t that he wanted to be rough; it was that he had never, for a moment, wanted to deny her of anything. Even now, he doesn't want to. Just thinking of it, her pliant and open and wanting under the warmth of his palms, makes his fingers tremble, and he wraps them more firmly around the glass. It is cool and unforgiving, and he worries that if he grips it too hard, a thousand hairline cracks will spread from his fingertips. 

Conrad knows he can read everything in her pupils. He does. 

He prays that Jeremiah spends his evening dissolved in tears, that Belly drops her napkin and runs as far as she can, somewhere no one can catch her, not even him. Least of all him, and his memories, and his wants, which all narrow to the scope of Belly’s lower lip, how it would taste if he bit it and didn’t worry about leaving a mark. A shadow of her against him, holding his wrist to her and pushing down until they both shook. One hand braced on her hip, spread across the expanse of her inner thigh. Sick to his stomach with want, drunk on the taste of her.

Belly’s eyes shift, returning to Jeremiah. Her smile does not meet her eyes. Her shoulders reach upwards ever so slightly, perked up by a puppetmaster.  

Conrad prays. 

Before he understood his love, before he practiced patience, before his years and years of quiet repentance, Conrad Fisher was very young, and his world was very structured. 

He idolized his father. For years, he constructed himself around his father’s pride and his mother’s love. He played football, got the best grades he could, didn’t squander a moment of the education his life, and his parents, had granted him. He learned confidence from emulation, discovered when to flatter, when to rib. He knew he was doing the right thing because Adam was proud, and Susannah was proud, and Jeremiah, underneath all those layers of resentment, was proud, too.

But Adam Fisher was not the man Conrad thought he was. Conrad’s world fell apart.

He learned it in something that felt like a fugue state, a screaming argument he overheard when he came back early from practice and his parents didn’t hear him walk in. It didn’t feel right, that his world should crumble based on an eavesdropped conversation. But it did. His mother was sobbing. Her cancer was back. His father cheated on her the first time around, fell into the closest arms he could find, and she forgave it then, but now that she had so little time left, she couldn’t go on forgiving it.

That was when Conrad first learned that his father’s pride wasn’t a gift. It was a brand, seared over his heart.

He hates himself. Changes. Hyperventilates and tries to become someone he’s not, someone who isn’t Adam Fisher, who doesn’t say “shit” in that same tone and move his hands in the same gestures and have the same blood moving through his veins. He tries to be a good man, more of his mother, more of Laurel, more of the boy that someone so important had once loved.

Conrad is loyal to a fault, and that loyalty leads him away from everyone. Steven, his brother, Belly. When he realizes distance made it all hurt more, he tries, again, to not be his father–to stick around, to make it all right again, to not turn his back on the people he loves. He lets them shove him and punch him and scream in his face. It’s what Adam wouldn’t do, and so he does it.

But after it all, Conrad still won’t tell his father no. He meets with him the night after the wedding, when Belly has run away, an answer to every one of his prayers. He doesn’t tell him what Jere said to his face. But he does say more than he has said to his father, maybe ever.

“It’s my fault,” he says, and his father looks at him with recognition. “I ruined the wedding. And I wanted it. I prayed for it.” It feels unreal, still. Like he has made it so by speaking it.

There it is: Adam Fisher’s pride, plain on his face. Conrad does not want to see it. He does not want one ounce of this man’s pride.

“You pushed me away,” Adam says, “When I tried to help you.” 

There is an ocean between them, but it is shallower than Conrad had once thought. He grasps for a buoy. “You made everything worse,” he says, all accusation.

“Exactly,” Adam says, and he does not blink. He does not look away, the same way he might look at his own reflection in a mirror.

Conrad has tried to outrun it for years. He has tried to convince himself that he can’t be his father if he runs away, if he turns his back on the things his father loved, if he does the things his father never did for him.

Adam looks at him. Their eyes are the same, blue and sparkling. It is permission and it is accusation in equal measure: We are the same. You must do as I did. Let go. Give in.

Conrad has learned enough to know that Adam is not entirely correct. But he is still Adam’s son. This whole affair has made him feel unnerringly like him, that boy he had spent years trying to bury. He has to imagine that this guilt feels the same as what his father had carried through the years, for capturing someone’s sunlight and holding it in a covered cage. 

Conrad is not the Fisher who has philandered and failed to exceed expectations. But he is a Fisher, and he has done harm in his pursuit not to be. Perhaps to no one more than himself.

So Conrad goes.

The night before he does, there are so many stars over Cousins. 

That was the first thing Laurel had realized about the place, when she was twenty and Beck had dragged her there for the first time. They haven’t faded, even after all of these years. It brings her some degree of comfort to know that they are here, even with Susannah gone. They’ll be here, too, when she is gone, and Susannah’s children, and their children, too. 

Conrad is looking up at the sky like he can discern the truth from it. Like he needs an answer, and if he studies for long enough, he’ll find it.

Laurel holds out a bottle to him, and he takes it, pushing himself upright. 

“What should would toast to?” She asks, though she already knows what he’ll say. It’s written all over his face.

So they toast to Belly and Jeremiah, clad in their formal dress. She can imagine that, if this were a different Conrad, she would have slipped off, left him to his misery in peace. But Laurel has seen Conrad shirk comfort at every moment of his life. He has always been bad at asking for it. And, while she has always been happy to try to give him what he wanted, she is still a mother, and most of what she does deals in needs, not wants. 

There is a set, a furrow to his brow. She mimics it, feels it on her own face, and it takes her back, suddenly, more than two decades. She craves a cigarette, though she hasn’t had one since Beck died.

“How are you doing?” She asks, because she knows him. Knows he needs to say it out loud. “C’mon, it’s me. Your Laura,” she says, gentle, insistent.

Conrad’s fingers play on the neck of the bottle. He looks away, and Laurel can only see the side of his face, the line of his jaw tense, like he hasn’t unclenched it in weeks. “It’s killing me,” he says, like a confession, like a prayer. He speaks of duty, is resigned to his fate. 

It’s too much for him, Laurel remembers telling Susannah once. Having to protect everyone. 

Laurel can’t help but feel like this is too much for him, too. This firework, this live grenade in his chest. She can see it on his face. He has nursed it through many nights, tried to keep it from sparking. She can see him singed at the edges.

Laurel lifts her hand to his face. It feels like just yesterday he was that tiny baby in the incubator, soothed when placed in his mother’s arms. He could practically fit in Laurel’s palm. When he was small, Laurel would hold his face between her hands, squish his mouth to force him into silly voices. Now he leans into her hand, exhaling through his nose. It seems like the first time he has relaxed his head enough to let it fall in days, perhaps weeks, perhaps since he got back to Cousins all those weeks ago. She holds him up. 

“We’ll get through it,” she says. They’ve made it through everything else, too. Grieving the only way they knew how. Sharing that language that felt all the lonelier, when the only others who knew it refused to speak it. 

When she moves her hand to his shoulder, the way Susannah had always comforted her boys, his head drops, eyes closed, caught in some thought Laurel would pay anything to be able to hear. 

“God, I miss your mom,” she says. 

“Me, too,” he says. His voice is thick. 

They sit. Conrad moves just once, as though he is trying to stand, but Laurel’s hand keeps him seated like a blanket over his shoulders. Laurel feels his shoulders move silently, and when she looks at his face, it is wet, unshuttered, eyes closed as though he can block out the truth. 

Maybe there is something of Susannah in him, too. Maybe there is enough of her in them both to sit here—not to pretend, like she might have. But to accept it without fear. To know that this is what their one, sparking, all-consuming love does, and know that they did not turn away from it, though it may have run from them.