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The parking lot is dark and cold. My truck sits where I left it.

Tomorrow I get on a plane. Tomorrow I walk into the house where Margo Ashby was made — the house with the rubric and the two daughters and the sister with the news nobody’s said out loud yet. I’m going to meet Caroline Ashby, who taught her daughter that love is conditional on timelines and performance. I’m going to stand in the middle of a world that has nothing to do with hockey or drafts or spreadsheets or a number at the bottom of a document I update on the first of every month. A world of old money and good manners and the very specific kind of love that comes with expectations attached.

And I’m going to do it as nothing, officially. The classmate. The project partner. The name on the second ticket that she paid for over my objection.

I’ve been nothing before. I’m good at nothing.

But I drove to the Sailmaker on a Wednesday night with no plan except her. I left before dawn not wanting to. She showed up to a Thursday hockey practice in a green coat, stayed the whole session, and said I figured I’d return the favor and made me laugh in a rink — actually laugh, the real kind, the kind that surprised me on the way out.

I think about her voice saying I don’t want to go alone. The drop in the brightness when she said it. The cost of that sentence for a girl who manages everything.

She asked me. Not Sloane, not Beau, not Priya. Me. The inconvenient chemistry problem. The one she’s been pretending for months doesn’t mean anything. She asked me to come with her into the most managed version of her life — the one where the rubric runs, where the performance is the whole surface — because she trusted me with it.

Beau said she’s good for me.

I start the car. I think Beau might be underselling it.

Tomorrow is going to be something. I don’t know what yet.

I’ve decided to be ready for it anyway.

Chapter 13

Margo

His hand is over mine the whole way.

I don’t know exactly when it happened. Somewhere over Georgia I started on my nails. The specific nervous habit I broke in ninth grade and apparently still know by heart. He reached over without a word, pulled my hand from my mouth, and set it palm-down on his thigh. Then he put his hand over mine and left it there. No comment. No look. Just the warm weight of it, steady, the whole rest of the flight.

I didn’t sleep. I tried. Pulled the shade, closed my eyes, ran the weekend in my head instead — every variable, every conversation, every possible configuration of what Charleston is going to ask of me. My mother’s warmth, which is real and also a metric. My father’s careful pleasantness, which is how he loves people he doesn’t know what to do with. My sister, who is somewhere in that house right now, with whatever news she’s been saving for the in-person announcement. And Michael.

Michael is somewhere in that house.

I know because I’ve met his parents enough times to recognize the specific text my mother doesn’t send, the studied neutrality of your sister will be here and she has news, the careful omission of every name. I knew before we boarded. I’ve been knowing since Thursday night, curled into Theo’s side at the Sailmaker, reading my mother’s text in the dark.

I didn’t tell him. That’s the part I’m sitting with now, in the back of an Uber on I-26, his hand heavy and warm over mine, the Charleston peninsula visible through the window. I didn’t tell him because saying it out loud makes it a real thing I have to walk into, and I have been very carefully not making it real since Thursday.

Here’s what I didn’t say: Michael will be there. Michael Hartley, who I dated for two-and-a-half years, who I thought I was going to love through college and beyond it, who slept with my identical twin sister while we were together. My parents never chose sides. That was the thing that broke something I didn’t know I’d been relying on — not Maddison’s betrayal, though that was its own wound, but my parents’ careful neutrality. The way they held both of us at equal distance and called it fair.

I don’t talk about it. Not here. Not anywhere except my therapist’s office and occasionally Sloane, who knows the full shape of it.

And Theo. Who knows the outline. Who sat with me in a hotel room at two in the morning while I held my mother’s text and didn’t say anything. Who put his hand over mine on a plane without being asked.

He doesn’t ask why I didn’t sleep. He doesn’t ask why I was biting my nails at thirty thousand feet. He just held my hand. Now he’s watching the city go by out the window — the specific quiet attention he brings to things he’s actually seeing for the first time. I watch him watch it. I feel the whole complicated warmth of being this glad he’s here.

The driver takes the highway out to the coast.

The city falls away. The landscape opens up — marsh on both sides of the causeway, cordgrass going gold in the evening light, the smell of salt and pluff mud seeping through the vents. I’ve driven this road my whole life. I’m immune to it. But I watch Theo’s face when the Ben Sawyer Bridge crests and the Atlantic opens up ahead of us, gray-green and enormous, the island laid out below like something not quite real.

He doesn’t say anything. He just looks.

And that’s the thing about him — the thing I’ve been cataloguing since October without knowing that’s what I was doing. He doesn’t perform amazement. He doesn’t reach for his phone. He doesn’t look at me to confirm he’s supposed to find it beautiful. He just takes it in, quiet and direct, the way he takes in everything he actually means to absorb.

I want to tell him about the bridge at sunrise. The dolphins in the channel in summer. The specific quality of light in February when everything is low and silver and the tourists haven’t arrived yet and the island is just itself, unperformed. I want to show him all of it.

I don’t say any of that. I look out my own window and I let him look.

Sullivan’s Island announces itself in a particular way. The roads go narrow. The houses get serious. Old Charleston money doesn’t shout — it spreads out horizontally, wide porches and sea grass and the Atlantic visible between the lots, everything salt-weathered and deliberate. I grew up here. I know every house on this street by its light.