Chapter 13: What Claire Wanted to Say

She was already there when he pulled into the lot, which was the first thing that struck him wrong about the whole evening — not that she’d come at all, but that she’d apparently been sitting there long enough that the visor mirror was still down when he walked past her car, like she’d been checking her reflection every few minutes for the better part of an hour, unable to settle on how she wanted to look for this.

He almost didn’t recognize the car itself. She’d traded in the little gray Civic they’d bought together junior year of college, the one with the crack in the windshield from a rock on I-70 that they’d never gotten around to fixing, for something newer, something with no history attached to it at all, and some small, tired part of him understood exactly why she’d done that before he’d even registered whose car it was or that she was getting out of it.

“Evan. Please. Two minutes.”

He kept walking toward his door at first, keys already out, telling himself he could just not stop, could let his legs carry him up the steps and inside and pretend he hadn’t heard her at all. He’d pictured this moment plenty of times over the past two months — lying awake listening to the window unit rattle through its half-hearted attempt at cooling the apartment, running different versions of it in his head the way you replay a hand of cards you already lost — and in most of those imagined versions he was better at just walking away than he suspected he actually was, standing here now with her real face in front of him instead of the flattened, furious version he kept locked up somewhere behind his ribs.

He stopped with one foot on the bottom step.

“How long have you been sitting out here.”

“A while.” She said it like a confession, arms already coming up to wrap around herself even though the evening wasn’t cold yet. “I almost left twice.”

“You should’ve gone with the second time.”

“Probably.” A short breath, not quite a laugh. “I didn’t, though.”

He looked at his door. He looked back at her, at the way she was standing with her weight rocked back on her heels like she expected him to tell her to get lost and wanted to be braced for it when he did. Something about that — the bracing, the visible cost of just standing there waiting — kept him from finishing the walk up the steps.

“Two minutes,” he said, and hated, even as it came out of his mouth, how much it sounded like a deal he was making, like some part of him was still keeping score, still hoping she’d go over so he could be the one who’d been generous about it. “Out here. I’m not asking you inside, so don’t ask.”

“I wasn’t going to ask.”

“And nothing about getting back together. If that’s where this is going, you can get back in the car right now and save us both the trouble.”

“It’s not.” She held his eyes when she said it, which was, he had to admit, more than he’d expected from her. “I know that’s done. I just needed to say some things to you, and you keep blocking my number, so I didn’t have another way to do it.”

He didn’t say anything to that. He let the quiet sit there on the sidewalk between them, let it do some of the work he didn’t have the energy to do himself, and the kid two houses down kept riding his bike in slow, aimless circles in the last of the daylight, the chain clicking with each rotation, oblivious to the two of them standing there like a monument to something that used to work.

She looked different than he remembered from the wedding-planning months. Thinner in the face. Tired in a way concealer wasn’t quite managing, faint gray half-moons under her eyes. Her hair was pulled back into a low, practical ponytail instead of down around her shoulders, the way she used to wear it because he’d once told her, sophomore year, sitting on the tailgate of somebody’s truck at a bonfire out past the Kesler place with a fire popping and throwing sparks up into a black sky full of more stars than a person got to see once they moved anywhere with real streetlights, that he liked it that way. She’d kept wearing it like that for six years, probably long after he’d have said he even remembered saying it. Now it looked like she hadn’t had the energy that morning to care.

“I panicked,” she said finally, when he still hadn’t filled the silence for her. “About the wedding. About — I want to be careful how I say this, because I know it’s going to sound like I’m making this about me, and I’m not trying to, I swear I’m not. I just started having these moments where I couldn’t breathe right. Standing in the kitchen looking at the registry. That stupid mixer we picked out that cost more than my car payment, remember that? Standing in that barn we booked, picturing myself walking toward you in front of everybody we’ve ever known in our whole lives, and instead of feeling excited, I felt like the walls were closing in on me. Like twenty-two was too young to already know the whole rest of your life. The house out past the county road we talked about. The — everything. All of it mapped out since we were seventeen and didn’t know anything yet about who we were even going to turn into.”