Chapter 4 The Wrong Side of Quiet

Dash's POV

I said too much.

That is the first thing I think when I wake up. Before the ceiling. Before the sounds of the house settled. Just that one clear, cold fact sitting on my chest.

Not if we handle it before she does.

I don't even know why I said it like that. Prentice had asked me point-blank, does Cleo know about the visits, and I panicked and said the wrong thing in the wrong way, and now it is out there, permanent, in the air of a house where sound apparently travels better than I realized.

Because when I came back upstairs last night, Cleo's door was open a crack.

It had been closed all morning.

I don't know exactly what she heard. But the way she looked at me at dinner, not angry, not cold, but carefully blank, the way you look at something you are studying from a safe distance, told me enough.

She heard something.

And now I am lying here trying to figure out how to fix a problem I am not supposed to admit exists.

Prentice solves it the way Prentice solves everything: by making it loud and unavoidable.

He announces at breakfast that Marcus is having people over, and we are all going. Not a question. A fact delivered with the full confidence of someone who has never once considered that other people might want to say no.

Cleo looks up from her coffee. "I'm not going."

"You are," Prentice says.

"Prentice,"

"Cleo." He points his fork at her. "You have been in this house for sixteen hours, and you have already memorized the ceiling of your bedroom. You're going."

She looks at me like this is somehow my fault.

I look back at her like I agree with Prentice, which I do, and I hold eye contact long enough that she looks away first.

She goes.

Marcus lives twenty minutes out. His backyard is the kind of place that collects people on summer afternoons, loud music, bad lawn chairs, and the smell of charcoal. Prentice walks in as he owns it. I follow. Cleo stops at the edge of the yard, takes one look at the crowd, and finds the furthest chair from everyone else.

She has a book in her bag. Of course she does.

I stay with Prentice for the first hour. Marcus and the others pull us into a conversation about nothing important, summer plans, people we know, the usual noise. I laugh at the right moments. I answer when someone talks to me.

But I keep track of where Cleo is.

I don't examine that too closely.

Around the second hour, Prentice gets absorbed into a card game, and I find myself standing at the edge of it all with nothing to do. I look across the yard. Cleo is in the same chair she picked at the start. Book open. Completely untouched by the thirty people around her. Like she built a wall out of pages and sat comfortably inside it.

I walk over.

I don't plan to. My feet just go.

I drop into the empty chair beside her without asking.

She doesn't look up.

"What are you reading?" I ask.

"A book," she says.

"That's helpful."

She turns a page. "I thought so."

I lean over just enough to see the cover. She pulls it slightly away from me. Not dramatic, just an inch. Like a reflex.

"I've read that one," I say.

That gets her. She looks up. Just for a second, but she looks up.

"No, you haven't," she says.

"Twice," I say. "The ending is wrong."

"The ending is the best part."

"The ending is the author giving up," I say. "Everything she built for three hundred pages, and then she just," I make a gesture with my hand. Flat. Gone.

Cleo stares at me.

"That's the point," she says slowly, like she is explaining something to someone much younger. "It's not supposed to feel finished. It's supposed to feel like real life."

"Real life is overrated in fiction," I say.

"That's the most backwards thing I've ever heard."

"Is it?"

She opens her mouth. Closes it. Looks down at the book. Looks back up at me.

And for about forty seconds, we are just two people talking about a book. Her voice loses the careful flatness she uses like a shield. She says something sharp and funny about the second chapter, and I laugh, actually laugh, not the social kind, and she looks almost startled by it, like she didn't mean to be interesting and is annoyed that it happened.

Then she seems to realize it.

The wall goes back up. Quietly. One brick at a time.

She looks back at her book.

I look at the yard.

We sit in silence for the rest of the afternoon, and it is somehow not uncomfortable.

Prentice talks the entire drive home. He is reviewing the afternoon like a sports commentator, who said what, who beat who at cards, and what Marcus's cousin said that was technically offensive but also a little funny. He is fully alive with it.

I drive. I say the right things at the right intervals. I keep my eyes on the road.

Almost.

At the second red light, I glance in the rearview mirror.

Cleo is looking at me.

Not at the window. Not at her phone. At me. In the mirror. Like she has been watching for a while and forgot to stop.

The second she realizes I caught her, she looks away.

Out the window. Fast. Gone.

But I saw it.

And I feel it sitting in my chest the rest of the drive home, warm and inconvenient and something I have no business feeling about my best friend's stepsister who already doesn't trust me and has every reason not to.

I pull into the driveway.

Prentice jumps out, talking about dinner.

Cleo gets out without a word and goes inside.

I sit in the car for a minute alone.

That is when my phone buzzes.

I look down at it.

Unknown number. But the first line of the message is enough to make my stomach drop completely.

I know you've been talking to Lorraine about the letters. Cleo deserves to know what her father actually said. Tell her. Or I will.

I stare at the screen.

Someone else knows.

Someone who has been watching this house, watching these people, close enough to know exactly what Lorraine told me and exactly what I have been carrying.

And they are not going to stay quiet.