Chapter 5 The Girl Who Wasn't Me
Cleo's POV
I went through my mother's phone records.
I know how that sounds. I am not proud of it. But I woke up this morning thinking about what Dash said to Prentice, not if we handle it before she does, and something about it wouldn't let me rest. So when Prentice left his laptop open on the kitchen table and walked upstairs to shower, I sat down, and I looked.
Mom shares a family plan with me. I know the account login. I have known it for two years because she made me memorize it in case of emergencies.
This felt like an emergency.
I found what I was looking for in four minutes.
Dash Calloway's number. Six calls from my mother's phone in the last three weeks. The longest one was forty-two minutes. It happened four days before the wedding.
Forty-two minutes.
My mother spoke to a boy she had met exactly twice for forty-two minutes and did not tell me a single word about it.
I closed the laptop. I put my hands flat on the table. I breathed.
Then I heard Prentice on the stairs, and I stood up and moved to the counter and poured myself a glass of water like I had been standing there the whole time.
I am very good at looking like nothing is wrong.
I have had a lot of practice.
Sloane Whitfield shows up at two in the afternoon.
I know who she is. Everyone at Hartfield knows who Sloane is; she moves through school the way the weather moves, like she was always going to arrive, and there is no point arguing with it. She texts Prentice twenty minutes before she appears, which is technically asking permission and functionally not.
She brings two friends. They come through the front door in a cloud of confidence and summer and the specific ease of girls who have never once had to wonder if they belong somewhere.
I am in the kitchen. I stay in the kitchen.
I watch through the open doorway.
Sloane finds Dash in under thirty seconds. She does not rush toward him; that is the thing. She just moves in his direction like gravity, like it is simply the natural way of things, and ends up beside him on the couch with her knee almost touching his.
She is beautiful. I am not saying it to be mean. It is just a fact, the way the weather is a fact. The kind of beauty that makes a room rearrange itself without her trying.
Dash is polite. I can see that from the kitchen. He smiles when she says something. He answers when she asks him things. But there is a distance to it, a glass wall between him and everything she is offering, and I notice it because I have been studying Dash Calloway's expressions for four days now with the focus of someone studying for a test she cannot afford to fail.
He is not interested.
He is also very good at not showing that he is not interested.
Sloane laughs at something he says. Loud and bright, the kind of laugh designed to be heard. And Dash, for just one second, for less than a second, glances toward the kitchen.
Toward me.
I look down at the counter.
My face is hot. I hate that my face is hot. I pick up a dish and wash it even though it was already clean because I need something to do with my hands, and I need to stop being a person who watches boys from kitchens and notices where they look.
The afternoon stretches long and loud. I stay out of the living room. I find small things to do, clean the counter, reorganize the cabinet Prentice already destroyed, start and abandon a book I have read before. I am not hiding. I am just not going in there.
Around four, Sloane's voice carries into the kitchen.
"Prentice says you're here all summer," she says to Dash.
"That's the plan," he says.
"So is Cleo," Prentice adds helpfully.
A small pause.
"Cleo," Sloane says. Like she is tasting the name. "She's the stepsister, right? I don't really know her."
"She's great," Prentice says. "You'd like her."
Another pause. Shorter. The kind that means someone has already decided something.
"Sure," Sloane says.
I set the dish down very carefully in the drying rack.
I go upstairs.
I sit on the floor of my room with my back against the bed and my knees to my chest, and I let myself feel it for a few minutes. Not about Sloane. About my mother. About the forty-two minutes she gave Dash Calloway that she has never once given me for the hard conversations.
When I was fourteen, my grades dropped. I stopped sleeping because I couldn't stop thinking about whether my dad was ever going to call. I figured it out alone. When I was fifteen, and Jade Okafor started the rumor about me at school that made three weeks feel like three years, I handled it alone. Every hard thing I have ever carried, I carried quietly, because my mother worked nights and worried too much, and I decided a long time ago that her peace was worth more than my problem.
And she called Dash.
She called a boy she barely knows. For forty-two minutes. About me.
I don't know if I am angry or just tired.
I think I am both.
Sloane and her friends leave at six.
I wait until the front door closes and the house goes quiet before I come back downstairs. Prentice is in the kitchen heating something up. Dash is not visible. I get a glass of water, stand at the sink, look out the window, and say nothing.
Prentice says: "She's not as bad as she seems."
"I don't think anything about her," I say.
He makes a sound that means he does not believe me.
I go back upstairs.
The mug is outside my door.
Still warm. Wrapped with a dish towel to keep the heat in, which means he thought about it. Which means it was not an accident or an afterthought. He planned it the same way he planned it the first time, quietly, without making it a thing, without asking for anything back.
No note.
I stand in the hallway holding it, and I am furious at myself for how much it matters.
I take it inside. I sit on my bed. I drink the whole thing.
I pick up my phone. I look at the unknown number that texted Dash earlier today.
I know about it because I stood in the hallway of Marcus's house and listened when he called Prentice on the drive home and told him.
What I did not tell either of them is this:
I recognized the number.
It is saved in my phone under a name I have not clicked on in two years.
My father.
