Page 62 of The Bet
I slide into the driver’s seat, shut the door, and let the silence bloom. My phone feels like a bomb in my pocket. I fish it out and type a message with shaking thumbs.
See you this weekend. X
He replies instantly, as if he’s been waiting:
Yes, and I want you. All of you.
I stare at the words until they burn themselves into the screen, then set the phone face-down on the dash.
For a minute, I don’t turn the key. I just sit there, the engine cold, my own reflection ghosted in the glass. My hair’s a mess, cheeks pink, eyes swollen and bright. I don’t look like myself, and maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m someone new—someone brave, or reckless, or just done with secrets.
I press my hand to the glass, leaving a mark, and watch it fade.
Then I start the car, put it in gear, and drive toward the next impossible thing.
Maybe it will be enough.
Maybe it will ruin everything.
But at least it will be mine.
16
THE DISCOVERY
Thomas
When Stella texts me, it’s in the form of a plea. “If you REALLY love me,” she wrote, “bring your tools and mount the shelves, please please please. Not a euphemism (ha, ha). We are helpless. Also bring some snacks, these girls are hungry bitches.”
It’s only after I park in the crumbly little lot behind the apartment complex that I realize I didn’t text back. But that’s fine—Stella didn’t give me a date nor time, so I figured I’d drop by, even if it’s a Friday night. Besides, my daughter knows her father, knows that I travel a lot and am often out of pocket midweek. She doesn’t know, of course, the real reason I’m at her apartment.
It’s not the shelves. I’d pay a guy to do that, in a heartbeat.
But I want to see how Andie is living.
The stairs reek of spilled beer and overcooked onions, each landing littered with flyers for furniture that looks one carelessbreath away from collapse. The door to their unit is propped slightly open with a sock, of all things, and the sound that comes through—laughter, the tinny buzz of music, the fizz of a can popped open—pulls me forward with a sudden, unmanageable hunger. I stand in the hall for an extra beat, running my palm over the back of my neck to calm myself.
Then I knock, and the door swings wide as if someone’s been waiting on the other side, breath held.
It’s my daughter, in shorts and a t-shirt with a sad sloth on it. Her hair is up, and she grabs my arm the second she sees me, as if she’s afraid I’ll escape back down the stairs.
“Dad! You actually came!” She laughs, tugging me through the door into a wall of air that smells like microwave popcorn and Pantene shampoo.
“Here I am,” I say, lifting the toolbox in my free hand as a peace offering. “At your service, milady.”
She ignores the joke. “We’re all in the living room. Come say hi.”
She’s matured since freshman year, both emotionally and physically; there’s a confidence to the way she moves, the way she doesn’t let go of my sleeve until we’re through the tiny entry hall and into the main room.
The place is a mess, but the happy kind. A couch that must have taken three lives to drag up the stairs is slouched under a blanket with holes in it. Picture frames—most of them still empty—are lined up like dominoes along the baseboard, waiting for someone ambitious to hang them. The coffee table is a door on cinder blocks, scattered with half a deck of cards, a bowl of popcorn, the glittery stubs of a manicure party.
Andie is there, of course.
She’s cross-legged on the floor, a battered MacBook open on the rug in front of her, laughing at something Kayleigh says. Her hair is up in a messy knot, strands falling in front of her face. She’s in leggings and a sweatshirt with the sleeves somewhat shredded, and when she sees me, her smile flickers—but only for half a heartbeat. She recovers instantly, lifting a beer bottle in greeting, her lips twisted in a perfect, polite “Oh, hello, Mr. Moreland.”
“Ladies,” I say, giving them the old head-nod, the one I use in boardrooms and faculty lounges.
They chorus back: “Hi, Thomas,” “Hey, Mr. Moreland,” “Can you pass me a soda, please?”—the last from Mary Kate, who’s trying to get popcorn from the bowl to her mouth without spilling it all down her shirt.
