Page 57 of Love All
“I have to go,” Indie says.
Which is Charlotte’s line. Which is the thing Charlotte says when the floor goes. I watch Indie Roy reach, in the worst moment of her life, for the one tool her best friend taught her by accident. And use it.I have to go.
And she goes, through the beautiful room, past the lights, in the green dress. And Cole stands frozen and doesn’t follow her, and then hates himself for not following her, I watch both happen on his face, and then he goes too, the other direction,and the two of them come apart across a crowded floor while the music plays.
And that’s that. That’s the whole of us. Four months of the best thing any of us has ever been part of, down in under four minutes, and every single brick of it traceable to a ball hopper and my careless gold mouth.
***
Charlotte doesn’t go after Indie. That’s how I know how bad it is. She’d go after Indie through a wall, normally. But she stands there one second too long, because she’s done the math twice now and gotten the same answer both times.
The second answer is me.
“You told him,” she says. Quiet. Not a question. The whole bright room roaring around us, and her voice flat as the floor I was taught I floated above. “Jack. You told Jack. The one thing. Theonlything I ever asked you to keep away from her.” She isn’t crying. Charlotte doesn’t cry; I told her that once and she saidcorrect,and here she is being correct in the middle of a detonation, dry-eyed and gray, and it is so much worse than tears. “Her over the plan. Every time.You said that to me. On the court. The first morning. Yousworeit.”
“Charlotte—”
“How.” Just the one word.
And I could lie. The old me would, find the angle, spread the blame.Jack figured it out. It wasn’t really me. These things get out.I stand in the wreckage of everything, and for one second the gold rises up in me, the sealant, the smooth easy exit,it’s not what it sounds like— and I don’t take it.
It’s the one decent thing I do all night. It is four minutes too late to matter.
“I told him. Not on purpose. But I did. He goaded me about you leaving, and I wanted to prove I’d made something real, so Ithrew the one real thing I ever made in his face. And he took it. Because that’s what he does. That’s what I taught him to want.” I make myself hold her eyes. “It’s mine, Charlotte. All of it. Not Jack’s. Not yours. You kept it safe for four months, and I lit it on fire in an afternoon because I was too busy beingfineto keep my mouth shut. It’s mine.”
She looks at me for a long moment. And the terrible thing, the thing I’ll carry, is that there’s no cruelty in her face. I’d take cruelty. Cruelty I’ve earned; cruelty is a thing we know how to do to each other. There’s just a kind of finished quiet. The look of a person watching the last theory she had about you turn out to be the true one.
“You floated,” she says. Not even angry. Almost gentle. The worst sentence anyone has ever said to me, and she says it like a diagnosis. “I made that whole thing up to hurt you, in my doorway. The coasting, the bill, all of it — I built it to be cruel and I didn’t believe a word of it. And then you went and made ittrue.In four days. You proved me right about the one thing I was lying about.” She shakes her head, slow. “I have to go find Indie. If she’ll let me. Which she won’t.”
And she turns and goes after the only person in the room who matters more to her than her own pride, and leaves me standing alone under the string lights in a suit I put on to confess, holding a plan I was one hour too late to use, in the smoking ruin of the best thing four people ever built.
Across the room, by the wall, Jack sets down the drink he never once raised, and walks out into the night, finally, after two years, a man whose books are balanced.
And I stand there and understand, all at once and far too late, the whole math of myself: I spent twenty-two years believing the gold meant nothing could ever cost me anything, when the truth was the exact reverse. The gold doesn’t keep the bills away. It just makes sure that when they finally come due, somebodyelse is always standing close enough to pay them. Jack. And now Cole. And Indie, in a green dress, going out a side door alone. And Charlotte, who handed me the one thing she loved more than her own safety, and made me swear, and watched me burn it down beingfine.
I won the bet by fourteen cents.
I lost everything else by one hour, and it was the cheapest, most careless, most expensive hour of my entire gilded life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Charlotte
INDIE DOESN’T COME home that night, and she doesn’t answer her phone, and by the third unanswered call I do the thing I do. The thing that caused all of this.
I start to manage it.
I am very good in a crisis. It’s the one unambiguous gift the cold house left me: when the floor goes, I go cold and clear and operational, and I make a plan, and I execute it. So that’s what I do, at one in the morning, in the dress I wore to watch my best friend’s life come apart. I make a plan. I will find her. I will explain it. I will lay the whole thing out, clean and exact, the way I lay out everything,here is what we did, and here is why, and here is the part that was real— and Indie is reasonable, Indie is the most reasonable person alive, and once she has the full and accurate picture, she will understand, and I will fix it. I drive to her sister’s. I text Margo. I text Tess. I draft, delete, and redraft a message to Indie eleven times, optimizing it, the way I’d optimize a serve. Hunting for the version precise enough to land.
It does not occur to me until somewhere around four in the morning, sitting in my car outside a building she isn’t in, thatthe version precise enough to landis the entire disease. That I am, at this exact moment, in the wreckage of what my engineeringdid, trying to engineer my way out of it. That I hurt the person I love most in the world by deciding I knew best and managing her life from behind a curtain, and my instinct, my deepest, fastest, most trusted instinct, is to do it again. Better. With a more optimized message.
I put the phone down. I sit in the dark. And for the first time in my life, I have no plan. Because every plan I have ever made is a version of the thing that broke everything, and I do not know how to want something without reaching behind the curtain to arrange it.
***
She finally answers Margo, who tells me, kindly, with the careful flatness of a person delivering a verdict she doesn’t entirely agree with but has been asked to deliver:She’s okay. She’s at her sister’s. She doesn’t want to see you right now. She said please don’t come, and she said to tell you she means it. She’s not being dramatic. She just can’t look at you yet. I’m sorry, Lotte.
Yet.I hold ontoyetthe way you hold a railing.Yetis a door left open a crack, and I have built an entire personality around getting through cracks.
