Page 2 of The Penalty

And God, the relief. It’s embarrassing how fast it comes, and how much it wants to turn into tears I’m absolutely not shedding in Beau Sorensen’s kitchen at seven in the morning.

“Thank you.” It comes out lower than I mean it to. It comes out meaning something other than the coffee, and I hear it land that way, and I put the mug down before the rest of it can arrive.

I take my heels back off the counter. At the mudroom door I stop, mostly to say it one more time, mostly to myself. “It means nothing.”

“Sure.” A beat. And then, because she apparently can’t entirely help it either: “Margo. The ones that really mean nothing don’t usually need three sentences of defense.”

I don’t have a script for that one. So I don’t answer it. I push out through the mudroom into the cold, heels in my hand, chin level. I leave my best friend holding both our coffees and my secret. And I don’t look back — because looking back is a tell, and I’m fresh out of cover.

The cold takes the top layer of skin off my face, and honestly, it’s a relief. It gives my body something to do that isn’t the other thing.

It snowed before dawn. A fine, dry second coat laid down over yesterday’s plowed gray, like powdered sugar over a cake that already came out of the oven wrong, and the side yard is one clean unbroken sheet of white — except for the single set of prints walking away from the mudroom, which are now, freshly, mine. My breath hangs in the air like punctuation. I go down the path fast, on the count, around to the curb where I parked last night, and there’s my car. White on white. A foot of snow on the roof and the windshield iced into frosted glass.

Of course I left the scraper at Priya’s.

So I drive the four minutes folded over the wheel, squinting through a circle the size of a salad plate that I cleared with my fist and the sleeve of a dress that cost more than the heat I’m not currently generating. The streets are dead. Whitmore on New Year’s morning is a snow globe somebody shook and set down and wandered off from. The town’s gone soft and white and hungover, the storefronts dark, one lonely plow scraping away two streets over like the last guy at a party who can’t read the room.

Western Massachusetts does winter the way some people do grief. Thoroughly. With conviction. By April I’ll be in love with it again — the green coming back up the Berkshires, the whole town smelling like thawed earth. But right now it’s just the cold I have to cross to reach the next warm room. And reaching the next warm room is the only plan I’ve ever fully trusted.

The radio comes on with the engine. Four-part harmony, wishing me a happy new year. I turn it off. The heater kicks in around minute three, and the warmth hits my skin, and my skin — traitor — remembers his hands. So. No music. No thank you.

Beta Nu sits at the top of Greek Row like it took a wrong turn looking for a longer growing season and decided to tough it out. It’s a white-columned monster of a house — three full stories of pale brick painted the soft buttery cream that belongs eight hundred miles south of here, a portico held up by columns so tall and so white they look like they’re holding up the whole sky, a sweeping front staircase, tall shuttered windows marching in rows. The front lawn is the prettiest green on campus in September. This morning it’s a smooth unbroken acre of snow, ruined only by the trampled cattle-path the partygoers cut to the door last night. The whole thing looks like somebody airlifted a Charleston mansion north, and the mansion has been standing here ever since, freezing politely, too well-bred to complain.

Which. Same, honestly.

I park at the curb, because the driveway’s a sheet of black ice and I’m in heels, and I sit for one second with both hands on the wheel. It was one night, I tell myself, slow, in the voice I save for the true ones. You wanted one thing for once and you took it. You’re fine. It doesn’t take. I put it away for later anyway. I’m extremely good at putting things away for later — it’s practically a marketable skill.

Inside, the house is awake. Which is deranged, because it’s not yet eight in the morning on the first of January, and these women threw a party I can still smell from the foyer — the sweet-stale ghost of spilled punch losing a slow war with somebody’s vanilla candle. But Beta Nu runs on its own private weather system. There’s a playlist going low in the back. A girl in a silk robe and last night’s lashes is dragging a trash bag the size of a body toward the side door. Through the wide arch into the kitchen there are four more of them in matching pajama sets and smeared mascara — two scrambling an industrial vat of eggs, one wiping down the marble island in long competent sweeps, one perched cross-legged on the counter narrating something that has the whole room wheezing.

Delaney catches me first, dress and smudged everything, and lifts a spatula in salute. “There she is! Walk of shame!”

“It’s a walk of strategy.” The bit’s already loading and firing before I’ve consciously authorized it, the bright thing rising up to meet the room the way water finds its level. “I left at a tactical hour expressly to avoid this exact conversation. It was an elegant plan. I have failed completely, and I respect every one of you for being awake to witness it. Eggs smell incredible. Drink water. I love you. I was never here.”

It buys me the stairs. It always buys me the stairs.

I go up the grand sweep of them with my hand light on the rail, past the composite photos of a hundred years of girls in pearls all making the same tilted-chin face, past the little brass plaque with the motto in Latin I translated on a dare freshman year and have wisely never repeated. Chin level. Pace even. I do not run, because running is a tell, and I used up all my cover in the kitchen.

Priya’s room is at the end of the second-floor hall, her door open, and she’s awake. Of course she’s awake. Priya Misra Michaels doesn’t believe in mornings the way other people don’t believe in ghosts — a charming little superstition with no real power over her. She’s in leggings and a Whitmore cheer sweatshirt with the sleeves shoved up, hair knotted on top of her head, a mug steaming on the desk and her phone in one hand. She looks up. She takes one long unbothered survey of me, heels to hairline. And she lets out a low whistle her mother could’ve delivered to the back row of a thousand-seat theater.

“Whose bed,” she says, “did you crawl out of?”

I lean on the doorframe. My smile’s up, and it’s been up so long this morning I’m half afraid that if I let it down, the rest of my face comes with it.

“I need to shower,” I tell her, “before we have that conversation.”

Her eyes narrow. Not unkind. Just reading. Priya’s the only one on the squad besides me who treats reading a room as a competitive sport, and she’s watched me orbit a certain enormous scowling defenseman since October — patient, like a woman who already paid for the movie and wants to see how it ends. She catches the thing I’m not saying. I watch her catch it. The tease drains out of her face, and something quieter comes up underneath.

“Margo.” Careful now. “Whose?”

“Shower,” I say. “Then we can talk. I really need to regroup.”

She holds my eyes one more beat, then nods, once, and lets it go. Because Priya knows the difference between a girl who wants to be needled and a girl who’s holding something with both hands — and she’s decided, correctly, that I’m the second kind this morning.

“Okay. Go, take your time. The water pressure’s the one genuinely good thing about this house.” She’s already moving, unfolding off the bed, doing the thing I do for everyone else, and it lands in my chest sideways and slightly wrong, the way being taken care of always does. “I’ll make us the real coffee — I hid actual beans from these animals, it’s a whole operation.” She squeezes my arm on her way past me into the hall. Light. No weight in it. “It’ll be on the desk when you’re out. And then you talk when you want to talk. Not before.”

And she goes. Gives me the room and the privacy and the door, all three, without making me ask for one of them. I stand in the middle of her borrowed bedroom in last night’s dress and feel the specific full-body itch of being cared for. The one I’ve never once known what to do with. The one that always makes me want to sprint down the hall after her and take care of her right back, twice as hard, so the ledger comes out even. It’s a whole thing. My therapist has a folder.

I don’t chase her. I go shower. That’s probably its own small act of growth. I’ll tell my therapist. She’ll throw a parade.