She’d thought she loved Callum, but the more time passed, the more she questioned it. Their relationship had been like a marble statue: beautiful, cold, immutable. The illusion of indestructibility belying how fragile it was. It had been so easy for her to skim over the tiny cracks in its surface, her mind filling in the flawless expanse it wanted to see.
If Callum was like a statue, Ethan was like a river: powerful and unpredictable. Sometimes she was one with the current, floating peacefully, basking in the sunshine. Sometimes she was drowning. The worst part was, she wasn’t sure which one she preferred.
She broke out of her reverie in time to see Ethan walking back up the path. As soon as he got close enough, she started peppering him with questions.
“What happened? Did you catch him? What did you say?”
“I got him to delete the picture,” Ethan said, sitting on the stoop next to her.
Grey’s eyes widened. “You didn’t beat him up, did you?”
Ethan’s brow creased in confusion. “What? Of course not. I paid him.”
“You did? How much?”
“Twenty.”
“Twenty dollars? He did it for that little?”
“Twenty thousand.”
“What?” Grey thought she was going to fall off the stairs.
He shrugged. “That’s how much he said it would sell for.”
“There’s, like, a hundred photos of us full-on fucking online already. Who cares if he sells it?”
Ethan looked nonplussed.
“Sorry, I thought…I didn’t want to make things worse for you.”
Grey drew her knees up to her chest and rested her head in her hands. Exhaustion swept over her.
“No, I’m sorry. Thank you. Thank you for doing that. That’s like the nicest fucking thing anyone’s ever done for me. What the fuck, Ethan.” She slid her hands down her face, laughing in disbelief. “This whole thing is fucking crazy. What are you saying to me right now? What do you want from me?”
Ethan ran his hands through his hair.
“I want to be with you. Whatever that means. We can figure it out.”
Grey closed her eyes, a yes dancing on the tip of her tongue. But when she opened her mouth, everything that came attached to that tiny word felt too huge and heavy to process.
“I…I don’t know. I need some time. I need to think. Everything…it’s all a lot.” She turned to him. “Is that okay?”
He nodded, his face placid. Controlled.
“Of course.”
She leaned over and brushed her lips over his, using every last ounce of self-control to keep it brief and not lean in deeper. He kissed her back, but remained where he was, too. When she pulled away, he stood up.
“One sec. I have something in the car for you.”
When he returned, he had a large cardboard tube tucked under his arm. She took it, looking at him quizzically.
“What is this?”
“Happy birthday. Sorry, I should have wrapped it.”
“You didn’t have to get me anything. I mean, thank you.” She felt awkward all of a sudden. She didn’t want him to leave, but he had to. She’d rejected him. Sort of.
She stood up, too.
“I, um…okay. I’ll see you…we’ll talk later.”
“Okay.” His tone was unreadable. She wanted to walk with him to his car, but all she could do was stand there, watching him disappear into the darkness.
When Grey let herself back into the house, Kamilah was lurking nervously next to the front door. Her brow knitted in concern when she saw Grey was alone.
“Are you okay? Was he…should I not have? I didn’t want to meddle. I just thought…you seemed like you were struggling.”
Grey shook her head. “It’s okay. It needed to happen. I couldn’t run away forever.”
“What did he say?”
“He wants to get back together. Or get together for the first time, I guess.”
“And…you don’t?”
Grey thought back to the camera flashing feet away from her front door. She swallowed. “I have no fucking idea what I want.”
Kamilah’s eyes flicked down to the cardboard tube in Grey’s hands. “What is that?”
“I don’t know. He said it was my birthday present.”
Grey popped off the white plastic top of the cardboard tube and pulled out the contents.
It was a poster, a big one. With Kamilah at her side, she cleared off her coffee table, anchoring one end with a book as she unrolled it. The living room was still fairly full, and the people on the couch leaned forward to watch her progress with interest. A few more gathered around to peer at it as she flattened it out.
It was the original theatrical poster for The Sister Switch: two identical tween girls grinning back-to-back, arms crossed, as their parents leaned in from either edge of the frame, giving them looks of benevolent annoyance. Grey felt a twinge of nostalgia at the sight of it. As she looked closer, however, she felt a twinge of something else, something immense and ineffable. Instead of seeing Morgan Mitchell’s face doubled back at her, Grey was staring at her own eleven-year-old visage.
She ran her fingers over the slick paper, stopping once they reached the text at the bottom:
And Introducing EMILY BROOKS as HEATHER and ASHLEY.
There were a few giggles and murmurs of confusion around her. Grey looked up and met Kamilah’s eyes. She could tell Kamilah understood immediately. They were both speechless.
Grey rolled the poster back up as quickly as she could without damaging it. It felt wrong to have it laid out in public with everyone staring at it. In a way, she felt more exposed by it than by the photos of her own naked body that had been everywhere for weeks. A hidden piece of her soul laid bare. She slid it back into the tube, her hands shaking.
“I have to— I— Sorry,” she muttered, her feet carrying her out of the room before she knew what was happening.
IT WAS STILL TOO EARLY for Ethan to go to bed. He popped open a beer to calm his racing mind and navigated, almost unconsciously, to the next episode of Poison Paradise. As the now-familiar theme song started playing, his stomach curdled. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. Maybe he’d had enough Grey for the night. But it seemed like there was no such thing as too much. There was something perversely enjoyable about it now, rubbing salt in the wound, reveling in her rejection.
Well. She hadn’t rejected him, exactly, but he didn’t have his hopes up. Ethan hadn’t professed his love many times, but he’d done it enough to know that anything less than an enthusiastic affirmation was a rejection. At least he still had another season to go before he really had to worry about it. He supposed he could always start it over from the beginning, again and again, growing old, alone, as the world’s foremost Poison Paradise scholar.
He kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the couch. Lucy had just discovered that her boyfriend’s accidental death may not have been an accident after all, and there was a cabal of shadowy forces at work in the idyllic town of Paradise Point. Ethan had been glad to see Callum’s character make his unceremonious exit, and not just for the obvious reasons. His presence had really dragged Grey down toward the end—although Ethan hadn’t yet seen her have a story line that wasn’t completely bonkers.
Grey and Mia peered around a corner, eavesdropping on a group of shady-looking men having a private conversation in broad daylight.
“What do you think it all means?” Mia mused loudly.
Grey bit her lip. “I don’t know. The more we find out, the less sense everything makes. How does Jackson’s secret greenhouse fit into all of this?”
“Turns out Mia was behind it all along. Killed my boyfriend and then had the nerve to act like she didn’t know a thing. What a bitch, right?” came a dry voice from behind him. Ethan sat up with a start, tearing his eyes off two-dimensional Grey so abruptly that it took him a moment to readjust to the three-dimensional version standing behind him.
“I— You—” he sputtered.
“Oh. Sorry. Spoilers.” The corners of her mouth twitched as he scrambled off the couch, stopping short in front of her. She let her overnight bag slide off her shoulder onto the ground, her eyes flicking from his face to the screen and then back again. “You weren’t kidding.”
“What?” he asked, taking another step toward her so she had to tilt her head back to meet his eyes.