“Ease onto the pedal,” I say.
He does, and because he’s Wyn, he does so beautifully. But as soon as he reaches full speed, he pushes too hard, and I dive to catch his right hand, steadying it before the would-be vase can topple. “Told you I’d ruin it.”
“So dramatic,” I tease, brushing my nose against his neck. “You didn’t ruin it. We’re just changing the shape of it.”
I lean across him to put my other palm on the outside of his left hand, matching the pressure, the vase narrowing and funneling upward.
“Now we really are doing the Ghost thing,” he says.
“Not quite,” I say, “but I don’t think my arms are long enough that I could sit behind you and do this.”
“Definitely not,” he says. “But you’re welcome to sit in my lap.”
“Excuse me,” I say. “I’m the one in charge here. Everyone knows the person sitting in the lap is the amateur.”
“So you want me to sit in your lap,” he says.
“I don’t have a death wish,” I say.
“Glad to hear it.” His gaze flickers back to the clay. Somehow, we’re keeping it from collapsing or tipping over. It flares out, narrows, and flares again, wonky but standing.
I catch myself staring at him, without any intention of replying.
When he looks up, my heart trips.
His mouth curls. “What?”
“I have to tell you something,” I whisper.
His foot lifts off the pedal, his smile falling. “Okay.”
I try to steel myself. I feel like Jell-O. I wish we were in the dark, on opposite sides of the kids’ room. It’s so much harder to say things in the light of day.
I close my eyes so I won’t have to see his reaction, won’t see if the world suddenly ruptures at the words: “I think I hate my job.”
I wait.
Nothing.
No eardrum-destroying groan as the earth splits in two. My parents and coworkers don’t come barreling into the room with pitchforks. My phone doesn’t ring with the calls of every teacher, tutor, and coach who ever wrote me a recommendation letter or gave me a research position or sent a congratulations email.
But all of those things were, arguably, a long shot.
The only thing that matters right now, the only thing I’m afraid of, is Wyn’s reaction.
All those sensations that tend to precede a panic attack bubble up in me: itchy heat, a tight throat, a sudden drop in my stomach.
“Harriet,” he says softly. “Will you look at me?”
On a deep breath, I open my eyes.
His brow is grooved, his eyes and mouth soft. Quicksand.
“Did something happen at the hospital?” he asks.
My stomach sinks a little lower. I wish it were that simple, a concrete moment when everything went wrong. I shake my head.
Wyn’s clay-covered hands gingerly catch my wrists. “Then what?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“Will you try?” he asks.
I swallow. “It’s not supposed to be about me. I’m supposed to be helping people.”
“It is about you,” Wyn says.
How do I sum it up? There isn’t any one thing I would change. It’s that for some reason, I spend ninety percent of my time excruciatingly unhappy, and the more I try to tamp it down, the more the unhappiness grows, swells, pushes up against my edges.
It’s that when I’m not here, I feel like a ghost. Like my skin isn’t solid enough to hold the sunlight, and my hair isn’t there to dance on the breeze.
“I’m not good at it, Wyn,” I choke out.
He jogs my hands. “You’re brilliant.”
“But what if I’m not,” I say. “What if I’ve put everything I have, all my time and energy, into this, and money. God, the money. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans, some of which my parents had to cosign because I don’t have good credit, and I—I’ve built a life where all I do is wait. Wait for the surgery to be over. For the day to end. Wait to be here, where I feel . . .”
Wyn’s lips part, his eyes painfully soft.
“Like myself. Like I’m in the right place.”
The right branch of the multiverse, I think. Where you’re still so close I can touch you, taste you, smell you.
“I loved school,” I say. “But I hate being in hospitals. I hate the smell of the antiseptic. The lighting gives me headaches, and my shoulders hurt because I can’t relax, because everything feels so—so dire. And every day, when I go home, I don’t even feel relieved, because I know I have to go back. And I . . . I keep waiting for it to change, for something to click and to feel how I thought it would, but it hasn’t. I get better at what I’m doing, but the way I feel about doing it doesn’t change.”
Wyn’s hands tense, his eyes dropping as his voice frays. “Why wouldn’t you tell me this?” he asks.
“I am telling you.”
“No,” he says roughly. “When I was there. When you needed me, and I couldn’t get to you no matter how hard I tried. Why wouldn’t you let me in?”
“Because I was ashamed,” I say. “You’d followed me across the country, and things were so hard, for you and for us. I was terrified of making them worse. I wanted to be who you—who everyone—thinks I am, but I can’t. I’m not. I never wanted to let you down.”
He stares at me for three seconds, then lets out a gruff, frustrated laugh.
“I’m not joking, Wyn.”
He scoots forward, and my knees slot in between his, both my wrists still cradled in his muddy hands, his thumbs sweeping back and forth, a slight tremor in them. “I’m not laughing at you. I just feel so stupid.”
“You? I’m the one who devoted the last ten years of her life, and a lot of imaginary money, to something she hates.”
“I . . .” He darts a glance at our hands. “You were in pain, and I didn’t even notice, Harriet. Or I did, but I thought it was about me. I fucked up, and I lost you for it.”
I shake my head ferociously. “You had bigger things going on.”
“There was nothing bigger than you,” he says raggedly. “Not to me. Not ever.”
Blood rises to my cheeks, my throat, my chest. It’s painful to swallow. “Maybe that’s what made it so hard. You built your whole life around my plans. You left our friends and missed time with your family—with Hank—and now I can’t hack it. You did all of that for me, and I’m not even the person you thought I was.”
“Harriet.” The tenderness in his voice, his hands, rips open all those hastily stitched sutures in my heart. “I know exactly who you are.”
I look up, voice shrinking. “Really? Because I don’t.”
“I knew who you were before we even met,” he says. “Because everything our friends told me was true.”
“You mean you saw a naked drawing of me,” I say.