“Kind of. More like with a future. He guessed, correctly, that it can be hard to be related to my dad and be in America sometimes. He has connections in England. He’s offered to make some calls and get me into a program at a university in England and would help cover the costs.”
Stevie blinked. Maybe it was the heat, or the rush of events, but her brain was not making a picture of the words coming out of David’s mouth.
“England?” she said.
“England,” he repeated. A nervous flicker flashed across his features.
“For school?”
“For school.”
“So what did you say?” she asked.
“I said I would think it over. I have to get back to them soon, though. Definitely by this week.”
Something Stevie had learned about herself in the months that she had been in some kind of relationship with David was this: she didn’t take emotionally taxing conversations well. It didn’t take much for her to spiral. She went from feeling completely connected to him and swimming in the warm waters of happy hormones, to a cold, frightened feeling. She had just gotten David back, and now he was going again, farther than before.
“So you’re saying this now?” she asked. “After a woman I met fell off a cliff?”
“That wasn’t my plan,” he said, a little archly. “I’ve been trying to tell you since I got here. It’s never the right time with you. I’m going to have to go soon, so . . .”
“So you’re dropping this news and leaving?”
“Stevie,” he said, a flinty edge coming into his voice, “I came out here as soon as I could. I’m trying to—”
“I know what you’re trying to do,” she said, even though
she had absolutely no idea what he was trying to do, or even what that meant. That’s the thing about speaking—you can talk and talk and have no idea at all what the words leaving your mouth mean, or where they came from.
“This is an opportunity,” he said. “I need to talk about it, think about it.”
“What’s there to think about?” she said. “It would be terrible if you had to pay for school like a normal person.”
He pushed himself up to his hands and stretched his arms long behind him.
“Yeah,” he said. “Like a normal person.”
The air between them chilled.
Stevie didn’t want to be saying what she was saying. She only sort of meant it. It wasn’t his fault that someone had offered to pay for his school, or that he could take it or leave it. At the same time, it wasn’t exactly fair that, once again, David had the world handed to him on a silver platter. People like David didn’t have to make their own luck. It was fair to bet that no one was going to offer Stevie a free ride to school in England, and she’d solved a murder.
It also meant he might be going far away, and just when they were happy. Was there some kind of law that said things couldn’t go well between them?
“I can’t deal with this right now,” she said, pushing herself up from the ground.
Shut up, Stevie, shut up, stop talking like you’re in a reality show. . . .
“I’m sorry things can’t always follow your schedule,” he
snapped back, starting to match her tone.
She was walking away, and she didn’t even know why. She was crying. She walked faster, then she jogged, then she stopped jogging because she still was no good at running. Overhead, the sky continued to darken quickly, turning a kind of green color.