“Do what?” I ask.
“Find some crafty compromise to their disagreements. They’ll work it out on their own if you let them.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say.
His brows flick upward in amusement. “None?”
“Zero,” I say.
“They’re having a great trip,” he says. “Try not to worry.”
My stomach flips. As much as has changed between us, he still knows me a little too well. “I’m fine.”
We take up the whole first row of the tiny theater, and since it’s otherwise empty, we stretch our wet outer layers on the seats behind us to dry. I’m trying to find a way to sneak in between Sabrina and Cleo; I wind up at the end of the row, with no one to talk to but Wyn, who fumbles with his phone—angled pointedly away from me—until the house lights come down.
At the first minor jump scare, I fight the impulse to burrow into his side. It’s not helping that it’s freezing in here, and every time I unthinkingly put my arm on the armrest, it brushes his arm, which is scalding in comparison to the meat-locker temperature of the room at large.
Sabrina leans forward and flashes a thumbs-up at us from the far end of the row. As if by instinct, Wyn snatches my hand against my thigh, and my heart leaps into my throat.
Our pulses bat back and forth between our palms, a human Newton’s cradle. It’s all I can focus on, this lone point of contact between us. I notice every minute twitch of his fingers.
I wonder if he’s thinking about last night, me perched on his lap with my arms slung around his neck, wriggling against him like a cat in heat, the tension between us building.
Because it’s suddenly all I can think about. Having the lights this low gives us too much privacy for this to feel like an act, yet not enough that we can completely avoid each other.
I’m so thoroughly not following the movie that when someone on-screen is impaled by a wall of antlers, it’s genuinely jarring.
“Oh, come on, Harriet,” he whispers as I yelp and thrust my face into his chest. “I’m sure that wasn’t your first antler impalement. I’ve seen your library books.”
“It’s different,” I hiss, drawing back to peer at him through the dark. “Those are cozy.”
“That just means whoever finds the body has a boring job and wears sweater-vests.”
“You know,” I say, “some would think your insistence on holding my hand suggests you’re a bit unnerved too.”
“I’m unnerved,” he says. “Just not by the movie.” He doesn’t sound flirtatious so much as resigned. Like this thing between us, this last ember of want, is an undesirable truth he’s accepted. As our gazes hold, the pressure builds between us, heady, potent.
I think about our four-minute breakup. Curt, sterile, almost surgical. I think about scrubbing our apartment top to bottom afterward, cleaning the grout with a toothbrush until sweat dripped into my eyes and never feeling any better, never managing to get my head above the waves of shock and grief.
I think of all the ways he let me down and of his most annoying habits. （I’ve never seen a dishwasher loaded so inefficiently.） But that’s not where my mind wants to go.
I need space. I need air. I need hours of hypnotherapy to erase him from my nerve endings.
“I need to use the bathroom,” I blurt, and slip out into the aisle.
17
HAPPY PLACE
AN HOUR OUTSIDE BOZEMAN, MONTANA
A SNOWY DRIVEWAY and a frigid rental car, struggling to keep purchase on the iced asphalt.
Wyn’s warm hand tight on mine. He lifts the backs of my fingers to his mouth, lets his breath warm them. “They’re going to love you.”
I wasn’t even this nervous before my MCAT. No moment in these first two years of medical school has induced this kind of anxiety. In school, I know what it takes to succeed, how to win approval. It’s something you can earn with work, but this is different.
They might not like me. I might not like them.
I might talk too much or not enough. I might keep them up with my middle-of-the-night trips to the bathroom, or put their dishes away in the wrong place, or get in their way in any of the millions of highly specific ways you can only learn to avoid with time.
The windows are lit yellow gold, and the snow looks purple in the dark. It’s so beautiful it makes me wish I were a painter or a photographer, someone whose lifework was capturing the ungraspable. Cleo would be able to bottle this moment if she were here.
Before Wyn’s even put the car in park, the front door flies open. His parents come running in flannel pajamas and untied bathrobes, the hems of their pants stuffed into snow boots. Gloria is wordlessly whooping. Hank hugs me before we’re even introduced.
Wyn’s mother is taller than I’d expected, nearly as tall as Hank, with ice-blond hair and permanently rosy cheeks. Hank has thick sandy-brown waves heavily laced with gray, and a more deeply grooved version of Wyn’s face behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses.
His sisters, tiny platinum Lou and even tinier dark-haired Michael, are already inside, sipping brandy in front of the fireplace, and after insisting on getting our bags himself, Hank ushers us inside, straight into a wall of noise.
Even in front of his family, Wyn keeps his hands on me—at my waist or the curve of my back or resting against the base of my neck, his thumb moving restlessly as he answers the dozens of questions thrown at us rapid fire.
The drive wasn’t too bad.
The flights from New York were long and cramped.
We aren’t hungry. （As Gloria asks this, she shoves plates of pumpkin pie toward us.）
We’ve been together （openly） for ten months now. “I’ve been in love with her since we met, though,” Wyn says.
“Of course you have,” Gloria says, squeezing my knee. “She’s sweet as pie!”
“You just think that because of the curly hair,” Wyn says. “She’s actually extremely feisty.” My face goes beet red, but everyone is laughing, talking over one another, and Wyn is kissing the side of my head again, squeezing me against him on the couch, and I feel like I’m finally there, that place I’ve always wanted to be, the other side of the lit kitchen windows I could see from my childhood street, where rooms are filled with love and noise and squabbling.
“He needs a stern hand,” Michael says.
“He’s not a workhorse,” Lou says with an eye roll.
“No, of course not,” Michael says. “Much more of a mule.”
Wyn pulls me across his lap, looping his arms around my waist. “How do you know Harriet isn’t even more stubborn than I am?”
“He’s right,” I tell them. “Between the two of us, I’m the mule.”
“Well, if you’re the mule,” Michael says, “then Wyn’s the ass.”
“If I’m going to be an ass,” he says, “I’m glad to be yours.”
When Hank comes back to the cramped little den with its raging fire, he says, “Put you in Wyn’s room, Har,” and I think, Har. I’ve been here ten minutes and I’m already “Har,” and there’s a sensation like an inflating balloon in my chest, a pleasant pain, like stretching a stiff muscle.