by Piper Lennox
“But first…can we make a stop?”
It’s dark when we get to the cemetery. Silas layers his coat over mine as we start up the cobblestoned path, then the worn lines in the grass, to the top of the hill.
“God,” he says, looking down at the stones below, “how was it only a few weeks ago, when we were last here?”
I shake my head: I have no idea. With Silas, time manages to drag itself into a blur. It lasts lifetimes, when you’re inside it. And when it’s over, you aren’t quite sure how you got there so quickly.
We walk to the fence and look around. Another snowfall is due tonight, and the wind is the kind that bites through your clothes, no matter how much you put on, so the cemetery is completely empty. Just us.
Silas goes over the fence first, to help me down on the other side. I blush when I hit the ground and he doesn’t let go of my waist right away. Even through two coats I feel his touch, more piercing than the wind.
“This one’s sturdy,” he offers, and grabs a branch near the bottom, thick and warped from winters just like this one. As if he needs to prove it to me, he grabs on with both hands, pulls himself up, and dangles a moment.
“Looks good to me.” When he thuds to the ground, I reach up and try to grab it. My fingertips miss by a few inches.
“Here.” His hands find my waist again, and suddenly, I’m lifted.
Arrow’s collar fits snugly around the branch. I tighten it as much as I can, then slide it until the metal tag is at the bottom, dangling like the suncatchers and colored glass around my head. For a second, I pause and listen to the chime of them in the wind.
“Good?” Silas asks from the ground.
I straighten the tag one last time. It won’t shine quite like the others, casting blocks of color in its wake—but maybe, when the sun hits it just right, it’ll bounce a little bit back.
“Yeah,” I tell him, tapping his head so he knows to let me down. “Perfect.”
When we arrive at Brynn’s house—Mine, too, I correct myself—Silas pulls up the parking brake and says goodnight, with a smile that doesn’t look like the one he’d usually give.
It’s forced, I realize.
“Do you want to come in?”
He looks up with a hint of surprise, but his hand is already on the keys, ready to remove them from the ignition. “Really?”
“Yeah. We could watch TV, talk. You can stay the night. I know it’s kind of late to drive all that way.”
“You don’t...think it’s too soon?”
I think of that night in the cemetery, somehow not long ago at all, and how fiercely I didn’t want him to leave.
I can’t believe there was ever a time when the opposite was true. And I don’t think it will ever be true again.
“Never too soon,” I tell him, and reach across him to take the keys.
Epilogue
Two Years Later
Here’s what I know about Silas Fairfield.
He snores in the winter and twitches his legs in the summer. When he watches the news, he studies it all with a kind of squint, whether it’s good or bad. No judgment, just intense focus.
Nine times out of ten, he can’t tell you where he last threw his car keys, but somehow manages to find a four-leaf clover any time he decides to look. Parks, fields, you name it. For a guy who says bad and ironic luck used to follow him like a shadow, it’s an amazing skill. He just says it’s more irony.
He’s the youngest brand strategist at Feldman Creative to land the gig without a degree, and damn good at his job. Not half as good as his go-to copywriter is at hers—but he likes to pretend that isn’t true.
Family is important to him. Even if it’s mostly comprised of people he just met a couple years ago.
I know he’s memorized my body like a map. I know he can ignite need and desire inside me with nothing but one glance across a party, that he can catch me in bedrooms and cars, pin me to locked doors and shower walls and make me ache with how much I want him.
He whispers things down my skin like water and I melt.
He makes me laugh when nothing in the world seems funny or bright. When I break, I know he has every piece, ready to help me rebuild.
I know he has some hold on me no one else ever has, or ever will.
“You bought a tux. Who buys their tux?”
Knox fixes his cuff links and shrugs at me in the mirror. “It was a good deal.”
“Says the guy who was too cheap for Netflix.” I look around for Lupé before falling into the suite’s couch. He’s been shooing us off furniture all afternoon, out of some deathly fear we’ll wrinkle our clothes and look like hobos at what, I’m now positive, he views as “his event.”
“It’s time to loosen the purse strings a little,” Knox reasons. “I was only cheap all those years to save for a house, and with one in escrow...I can live a little, right?”
“Buying your wedding tux instead of renting like a normal human isn’t my idea of ‘living a little,’ but yeah, sure.”
“I can’t do it.” Banner emerges from the bathroom in his tux, tie in hand, looking severely defeated. Wordlessly, he holds it out to me.
“Took me a long time to learn,” I assure him, flipping up his collar. “Don’t feel bad—you just need some practice.”
“My dad’s getting married in spring. Can I learn by then?”
I tighten the knot and rearrange his collar. “I don’t see why not. But if you can’t, I’m sure somebody can help you then, too.” He smiles and wanders off to Cohen, who’s playing a video game on a handheld set. The way he rolls his entire body with the digital punches and impacts, suit jacket crinkling with every motion, Lupé would have a fit.
“Is it weird?” I ask Knox softly. “Knowing you’ll be Banner’s dad, but like...not really?”
As easily as can be, he shakes his head. “His dad’s a good guy, really involved, so it’s not like I’m walking into a bunch of drama or anything. And Banner’s never known anything but his parents being apart, so I don’t think he’ll see it as me trying to replace his dad.”
“Did Cait have an absolute meltdown,” Levi calls from the suite’s bedroom, “when you told her you dropped her ring down the sink last night?”
“Cait,” Knox responds firmly, checking his teeth in the mirror, “is not going to find out until enough time has passed that she won’t even care. Which will be...what do you think, Ban? A week?”
“A month,” the kid deadpans, and all of us double over laughing.
When we go downstairs, Lupé takes us through a series of small hallways to get to the room off the courtyard and tearoom. Banner asks him if they’re secret passageways.
“Close,” he says, and laughs for the first time all day. “Employee hallways. When we have to be somewhere quick and undetected.”
“Like when?”
Cohen grabs his shoulders, startling him. “Like when they have to carry out a dead body from one of the hotel rooms.”
Knox and Levi scold him at the same time, but Banner grins, unaffected.
“There’s a big crowd in the lobby we want to avoid at all costs,” Lupé explains. “Tonight’s the annual illumination.”
“Leave it to Cait,” Cohen calls, from the back of our little line, “to not only steal someone else’s wedding date, but then decide she needs the biggest show in the city to be her backdrop.”
Levi waves this off. “She didn’t ‘steal’ it. This is their first-kiss anniversary or something, right? It means something to them, Mara and I just picked it at random. Besides, waiting until spring is more than fine for us. The lake will actually be warm. Kind of.”
“I’m so excited. A whole weekend of partying, chilling in the cabins around the lake—no one yelling at me not to wrinkle my suit,” Cohen emphasizes, throwing his voice at the back of Lupé’s head as we enter the waiting area. “My kind of wedding. No offense, Knox.”
“None taken.” Knox checks his tie in an antique mirror by the door while Lupé s
wipes his shoulders with a lint roller. “To tell you the truth, that’s the kind of wedding I’d rather have.” Quickly, he glances at Banner, who’s not even paying attention as he adds, “But whatever Cait wanted was fine with me.”
“Happy wife, happy life,” Levi smirks, and Cohen nods with a dramatic exhale.
Lupé checks his watch, then motions for all of us to line up outside the rear door of the tearoom. “All right, boys.” He looks at Knox and flashes his best Acre Hotel smile. “Time to have a wedding.”
* * *
Grandpa McIntyre used to tell me that we make our own luck. “Work hard, work smart, think positive.”
One time, on the drive back from the cigar shop in Hillford, I rolled the cognac-dipped one he’d purchased between my fingertips and considered this.
“I should be a millionaire by now, if that’s true,” I muttered. I put the cigar between my lips for a second, then put it back in the bag. The sweet, papery taste was all over my mouth.
“Boy, your mama’d kill me if she knew I let you do that,” he laughed, and slapped my back hard enough to make me cough. “Now tell me why you think I’m lying.”
I shifted on the truck’s bench. The cracked vinyl poked through my jeans. “Not lying. Just...making it sound too easy.”
“When did I say it was easy? Work hard. That’s the first thing. Anything you get that comes easy, don’t you trust it. It could be gone just as quick.” He snapped his fingers, forgetting to veer around the first pothole in the neighborhood. I bounced so high, my head almost hit the ceiling; when I landed, I felt the impact all the way up my spine.
“Second,” he added, “work smart. That means working hard, but not harder than you have to, if you can get the same results. You remember Charlie?”
My laugh made him laugh again, too. Nobody could forget Charlie.
“That poor dog,” Grandpa McIntyre went on. “Sharp instincts, great hunter. Just about the best scent hound I ever owned. But good Lord, was that dog dumb when it came to food.”
“He’d sneak up on Minnie,” I added, picking up my lines in this story we’d repeated on countless drives, just like this, “and get into such a crazy fight to get her food, even though his bowl was right beside him.”
“And Minnie would give up, go eat his, and wander off. Charlie would get himself into all that trouble over one little scoop of food, when he could’ve had three. And for way less work, at that.
“Now the last part—staying positive. That’s where you lose it.”
“What?” I was actually offended to hear him say this. Grandma called me her sunshine boy when I was little; I was always smiling. Sure, I couldn’t be positive and sunny all day, every day, but I was hardly Mr. Gloom-and-Doom, either.
“Thinking bad luck is all you’re due. You have a bad habit of that.”
“Yeah, well, if you had bad luck all the time, you’d start expecting it, too.” I crossed my arms and stared at the shorn cornstalks around us, stabbing their way out of the ground.
“We all get some bad luck, son,” he said quietly, after a minute. “It’s just life. You get good luck, you get bad luck—sometimes you just get...what you get. But if you do all three of these things, good luck will find you more and more.”
At the time, I thought Grandpa was talking about money. I was at the age where the discrepancies between my life and that of “those Fairfields” was practically an obsession. Fairness was suddenly important to me, too, in a way it never had been.
It wasn’t fair Caitlin-Anne Fairfield was living my life. Not that I was jealous of her debutante training and shopping sprees, or the Sweet Sixteen party she had that was so ridiculously opulent, it made the local news.
But the rest of it—the mansion, the wealth, the quasi-fame that followed that family like a golden aura: I wanted that.
What I had, instead, was a roof that leaked brown rainwater onto my bed until Mom moved it, and I had to listen to the constant drip into our good soup pot for two months, every rainy night, while she saved to get it fixed.
What I had wasn’t acres of land like the McIntyres, or acres of commas in my bank account like the Fairfields. I had the blood of both in my veins, but it felt like a waste. Like all that divided water, in the creek at the back of the farm: so mixed together, you couldn’t tell whose was whose, anyway. None of it did me any good.
“You decide what’s good luck and bad luck, and what’s just...life, happening on its own.” Grandpa held out his hand; I twisted open his Coke and passed it to him. “That’s part of positive thinking, too. And if it really is bad, you work to change it. And when work gets too hard for too little in return, you find something smarter.”
“What about people like the F—” I shut my mouth. The McIntyres hated the Fairfields, a one-sided feud the latter probably didn’t even know existed. It was equal parts anger (at Tim, for leaving) and shame—at my mother, for sleeping with a man who already had someone at home. As far as my grandparents were concerned, my last name was McIntyre, just like theirs.
“That family,” Grandpa said, after a beat, “did make their own luck, a lot of the time. But not enough. Most of what they did, and what they still do...well. It just isn’t right. Plain and simple.”
“But they’re rich,” I pointed out.
“Money isn’t everything, Silas. It’s nice, if you use it the way you’re supposed to, but it’s not going to make unhappy people happy.”
I snorted in my throat. “You think the Fairfields are unhappy?”
“More so than they probably have to be,” he answered, nodding. “When you think money fixes everything, you’ve got the worst problem a person can have.”
After that, we were quiet. Their dirt driveway rattled me as always, but I barely felt it. I was too busy thinking about how unlucky I was to now, on top of everything else, have the worst problem a person could apparently have.
When I got older, I learned that Grandpa McIntyre was right. Money wasn’t everything. But deep, deep down, I still thought being a real Fairfield, whatever that meant, could make its own luck.
My mom thought it would open doors.
My grandparents thought I was better off pretending I didn’t even have Fairfield blood in me.
I wanted to know which of us was right. So when I packed my suitcase and left Hillford to go find Timothy Fairfield, it wasn’t for his money.
It was partially so I could get to know him, but even that wasn’t the real reason. Because it wasn’t just him I wanted to learn about.
I wanted to identify the Fairfield blood in me, pick it all apart until I could distinguish the blue from the gutter. Until I could divide myself in two, just like the creek, and tell people, “Here it is. This half is what makes this stupid name worth it.” If I could figure out what kind of Fairfield I was...maybe those doors Mom always talked about would finally open. Maybe my luck would change.
But all blood looks the same, when you finally see it. We spill it the same. We use it the same. All you’re doing is labeling something that was never meant to be labeled, and dividing something you shouldn’t.
The day I turned down Tim’s job offer, I realized it was never the water in that old creek that was useless. It was the fence.
* * *
Caitlin-Anne’s wedding is exactly what I expected.
That’s not to say it isn’t fun, or beautiful, or that half the audience isn’t in tears like babies when she and Knox read their vows. Even I get a little choked up when Knox reads a letter to Banner, promising to love him like his own son.
The flash of it all is just beginning when, exactly when they say “I Do,” the illumination begins outside. The tearoom’s wall of windows give us premium views of the courtyard when the wicker Christmas display lights up, piece by piece, everyone cheering inside and outside the hotel.
The giant Christmas tree the Acre is apparently known best for sparks to life right when the pastor introduces them, and they start down the aisle.
&nbs
p; In the ballroom, not only do the bride and groom enter their reception in some kind of Cinderella carriage (also adorned with Christmas lights), but manage to do so under two huge blasts of silver confetti, right onto a light-up dance floor.
“Wow,” I laugh. “I knew she’d go all-out, but still.”
“Yeah.” Cohen flicks a paper football, made from an extra program, at Levi across the table. “Cait’s a show-off.”
“Oh, my God,” Juliet scoffs.
Levi throws the paper back. “Seriously. Pot calling the freaking kettle black. I’m sorry, didn’t you have fireworks during your ceremony, also held at the illustrious Acre?”
“You,” Cohen retorts, already laughing, “are so damn extra, you’re going to have two weddings under your belt.”
“First one doesn’t count,” Levi protests. Mara gives Cohen a fake glare and raises her ring finger, then slowly lowers it while raising the middle.
“Sounds like this is the cool kids’ table.” Camille slides into the seat beside mine and hands me my drink. “They didn’t have any more Sam Adams, so I got you the same thing as me.”
Warily, I sniff the blue-green concoction and gag. “This smells—and looks—like pure sugar.”
“Drink it,” everyone around the table orders at once. Alarmed, I furrow my brow at them and obey. Even more alarming is that the drink isn’t just tolerable: it’s good. And very, very strong.
“Mara invented it,” Camille says, elbowing me. “She called it a High Dive. Maybe she’s the one you should’ve had help you with those ice cream flavors.”
“Nah. I’m pretty happy with my choice.” I pull her to me and kiss her while everyone else pretends to gag.
Halfway through the night, Tim wanders past our table and slaps my shoulder. “You boys up for some cigars on the balcony?”
