But the sad truth was, I hadn’t felt for him what I should have. Even sadder, crueler in many ways, was that leaving Silas wasn’t going to break my heart.
Because I’d given it away a long time ago.
“You chose poorly,” I said with a small twist of my lips, trying to lighten our mood with the Indiana Jones reference. Truck and Dawson would have snickered at it, but it just went over Silas’s head.
“Don’t get all snippy at my word choice, Vi,” he snapped, eyes flashing. “I could have had anyone, but I wanted you.”
“Wow. Way to be humble.”
“That isn’t how I meant it,” he replied, blowing out a frustrated breath.
I started toward him, wanting to give him comfort, wanting to ease the sting of my bite, but then stopped myself. “I’m really sorry, Silas. Truly. I just think that vision you had of us―like we were your parents―that isn’t me.”
I’d thought I wanted it, briefly, like a mirage. This was my fault.
“I think you’re upset about your dad,” he said. “And you’re projecting it onto us in some weird way. Why don’t you go, do what you need to do, and we can talk when you get back?”
He’d drawn a linear equation from point A (Dad dying) to point B (my breaking up with him), but he didn’t see they weren’t the same equation at all. They just had happened to intersect at the same time and space.
“If that’ll make you feel better, then by all means, we can talk when I get back, but it won’t change my mind. This isn’t about my dad. This is about us,” I told him. “I’m sorry. I have to go. I don’t want to miss the flight.”
He walked me out of the apartment, opened the door of the CarShare, and said, “We’re not done, Vi.”
I didn’t know how to respond, and I didn’t have to. He shut the door, and the driver took off. I sat in the back seat, trying not to cry.
The tears weren’t for my dad. They weren’t even for breaking up with Silas. They were because all the boxes in my life that I thought had been marked with x’s now seemed to be erasing themselves. My thesis. My formulas. My relationship. I felt like a jerk for not ending things sooner. For letting myself and Silas believe that his perfect scientific family could ever fit me.
♫ ♫ ♫
The funeral director glanced awkwardly at the three of us. It was just Truck, Jersey, and me at the mausoleum. We’d left Nell with Mandy and Leena. They’d asked if we wanted them to come, but it wasn’t that kind of burial. There weren’t going to be tears and talks of what the man had done for the world.
I could tell the director wanted to say a few words as we got ready to place the urn holding our father into the niche with our mother. The mom I barely remembered because she’d died of ovarian cancer when I was six. Before the man could say anything, I cut him off.
“Please don’t.”
Jersey’s eyes flickered to me and away.
“He wasn’t a good man,” I said. “He’s gone, and now he can’t hurt anyone else.”
I knew my voice sounded harsh, but it was the truth.
The director’s mouth dropped open.
I turned and walked out of the marbled silence. The sun hit me just as the sounds of the world did: birds chirping and a lawnmower humming. Photosynthesis buzzed all around us, reminding me just how quickly so many things in life could be altered by the mildest of reactants.
Jersey joined me, sliding her arm through mine.
“You going to tell me what’s really bothering you? Because it isn’t the man we just stuck in a hole in a wall,” she said softly.
Truck had hung back, paying the man. We’d been back in New London for two days, and Truck and Jersey had coughed up a bunch of money to finish our father’s business. Paying his rent and utilities. Paying for the cremation. Dad, like when we’d been growing up, had spent everything on booze and hadn’t left even a penny behind.
“Nothing is wrong, per se, but nothing is right, either,” I told her the truth, fiddling with the ID bracelet that told the world about my lack of a spleen in case of an emergency. Dad had taken the body part from me, but it was nothing compared to the life he’d taken from Ana or the trauma he’d put Jersey through.
“Why don’t you start at the beginning?” she asked as we made our way through the green grass toward the rental car.
“I can’t get the school to approve my thesis or the lab time required for it, and I broke up with Silas,” I told her.
She stopped, pulling me to a standstill with her.
“What? Violet, why didn’t you say anything?”
“It all kind of happened at once. The same day you called about Dad,” I told her.
“Why did you break up with Silas?” she asked, pushing my long braid back over my shoulder, touching me in a way that was uniquely Jersey’s. She’d always granted me solace this way. A light touch. A small hug. A quiet word.
“He wanted more than I did,” I told her the truth.
I could see the worry in her eyes, and I didn’t want to be the cause of it, so I smiled.
“You know boys and sex, but you told me to wait, so…” I teased, and she laughed.
“Don’t even try to pull the ‘I’ve never had sex’ card on me, Violet Banner. I know you too well. All force of nature, demanding what she wants. I bet the first poor boy didn’t even know what hit him.”
I elbowed her. “Poor boy! Please.”
“What are you going to do about your thesis?”
“I’m not sure yet. Honestly, I’m not even sure I want to get my Ph.D. anymore.”
I waited for the disappointment to cover her face. Jersey had been convinced from the time I was a teen researching insects that I’d somehow save the world. She’d even created her superhero, Viola the Jewel, inspired by me and my love of bugs. A hero who could camouflage like the best of the metallic beetles.
“Violet, I need you to do something for me.” She made sure I was listening, making eye contact and holding it. “Stop doing things you think people want you to do, and do what you want.”
Tears did hit my eyes then. Not because of Dad but because of my smart, beautiful sister who’d been mom and friend and confidant. The person who’d taken the hits intended for me and gone hungry so I could eat. I hugged her, and she hugged me back. Truck joined us, looking like he wanted to hug us both, but he didn’t.
We walked in silence to the car.
Change. Reactants blooming to life. I could feel them.
When we pulled up to Books and Beds by the Sea, I was overcome with a sense of homesickness that I’d never really felt before. This house had been the only one I’d ever truly called home. When Jersey and I had lived here with Mandy and Leena, they’d just started renovating it into the bed and breakfast it was now.
On the outside, the white Victorian looked posh and perfect with its bright-blue shutters and curling trim. But on the inside, it looked like Mandy and Leena. Its nineteenth-century antecedents—panels, crown molding, and chandeliers—were mixed with brightly colored patterns that blurred into solids, reflecting Leena’s artistic side, while the books piled onto almost every available space were all Mandy.