“Benji,” Celeste says, and Benji clamps his mouth shut. He sounds like an ass. “My decision doesn’t have anything to do with Merritt.”
“It doesn’t?” he says.
She shakes her head. “It has to do with me.”
She doesn’t want to marry him.
He would like to say this comes as a complete shock, a wrecking ball out of nowhere—but it doesn’t.
“Your stutter is gone,” he says.
She smiles, sadly at first, but then with a touch of relief—or triumph. “Yes,” she says. “I know.”
As Benji is walking back to the first cottage—he needs to hide; he can’t bear to see either of his parents—he spies Shooter walking down the driveway.
Shooter. Benji has completely lost track of him, of time, of everything. Shooter looks like he’s just survived a shipwreck. He’s unshaven, his blue oxford is rumpled and untucked, he has his navy blazer crushed under one arm, and his mouth is hanging open as he stares at his phone.
“You look even worse than I feel,” Benji says, trying for the jocular tone they normally use with each other. “Where have you been?”
“Police station,” Shooter says. He follows Benji into the first cottage, then goes straight to the fridge and flips the top off a bottle of beer. “Want one?”
“Sure,” Benji says.
“Listen, there are some things you need to know,” Shooter says.
“Spare me, please,” Benji says. “I’ve heard too much already.”
Spare me, please. I’ve heard too much already.
Shooter lets that comment sink in. He was finally released from the police station; in the end, they had nothing to hold him on except impeding an active investigation. They issued him a ticket for three hundred dollars, which he paid in cash. Val Gluckstern had offered him a ride back to Summerland, but he said he wanted to walk. He needed to clear his head.
He hadn’t been sure how much he would need to explain. Maybe everything. Maybe nothing. He wanted very badly to talk to Celeste but he was afraid. He had spilled the beans to the police, which already felt like a betrayal. He was afraid Celeste would be angry, but he was more afraid she would deny that she had ever intended to run away with him.
As he was walking down the Winburys’ white-shell driveway between the rows of hydrangeas and under the boxwood arch, his phone pinged. It was a text from an unfamiliar 212 number. Shooter had clicked on the text more out of habit than anything else.
It was a picture of Shooter and Celeste standing outside Steamboat Pizza. They weren’t touching, though they were very close together—too close, probably. Shooter clicked on the photo and zoomed in. Celeste was looking in the vague direction of the camera and Shooter was looking at Celeste, his expression one of naked desire, longing, covetousness.
The photo is chilling, a threat. Did someone else know their plans? Who took it? Who sent it?
Shooter stopped dead in his tracks. He texted back: Who is this?
To which there was no response. Shooter ran through the possibilities. The 212 area code was Manhattan. And whoever this was either had been across the street or knew someone who was.
The implications were obvious, right? Someone was trying to scare him. If the photo was being sent to Shooter, it had probably also been sent to Benji. But Benji knew that Shooter and Celeste had gone to get pizza. It wasn’t as if someone had sent a picture of Shooter and Celeste a few minutes later, sitting on the bench by the Steamship terminal. That would have been harder to explain.
Okay, fine. Honestly, Shooter was too tired for games. He proceeded under the boxwood arch and bumped right into Benji.
Spare me, please. I’ve heard too much already.
“I ran away from the police this morning,” Shooter says. “They wanted to question me and I told them I had to use the john and then I slipped out the bathroom window.”
“Shut up,” Benji says.
“I’m serious.”
Benji says, “I hope you told them you didn’t want to talk to the police because of what happened to your mother.”
Shooter takes a long pull off his beer. Benji is the only person who knows about Shooter’s mother, Cassandra. She became addicted to heroin after Shooter’s father died, but she had happened to OD during one of Shooter’s rare visits home. He was twenty-one years old, working as a bartender in Georgetown, and he gave Cassandra a fifty-dollar bill. She had spent it on smack. Shooter had woken up in the morning to find his mother dead. And, yes, he had blamed himself. He had basically begged the Dade County police to arrest him, but they had far too much experience with overdoses to blame anyone but the user herself.
“I hopped on the Hy-Line and they caught me, cuffed me, brought me to the police station. I hired a lawyer. She sat with me while I gave my account of last night.”
Benji barely reacts. It’s as if he expects these kinds of theatrics from Shooter. Either that or he’s not really listening. “They found something in Merritt’s bloodstream,” Benji says. “Pills.”
“Really,” Shooter says. “How is Celeste taking it?”
Benji shoots up off the sofa. “How is Celeste taking it?” he says. “Well, let’s see, she was so hysterical that she spent half the day in the emergency room. And yet she seems to have gained a certain clarity. She doesn’t want to marry me. At all. Ever.”
Shooter is suddenly very alert, despite his profound exhaustion. What is Benji going to say next?
“She says it has nothing to do with what happened to Merritt. It has to do with her. She doesn’t want to marry me—not next month, not next year, not on a beach in Aruba, not at city hall in Easton, Pennsylvania. She doesn’t want to marry me. When was she going to tell me this? Was she going to stand me up at the altar? Oh, and guess what else. Guess what else. Just guess.”
Shooter doesn’t want to guess, which is okay because Benji isn’t waiting for an answer.
“Her stutter is gone! Completely gone! She decides she’s not going to marry me and her speech impediment disappears.”
Her stutter was gone last night, Shooter thinks. If Benji had paid attention, he would have realized that. When Celeste and Shooter left the bench next to the Steamship terminal, they had gone back to get pizza, and when Shooter asked Celeste what she wanted, she said, “Slice of pepperoni and a root beer, please.” Her words had been as clear as the peal of church bells on a summer morning.
“Did she say anything else?” Shooter asks. His plan of running away with Celeste was incredibly cowardly, he sees now. Because this—Benji’s reckoning—wasn’t anything Shooter wanted to witness.
