“Tell me you didn’t make a rain metaphor.”
When May grinned, her teeth were breathtaking. Her wet lips. Her everything. Allie stared at her sister’s wet face and the light in her eyes.
“I did. I’m not taking it back, either. Deal with my rain metaphor.”
Her rain-soaked hair plastered itself to her neck. Thunder rumbled. Allie felt alive and scared and awful.
But sort of wonderful, too.
“Remember when we were kids,” May said, “and it rained, and Mom would send us outside to play as long as there wasn’t any lightning?”
The white noise of the rain had always hurt her ears, hurt the inside of her head and forced her to be louder. In the rain, Allie would shriek and run and stomp in puddles, making herself big enough to drown all her fear.
“That’s what I lost sight of with Dan,” May said. “I knew he’d take care of me and be nice to me. I would never get wet, with Dan. He’d hold his umbrella over my head forever, and his arms would never get tired.” She spread her arms wide. “But he never made me feel like this. Not once.”
Allie’s nose scrunched up from the pressure of unshed tears. “Neither did Matt.”
“The thing is,” May said, “I want to feel like this as much as possible.”
Allie remembered the rainwater rushing out of gutter spouts to fill her boots. The shock of the cold. And she understood what New York had done to her sister. It had filled her boots with cold and made her shriek with the shock of being alive and wet and overwhelmed. It had taken away her fear and made her more May. Unafraid in a way that Allie had never been, no matter how stridently she bluffed.
“But what if there’s no mom meeting us at the door with towels and hot cocoa after?” she asked. “What if Matt is the best thing I’m ever going to have?”
“That’s the risk. But you don’t actually have to worry about that right this second. You can just stand here and get wet, if you want.”
“Oh good. I’ll focus on trying not to vomit, then.”
“Do that.”
But she didn’t. Instead, she lifted her face to the rain and let it wash the salt off. Let it wash all the fear and guilt and dread from her, just for one second, and then for the next. The next.
She let herself imagine what it might be like to feel okay again.
And after the elation and the pain and the crying had all drained out of her, May put her arm back around Allie’s waist and turned them back toward the museum.
“Mom and Dad already paid for the reception, right?” she asked.
“God, I can’t think about that. The wedding. The money. Oh fuck.”
“No, don’t think about it. All I mean is, it’s a sunk cost. So after you tell him, we’ll have the party anyway.”
“We will?”
“We will. And we’ll get extraordinarily drunk.”
May gave her a gentle tug and began walking them back toward the museum. Back toward the terrifying thing that was the rest of Allie’s life.
Their sodden shoes squished with every step.
CHAPTER FORTY
Ben drove north.
He didn’t think about May. He didn’t think about anything. He hid in the sliver between walls. But because he was older now, too large to fit perfectly, his hands shook on the steering wheel.
His fault. He’d done this to himself.
The modest cities of central Wisconsin gave way to smaller towns, the farmland to forests that crowded the narrowing road. After five hours in the car, he felt wind-scoured and eroded, as if every mile had removed another thin layer of the man he’d become since he left this part of the world behind.
He drove straight to the harbor, expecting to see Lake Superior’s shoreline with its tall pier of jutting steel, the long vertical line of ore chutes marching hundreds of feet out into the water like so many rusting soldiers.
But the ore dock was gone.
His whole life, the dock had been falling apart—endangered, structurally unsound, calving chunks of rust and paint like a postindustrial glacier. Now it had vanished. Tens of thousands of pounds of early-nineteenth-century enterprise. Poof.
There was nothing without it. No harbor to speak of. Only an absence. An ache that vibrated with noise.
The rest of Ashland looked the same—the quaint grid of downtown, with its collection of modest, well-maintained shops, the café, the coffee shop.
The blocks weren’t as long as he remembered them, though. The bank wasn’t as grand.
His hands shook, and he shoved them in his pockets. Walking the paths around the college, he pulled his hoodie up over his head, earning apprehensive looks from the coeds he passed. He veered back downtown. The cup of coffee he bought at a vegan-friendly cafe did nothing to warm him.