Chapter 4: Wren's POV

Ms. Collins is wearing orange on Tuesday.

Wren clocks it at the entrance, adjusts, smiles anyway one hundred and sixty-five and keeps moving. Orange is harder than yellow. Yellow she has practiced. Orange catches her off guard in a way she refuses to show.

She is at her locker when Priya appears with two coffees and the expression she gets when she has been awake too long thinking about something.

"You look different," Priya says.

"I look exactly the same."

"Your eyes look different." Priya hands her a coffee and studies her face the way she studies everything fast, thorough, missing nothing. "Something happened."

"Nothing happened."

"Wren."

"I started a new job yesterday." Wren opens her locker. Clean door. No marker. Small mercy. "I told you."

"You told me you got a job. You did not tell me where or who or why you came to school this morning looking like someone who spent the night rearranging furniture in their head." Priya leans against the adjacent locker. "Who is it for?"

Down the hallway, Cole Ramsey rounds the corner with Marcus Webb at his shoulder. He is laughing at something Marcus said head back, easy, the performance of a boy without a single complicated thing in his life. He doesn't look in her direction. He never looks in her direction.

Wren watches him for exactly two seconds.

Looks away.

"Nobody important," she says.

She thinks about Daisy on the bus ride home.

Not Cole she is not thinking about Cole, she has made a firm internal policy about this starting approximately 2am last night when she caught herself thinking about Cole and shut it down immediately but Daisy. The way Daisy had climbed into her lap during Gerald's bedtime story without asking permission, just arranged herself there like it was a given. The way she had smelled like children's shampoo and absolute certainty.

Wren has not been climbed on by anyone in a very long time.

She gets off at Clover Drive and walks up to the house and knocks.

Daisy opens the door. She is wearing a cape made from a pillowcase and holding Gerald at arm's length.

"Gerald had a bad day," she announces. "He needs a walk."

"Giraffes don't usually walk on leads," Wren says.

"Gerald is advanced." Daisy steps back and holds the door open. "Also there's a snack on the counter. I didn't make it. It was just there."

Wren walks into the kitchen.

On the counter, next to the fruit bowl, is a plate. Two pieces of toast. Peanut butter. Cut into triangles.

No note.

She stands looking at it for a moment.

The electricity envelope is gone from the counter.

She doesn't let herself read into either of these things. She picks up a triangle of toast, takes a bite, and goes to find Gerald's lead.

She is in the backyard with Daisy and a stuffed giraffe on a jump rope when her phone buzzes.

Unknown number.

She almost ignores it. Then: This is Madison. We need to talk about what you're doing in Cole Ramsey's house. Meet me tomorrow. Alone. Or I start talking.

Wren reads it twice.

The jump rope goes slack in her hand.

Daisy looks up. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing." Wren puts the phone in her pocket. Smiles. "Gerald's pulling left. Is he always this strong?"

Daisy accepts this immediately. "He has been working out," she says seriously.

Wren laughs a real one, short and surprised and the sound of it catches her off guard.

She has not laughed like that in a while.

She tucks Madison's text into the back of her mind, into the same place she keeps the yellow cardigan and the electricity envelope and the three words from a hallway, and she focuses on the jump rope and the evening light and the small person beside her who is explaining Gerald's fitness regimen in complete seriousness.

She will deal with Madison tomorrow.

Tonight she has a giraffe to walk.

Cole gets home at six-forty.

She hears the car. Hears him count she has started to notice it, the pause before the door opens, the specific length of it. She doesn't say anything. She just moves the pot to a lower heat and gets Daisy started on homework.

He walks into the kitchen and stops.

Wren is helping Daisy with subtraction. Daisy is objecting to the concept of subtraction on philosophical grounds. Wren is explaining, with complete patience, that the philosophy of numbers is for after the worksheet.

Cole puts his bag down.

He looks at the counter. The empty space where the envelope was. Then at the plate two triangles of toast remaining. Then at Wren.

She doesn't look up from the worksheet.

"Seventeen minus nine," she says to Daisy.

"Eight," Daisy says immediately. "But why do we have to take things away? Why can't we just add?"

"Because life involves subtraction whether we like it or not," Wren says. "Next one."

Cole makes a sound that is almost not quite, almost a laugh.

Wren looks up.

Their eyes meet across the kitchen for exactly one second.

He looks away first.

"Smells good," he says, to the stove and not to her.

"It'll be ready in twenty," she says, to the worksheet and not to him.

Daisy looks between them with the bright focused attention of someone watching a very interesting new development.

She writes down 8 and says nothing.

After dinner Wren washes up and Cole dries and they do the entire thing without speaking while Daisy sits at the table drawing and providing a running commentary on both of them that neither of them acknowledges.

"Wren stirs soup the same way Mama does," Daisy says. "Counterclockwise."

Silence.

"Cole is drying that bowl wrong. He always dries the outside first. You're supposed to do inside first."

More silence.

"You both make the same face when you're not saying something," Daisy adds, with great satisfaction. "I'm just saying."

Wren hands Cole the last pot without looking at him.

Their fingers don't touch.

She notices that she noticed.

She puts it in the back of her mind with everything else and says: "Daisy. Pajamas. Now."

She is putting on her coat in the hallway when Cole appears in the kitchen doorway.

"The toast was in case you hadn't eaten," he says.

She looks at him.

He is looking at the wall just past her left shoulder, jaw tight, doing the thing where he speaks and performs indifference at the same time. She has learned, in two days, that this is what it looks like when Cole Ramsey is trying to do something decent and hates himself for needing to.

"Thank you," she says.

He nods. Looks at the floor.

She picks up her bag.

"Madison texted me," she says. She watches his face the way it closes instantly, every door shut simultaneously, a house going dark from the inside. "She wants to meet tomorrow. Alone."

The silence that follows has a different quality to all the other silences in this house.

"Don't go," he says. His voice is very quiet.

"Why?"

He looks at her then. Actually looks not past her, not at the wall, at her. Something in his expression that she hasn't seen before and cannot fully read.

"Just don't," he says.

She holds his gaze.

He is asking her to trust him and he knows he has not earned it and he knows she knows that too, and all of that is visible on his face at once in the way that things are visible on people's faces when they are too tired to manage them.

She buttons her coat.

"Goodnight, Ramsey," she says.

She walks out.

She is halfway down the path when she hears it his voice, low, almost too quiet to reach her.

"I'm going to fix it," he says. "What I did. I'm going to fix it."

She stops walking.

She doesn't turn around.

After a moment she keeps going, down the path and onto Clover Drive, and she does not look back, and she does not let herself think about what his face looked like when he said it.

She thinks instead about Madison's text.

Or I start talking.

Whatever Madison is planning to say whatever she thinks she has Wren already knows the worst of it. She has known since Daisy told her in the hallway.

Cole called someone and Daddy had to go away.

He cried after. Through the wall. He didn't know I heard.

The boy who called her nobody sat in a kitchen at fourteen years old with a phone in his hands and made the hardest decision of his life.

Madison has no idea what Wren already knows.

And that, Wren realizes as she turns off Clover Drive and walks into the dark that might be the only advantage she has.