Chapter 24 Library Confessions

Chapter 24 Library Confessions

Daisy

The Martinez mansion felt different in the late afternoon.

In the mornings it was all movement: Mrs. Martinez's heels on marble, the smell of coffee, and Chloe's voice carrying from the kitchen.

But at four thirty, when the light came through the west-facing windows at that particular low California angle and turned everything gold and amber, the house went quiet in a way that felt almost deliberate. Like it was exhaling.

I came through the front door still wearing Liam's hoodie.

I had told myself three separate times on the drive home that I was going to leave it in my bag.

That I was going to go upstairs, change into my own clothes, and return it to him at the study session tonight with the same detached efficiency I applied to returning borrowed pens.

I was still wearing it.

Chloe was sitting on the bottom stair with a book open on her knees and a strawberry lollipop in her mouth, which meant she had finished her afternoon reading early and was now staging herself in the most high-traffic area of the house to maximize the chances of something interesting happening.

She looked up when I came in.

Her eyes went directly to the hoodie.

Then back to my face.

Then to the hoodie again with the focused attention of a twelve-year-old who had noticed something significant and was deciding how to handle it.

"That's Liam's," she said.

"I know."

"Why do you have it?"

"I was cold," I said, which was Liam's explanation and felt deeply ironic coming out of my mouth.

Chloe pulled the lollipop out and studied me with those green Martinez eyes that saw forty percent more than they let on. "Your hair is a little crunchy," she said. "Did something happen at school?"

I looked at her small, serious face and felt something move in my chest that was adjacent to the thing I felt when my mother asked me questions I didn't want to answer honestly.

"Minor incident," I said. "It's handled."

"Did someone do something to you?"

"Chloe—"

"Because Liam gets that face when someone does something to him that he can't talk about," she said, with the serene confidence of a person who had been observing family members in distress for twelve years and had developed a taxonomy. "You have that face right now."

I stood in the entryway of the Martinez mansion in Liam's oversized hoodie with my crunchy hair and my color-coded notebooks, and I looked at this small, perceptive, strawberry-lollipop-wielding person, and I said:

"I'm fine, Chloe."

"Okay," she said, which meant she didn't believe me but was choosing to let me have it. She put the lollipop back in. "We have spelling and the new multiplication tables today."

"I know. Give me ten minutes to put my things down."

"Can we do it in the kitchen? Mrs. Hoffman made snickerdoodles."

"Yes," I said. "We can do it in the kitchen."

She smiled and went back to her book, and I went upstairs.

I changed out of my school clothes and folded Liam's hoodie and put it on the chair by my desk and did not think about it.

Then I picked it up and put it in my wardrobe.

Then I took it out of my wardrobe and draped it over the back of the chair again, which was a neutral location that didn't mean anything, and went downstairs to teach Chloe multiplication tables.

Chloe was an excellent student on the days she wanted to be one, which today she did, possibly because snickerdoodles were involved. We got through the six and seven times tables and four spelling words and a reading comprehension exercise about ocean ecosystems in forty-five minutes, which was a personal record.

"You're distracted," Chloe announced during the fifth multiplication question.

"I'm not distracted. Six times eight."

"Forty-eight. You keep looking at the door."

"I'm checking the time."

"The clock is on the wall over the refrigerator," Chloe said. "You've been looking at the door."

I looked at Chloe.

Chloe looked back at me with serene patience.

"Seven times seven," I said.

"Forty-nine," she said, taking a snickerdoodle. "Is it because Liam's coming home soon?"

"It is absolutely not because of that. Seven times nine."

"Sixty-three." She chewed thoughtfully. "He texted Mom that he was staying late at practice but he'd be home by seven. " She paused. "I didn't tell you that because you asked. I told you because you keep looking at the door."

"I am going to need you to focus on the multiplication tables, Chloe."

"I'm very good at multiplication tables," she said serenely. "Eight times eight."

"Sixty-four, and I ask the questions."

She smiled and took another snickerdoodle.

By six-fifty I was in the library.

Books out. Notebooks open. Color-coded pens in their designated order. The practice problems I had prepared for tonight's session stacked neatly on Liam's side of the table.

I sat down and looked at everything I had arranged and thought about the word "secret" that I had circled in history class this morning.

Do you think she knows about, you know?

The sentence fragment had been sitting in the back of my mind all day like a splinter not painful enough to stop what I was doing but constantly present, working its way in with every hour that passed.

What did Portia know that she hadn't said out loud?

What was the thing that people stopped saying when I came within earshot?