Page 72 of Double Apex

“I’ll carry your suitcase.” I push to my feet.

She lets me take it, then follows me down the stairs to the entryway.

I meet her eyes. “Did you…?”

“I called a car, yeah. It’s a couple blocks away.”

Our helpless expressions are mirrored. I draw in a breath to speak, and she takes a quick step toward me and puts her fingers over my mouth.

“No last words. This isn’t an execution or something. Let’s be friendly about it.”

There’s little as frustrating as a thwarted declaration. I take her hands in mine, and she allows it.

“Promise me something?” she ventures. “Let’s make this sacrificeuseful. No moping. Put everything into racing. I want you on the podium as much as you want to be there.”

“I will make you and Mo proud.” The words feel like sawdust in my throat.

She takes a ring of keys from her bag and slides off two, pressing them into my hand.

I shove them in my pocket. “Can we still call?”

She shakes her head. “I’ll see you during remote meetings—it’s as much as I can handle.” Her phone chimes, and she glances at it. “Car’s here.”

My heart twists, and my head is packed like crowded stands at a race—thousands of voices, blending into indistinguishable noise. I take her chilled hand. Grief is nearly undoing me.

“When you asked on Santorini,” I tell her, “about my greatest fear and the missing scale on the dragon…thisis it.” I yank her hand toward me and crush it against my heart. “You shot the arrow, draga mea. Your aim was perfect.”

My hands go to her waist, and she gets only one word in,“I’m—” before my mouth claims hers. I lift her and take the last few steps to the wall, pressing her against it.

Our lips are feverish, hungry, open to the shape of our loneliness and trying to fill it with each other. Her hands clench my hair, and she moans against me.

After a minute we part. My face is wet and I’m not sure whose tears they are. She fumbles for the door and flings it open, grabbing her suitcase handle—pushing my hand away roughly when I try to help—and dragging it onto the walkway before pausing to look back.

“Like you promised in Barcelona,” she chokes out, “you wrote your name in every room of me—it’s indelible.” Shaking her head, she directs, “Close the door, Legs. Don’t watch me go.”

22

NORTH CAROLINA

LATE JULY

PHAEDRA

The house at Holden Beach is the only place we ever acted like a normal family while I was growing up, so it makes sense that Dad would choose to die here. It’s a beautiful beachfront five-bedroom, all soft white surfaces combined with cozy rustic shit.

As a kid, I had a conflicted relationship with the Holden house. It lacks the garage and workshop we have in our Charlotte home, so I sulked every year about having to be at the beach. When we weren’t on the road, Dad insisted we spend half our time at the coast—it forced me to interact with the family.

Unfortunately, I usually ignored two-years-younger Aislinn in favor of my beloved textbooks. From ages eight to ten, I constantly had my nose in high school mathematics and physics books. From age eleven on up, it was college textbooks, which Dad would buy for me at a university bookstore.

My mother is pretending everything’s the same, that Aislinn and I aren’t cynical adults now, and Dad isn’t weeks from dying. It’s like she thinks if the throw pillows have the perfect knife chop, the floors gleam, and something’s in the oven, everything is GOING TO BE JUST FINE.

Dad talks a bunch about old memories: funny and smart and cute things Aislinn and I did as kids, memories of his courtship with Mama back in the eighties (her hair is still incredibly high—I think that woman has stock in Aqua Net), memories of his boyhood in Fairmont, all the mischief he got up to with our uncle Skeet.

My whole life, Mo has been a big, jocular, “mostly muscular with a touch of middle aged spread” guy with sparkling eyes and charming laugh lines. Illness has shrunk him. He hasn’t done chemo or radiation because he was told right out of the gate that it wouldn’t help much and might just buy a handful of extra time. He was adamant he’d rather not have a few more months if it meant spending them puking and bald.

The guy is so fearless it freaks me out. Aislinn said Mama told her Dad’s reaction when the oncologist laid out the facts: Dad was silent for about a half minute, then said,All right—let’s get on with it. By which he meant dying, not treatment. Whosaysthat shit?

Edward fucking Morgan, that’s who.

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