The waitress takes our order quickly. We both order a short stack and a coffee. When she walks away, Andrew sets his eyes on me squarely, his head leaning slightly to one side. I look back into his eyes, holding on as long as I can. It feels like a game of chicken, and eventually I lose, moving my attention to the rolled up silverware and napkin in front of me. I unravel it and move my knife and fork to the side, unfolding my napkin and spreading it on my lap. When I glance down at my hands, I realize just how badly they’re shaking. Then Andrew’s foot finds mine under the table, his shoe tapping into mine. It makes me laugh.
“There she is,” he says. I let out one more breathy laugh, and it mixes with a cry. I choke it down quickly, before he can see.
I rub my hands on my cheeks, thankful when the waitress comes to quickly fill our coffee mugs. I thank her and go to work adding creams and sugars to my cup.
“Wow,” Andrew chuckles. “That might be the unhealthiest cup of coffee I’ve ever seen.”
I nod in agreement.
“I’m a little high strung,” I shrug, blowing over the top of the liquid before attempting a sip. It’s hot, so I set the cup in front of me to let it cool.
“Yeah, I’m sure the seven packs of sugar and liquid fat will totally help calm you down,” he jokes.
“Feed the beast,” I say with a shake of my head.
He chuckles at me, then pulls his arms up to rest his elbows on the table, leaning his face into one hand. His eyes haven’t left me once in the last five minutes.
“I was in Iowa,” he says finally. My eyes lower and my brow pinches as I try to understand. “Not at first, but after…when I got out of Lake Crest. I moved to Iowa with my uncle.”
Every new piece he shares from his life fills these missing gaps in my world of Andrew Harper. Some of the things he says erase what I thought, strike out the story I’d believed and replace it with something sadder. He’s careful when he shares, too—like he’s testing me a little each time to see how I react. I think he’s wondering if I care. He has no idea how much I do.
I care. I care, and it feels so dangerous to let myself, like caring about him could topple over so many other things that lay in the balance. This is how it’s always been with us—our feelings on a teeter-totter.
“When did you move there? To Iowa?” I ask, hoping he says it was only a few weeks after the accident, that he wasn’t at Lake Crest for long. I don’t want my parents to have lied to me.
“Junior year,” he says. His eyes are hard, almost stoic. His foot slides away, and I’m tempted to chase it. Instead, I bring my legs up to the booth, folding them under me.
A test.
“So you were at Lake Crest…for a year?” My eyes sting, but I hold in my cry. My mind races through memories of my mom, how she told me my dad went to look for Andrew, how they were told he was with family in another state. So. Many. Lies.
“Ten months, really. I came home at the end of spring, sophomore year,” he says, pulling one of my empty sugar packets from the center of the table and folding the small paper into a fan pattern.
“Sophomore year,” I repeat. He was home. And he never came to see me. My parents lied. And Andrew gave up too quickly. I shudder in the booth, and I know he sees it. His eyes flinch and his gaze lowers as he continues to study me; he’s waiting to see if I’m pretending. “Why didn’t you visit me? Before you left.”
He shrugs quickly and pushes the small folded paper off to the side, running his palms over the table, clearing the few grains of sugar away that had spilled out.
“You’d moved on,” he says, his eyes moving up to meet mine briefly. I gaze at him, my forehead low, not understanding. His teeth hold on to his top lip for a second. “You never wrote back,” he finally adds.
I breathe in hard, holding my words while our waitress delivers our breakfasts. When she leaves, I let myself move beyond that silent barrier that’s been making everything this morning so difficult, that wall that’s been keeping us both from saying things.
“I never got your letters. Not once. I didn’t know, Andrew. I didn’t know. If I had known…”
He shakes his head, turning his attention to his pancakes, pouring syrup, cutting vigorously, stuffing a bite in his mouth. “It wouldn’t have mattered,” he shrugs.
How can he say that? It would have mattered. I wondered about him, worried about him, wanted to see his face for so long. I wanted his hand in mine when I was scared. I wanted him there—in the hospital when they cut me open.