a benevolent shouting match, trying to be heard over something that sounded a lot like Bizet. I heard him shout, “From the air, you can see everything.” I retrieved my phone and flipped it open. Seeing Sam’s number made me feel a strange knot of nerves in my stomach. He’d sent me a text, full of typos.
we founf her. was badf but cole pulle through likea hero.
thjought youd want to know. s
It was hard to picture the words Cole and hero in the same sentence. Hero seemed to indicate some kind of gallantry. I tried to text back under the table, out of the view of helpful boy next to me and Dolly on the other side, saying just that I was at dinner listening to details and I’d talk later. Or come by. When I texted come by, I once again felt that twitch in my stomach, and a breathless rush of guilt, for no particular reason that I could name.
The singing stopped then, and there was clapping around me — Dolly had her hands up by her face and was clapping right by my ear — but my father and Marshall kept on talking, leaning on the table toward each other, as if there had never been any music.
My father’s voice was clear: “—drive them out from the woods, like we did before, but with more manpower, state blessing, Wildlife Services and all that, and once they’re north of Boundary Wood in the open, the helicopters and sharpshooters take over.”
“Ninety percent success rate in Idaho, you said?” Marshall asked. He had a fork poised over an appetizer like he was taking notes with it.
“Then the rest don’t matter,” my father said. “Without the pack, they can’t survive alone. Takes more than two wolves to take down enough game.”
My phone vibrated again in my hands, and I flipped it open. Sam, again.
i thoughtshe was going to die isabel. i am so relievef it hurts.
I heard the boy across the table laughing and knew that he’d thrown something else at me that I hadn’t felt. I didn’t want to glance up at him because I’d just see his face against the wall where Jack’s had been. Suddenly I knew that I was going to be sick. Not in the future, not in a “distinct possibility” way, but in a “right this moment I had to leave before I embarrassed myself” way.
I pushed back my chair, jostling it into Dolly, who was in the middle of asking a stupid question. I wound my way through tables and singers and appetizers made out of sea creatures that didn’t come from anywhere near Minnesota.
I got to the bathroom — one room, no stalls, all kitted out like a home bathroom instead of a restaurant bathroom — and shut myself inside. I leaned back against the wall, my hand over my mouth. But I wasn’t sick. I started to cry.
I shouldn’t have let myself, because I was going to have to go back out there, and I’d have a swollen, red nose and pink eyes and everyone would know — but I couldn’t stop. It was like they were choking me, my tears. I had to gasp to breathe around them. My head was full of Jack sitting at the table, being a jerk, the sound of my father’s voice talking about the sharpshooters in helicopters, the idea that Grace had nearly died without me even knowing it, stupid boys throwing stuff into my shirt, which was probably cut too low for a family dinner anyway, Cole looking down at me on the bed, and the thing that had set me off, Sam’s honest, broken text about Grace.
Jack was gone, my father always got what he wanted, I wanted and hated Cole St. Clair, and no one, no one would ever feel that way about me, the way that Sam felt about Grace when he sent that text.
I was sitting on the floor of the bathroom now, my back up against the cupboard beneath the sink. I remembered just how scathing I had been when I’d found Cole ruined on the floor of Beck’s house — not the last time, but when he’d told me he needed to get out of his body or kill himself. I’d thought he was so weak, so selfish, so self-indulgent. But I got it now. Right in that moment, if someone had said, Isabel, I can make it go away, take this pill … I might have taken