Meg was four or five, she’d wandered off in the supermarket while her mom was ordering salmon for a dinner party, then been completely unable to find her when she came shuffling back down the aisle clutching a package of Halloween-dyed Oreos for which she’d intended to beg. To this day, she shivered a little when she remembered the quietly apocalyptic moments that followed—the crinkle of the cellophane sleeve in her hand as she dashed frantically down aisle after aisle, the sour tang of panic at the back of her mouth.
It felt like hours, though it was probably only a couple of minutes before she finally found her mother, who had moved on to the cheese counter and not yet noticed Meg was gone in the first place. “What’s wrong?” she’d demanded, catching sight of Meg’s stricken expression. “What happened?”
Meg had shaken her head. The relief was overwhelming and animal, jumbling up any kind of cogent explanation inside her brain: all she’d been able to say was, “I missed you,” before bursting into inconsolable tears.
Meg didn’t know why she was thinking about that right now.
She tucked the phone back into her pocket and did her best to ignore the way her whole chest had loosened, like she’d taken a full breath for the first time all day. Yeah, she was glad he’d texted. Yeah, she’d been worried he might not. But it was also kind of shitty, the way he was totally ignoring the fact that he’d hurt her. And it didn’t change the fact that sometimes it felt utterly pointless for them to try and agree on anything at all.
“Harrison,” she said now, her voice coming out a little more shrilly than she’d necessarily intended. “Let’s get back to work.”
By the time Darcy Ramos came to relieve her at the end of her shift, Meg’s mood had totally blackened, like one of those gruesome warning posters of calcified cigarette lungs or the pot roast her mom had attempted for dinner a couple of weeks ago. She’d been planning to go find Emily, to see what all the mystery was about, but as she looked out at the buzzing midway, she realized there was absolutely no way she had the courage to get into a fight about their future tonight. She didn’t want to get into a fight about anything. She kind of just wanted to go home.
Meg darted past the Fun Slide and the falafel truck, breathing a sigh of relief at the familiar chirp as she unlocked her driver’s side door—she’d gotten her car back this morning, her mom having driven her over to the mechanic’s in irritable silence. She leaned her head back against the seat for a moment before wriggling around and pulling her phone out of her pocket, staring at Colby’s message one more time. What are you even after with me here? she almost texted. Instead, she dropped her phone in the cup holder and headed home.
The following night, Meg’s dad took her to dinner at a steakhouse near UPenn—all dark wood and white tablecloths, votive candles flickering in little glass jars. Since the divorce, the two of them had a standing dinner date every other Friday, and they alternated who got to choose. Meg kind of liked researching new restaurants—reading reviews and scouring menus, deciding exactly what she was going to order ahead of time. Sometimes it was more fun than the actual dinners themselves, although obviously she didn’t want her dad to know that.
Tonight she ate her strip steak and scalloped potatoes, chatting gamely about WeCount and the carnival and the paper she was writing for her independent study about Rebecca Latimer Felton. Sometimes as the two of them sat across from each other in a booth or a corner table, both of them casting around a little bit frantically for topics of conversation, it was hard to believe her dad was the same guy who’d changed her diapers and taught her to ride a two-wheeler and carried her screaming bloody murder out of an IMAX movie about dinosaurs when she was seven. They used to sit in easy silence for hours at a time watching Japanese monster movies on Blu-ray. Now she kind of couldn’t imagine being comfortably quiet with him for five minutes at a stretch.
“So,” he said now, sitting back in his chair as the waiter cleared their plates, “I’ve got some news.”
“Uh-oh,” Meg joked. “The last time you said that, you told me you and mom were getting