One Last Thing Before I Go

dirty when she’s pissed. But more often than not, Silver seems to get a pass just for being Silver. She chafes at the injustice of his having acquired favored-nation status simply by being an irresponsible asshole of a father, but if she can sail through this one on his coattails, she’ll put that in the “wins” column and move forward. More than anything, what she needs now is to right her own ship, to save herself from this terrible mistake.
    She becomes aware of the crickets, their low, hypnotic chirping, and wonders idly, as she has before, if what she hears is ten crickets or a thousand. It’s one of those mysteries she has never bothered solving. Rich would know. She makes a mental note to ask him the next time they’re up here, as if having an agenda might ensure that there is a next time.
    She hears the scrape of metal on wood and realizes that Rich is docking the boat. Her perspective was skewed by the darkness and she couldn’t tell that the red light had been getting increasingly closer. She heads down the wooden staircase with the cold chill of fear in her belly, and then walks gingerly across the sandy knoll to the edge of the dock. Rich emerges from the darkness, walking down the dock, carrying a string of five or six healthy-sized trout. He sees her waiting for him and pauses for a second, then comes forward to face her. She can feel the dock beneath her shifting with each step he takes. They look at each other for a long moment. The leaves whisper as a mild wind blows through them, and the calls of nocturnal birds haunt the woods around them. She looks out at the dark canopy of trees surrounding the lake, senses the vast array of unknowable creatures living out their lives beneath them. We could live here, Denise thinks. We could make this our home.
    “I forgot how peaceful it is here at night,” she says.
    She thinks that maybe he smiles. It’s hard to tell with the shadows playing across his face. Rich holds up his catch; six long speckled trout, gleaming silver in the faint glow of the distant porch lights. “Paperbellies,” he says. Fireflies are lightning bugs. Lake trout are paperbellies. He can call them whatever he wants and it will sound right rolling off his tongue.
    “Rich.”
    He shakes his head, not wanting her to say anything more. “I’ll fillet,” he says. “You cook.”
    He moves past her and heads up to the house. Denise turns to follow, feeling her heart finally begin to slow down its frenetic rhythms. She feels the dark veil that descended on her future like the night on this lake finally lifting. Rich understands. A small part of him hates her for it, and someday in the future, during an intense fight, he will pull this event out like a chit he has saved and polished for just such an occasion, and he will render her furiously mute. But that future slap will be a small price to pay for his forgiveness today. And they will get past that, just as she now knows that they will get past this. Because Rich understands, maybe even better than she does, that her momentary indiscretion was the end and not the start of something.
    And now there is only their own life stretched out ahead of them, a thought that fills her with a sense of peace that for the entire stretch of their engagement, she realizes now, she had been lacking. She would like to tell him this; she thinks it would reassure him, but he has made it clear that he doesn’t want to talk about it, and so she must swallow, maybe forever, the elation she feels in this moment, the clarity of her love for him washing warmly over her. She will have to feel it by herself. The thought makes her sad, but she thinks to herself as she follows him up to the house, which is bathed in the warm glow of the incandescent lighting spilling out from the kitchen, there are far steeper prices to pay for forgiveness.

CHAPTER 42
    F or the first hour of their drive back, Casey drives in silence, refusing to look at him. He tries to wait her out until he can’t take it anymore.
    “Are you going to say anything?”
    “What do you want me to say?”
    “I don’t know. I just think we should talk about this.”
    “Which part?”
    “What?”
    “Which part would you like to talk about? The part where you betray me and tell Mom about Jeremy? Or the part where you betray pretty much everyone by having sex with Mom?”
    “Are those my only choices?”
    “Joking, right now, would be a serious fucking mistake, Silver. And I say that