Everything That Follows

by Meg Little Reilly

  Through the snowy curtain outside his kitchen window, Sean saw his mother approach. Thank goodness. He didn’t know how to talk about Kat with his daughter. “Nana’s here!”

  Weeta jumped up and went to the door.

  “My love!” Orla exclaimed, her snowy arms extended in the doorway.

  They hugged and Sean took his mother’s coat so she could get right to the business of catching up with her only grandchild. Weeta had already launched into a story about her basketball team and which friends were playing which positions. Orla wanted all of it.

  Moments later, the pizza guy arrived and Sean greeted him at the door.

  Orla and Weeta didn’t look up from their conversation on the couch.

  It was an almost perfect moment for Sean—his daughter happy, his mother healthy and all of them together on their snowy island. But he ached for Kat. He ached for her and he hated her. She had become a fixture in their family life, not only as his partner, but also as Orla’s protégé. It was a strange arrangement, really. Not the sexiest of scenarios, for his girlfriend to be tangled up with several limbs of his family tree. But Sean didn’t need sexy. He needed sex—which they had at a perfectly acceptable rate—but he didn’t need intrigue. He just wanted this good life and these good people—and for Kat to threaten it all was just such an unfathomable act of deceit.

  Sean didn’t want to think about Kat, not tonight. Things were almost great, and he’d done such a good job of putting it all out of his mind for the past few weeks. He couldn’t lose himself to that anger on this night, not with Weeta there.

  “I’m just going to set the table, honey.” Orla went to the kitchen and began opening cupboard doors.

  “Dishwasher’s clean,” Sean said.

  She turned to her son. “Have you talked to Kat? Something’s not right there.”

  He froze. Orla wasn’t supposed to know anything about Kyle. Is that what this meant—that she knew something? “We haven’t talked in a few days. We’re still working through things.”

  Orla nodded. “I understand. But I think you might want to check on her. She’s not taking this well. She’s distracted and listless. She looks like hell. Whatever’s going on with you guys must be harder on her than you think.”

  Sean looked down at the pizza box. It was hot in his hands. He would have loved to believe it was their separation that was making Kat listless. To have that effect on her would be satisfying. But that wasn’t what was wrong with her. “Okay, I’ll call her tomorrow.”

  “I know that’s not the only thing,” Orla went on, her voice low.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know she’s concerned about the glass shop too, after the cliff fell.”

  “She’s concerned about you, Mom.” Sean was relieved to go down this different, depressing path.

  “Yes, and me. But it’s a poor use of her energy. The fact remains that none of us is in any immediate danger. And the house might be fine for a very long time. We just can’t know, so there’s no use fretting over it.”

  Sean couldn’t tell if his mother believed this. “Mom, Ashley said that anything could happen. She’s not as sanguine as you about the cliff.”

  “Well, anything can always happen.” Orla took the pizza box from his hands and went to the table. “Dinner’s ready, honey.”

  “I don’t know, Mom.”

  “And anyhow,” Orla went on, making no attempt to hush her voice, “that girl has a thing for you, so...”

  Sean took a seat across from his daughter. “Ashley? Maybe, I don’t know. What does it matter?”

  “I’m saying that maybe she has other motives in all this.”

  “Who has a crush on you?” Weeta asked with a mouth full of pizza.

  “No one. Your grandmother’s just teasing me.”

  Sean thought about that day in Katama Bay, the day Ashley had convinced him to go with her. She was looking for some kind of clue to Kyle’s death there. She had taken pictures of places where the sand pooled and went back out again. At the time, Sean thought it made her nutty and intense. After what Kat and Hunter had confessed, it made her dangerous to all of them. Sean didn’t know what to do with the truth of Kyle’s death, but he knew he didn’t want Ashley to have it. And yet, he still liked the idea that she might want to sleep with him. He hadn’t been pursued in a long time, and it helped with the blow of whatever it was Kat was doing to him.

  “Who has a crush on you, Daddy?”

  “Your dad’s right,” Orla said. “I was just teasing him. Don’t worry about it, honey. Tell me about school. Who’s your science partner these days?”

  Weeta explained that her lab partner was Ezra, and he was terrible at taking notes. Sean watched her as she gesticulated, licking greasy pizza fingers midsentence.

  Weeta didn’t need this. She didn’t need change or unreliability in her parents. Sean lived with a low, incurable fever of guilt about the scenario in which they’d brought her into the world. He and Beth were not a great couple and they should have known that before allowing for the possibility of Weeta. And yet, they made thoughtful, cooperative coparents. They were doing this pretty well. But they were also both committed to limiting the variability in their daughter’s life as a corrective measure for their earlier mistakes. Kat was a variability now.

  After dinner, they played one more round of the wizard game, and then Weeta got ready for bed. She kissed them both and curled up with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Five minutes later, Sean could hear her snoring into the pages of her open book.

  Sean snuck into Weeta’s bedroom to turn off the pink conch shell reading light. He pulled the book gently from beneath her smooth cheek and brushed a lock of hair away from her parted lips. She was splendid, more so each time he saw her. Sean had feared the onset of these teenage girl years for so long that he was constantly amazed by just how much he was actually enjoying her growth. He wasn’t losing her, not yet at least, and maybe that meant he’d misunderstood what these years were all about. Maybe he could be the thing she runs to instead of from as she gets older.

  It had always been hard for Sean to imagine the next stage with Weeta. When she was a baby, he couldn’t picture her as a toddler. And in kindergarten, he never imagined she’d become an adolescent. Did all parents feel this way about their firsts or was this evidence of a more fundamental deficiency in him? He didn’t know. Sean wasn’t prone to self-doubt in other areas—just parenting, and only occasionally. The prospect of Kat one day being a wife and parent to Weeta had always reassured him. It allayed his self-doubt. But now, with their future in question, Sean suddenly felt his parenting in question too. Kat was supposed to be a steadying third leg in this parenting tripod.

  Sean closed the bedroom door quietly and stood alone in the dark hall of his little house. He heard a cork pop from a bottle of wine, and his mother pull glasses from a shelf. He didn’t have the energy to go out there and make small talk. He couldn’t bear the weight of this secret, which made him feel like a liar even when he was alone. No one was asking Sean about Kyle, but he was still lying. Is this how it would always feel if he kept quiet for Kat? It wouldn’t only be with his family, either. Sean might feel like a liar with his friends and coworkers. He’d feel like a liar with new people, friends he hadn’t yet met in this life. It would change him—turn him from an open person to a closed one. And who would he be, then?

  Weeta murmured something in her sleep, and Sean heard her flipping around in her sheets before settling again.

  He couldn’t parent like this. Sean couldn’t keep this secret from his daughter and keep Kat in their lives. It wasn’t right. And the wrongness of it would be a cancer that ate him up. As Sean saw it, there were three paths before him: turn Kat in and be done with her; keep this secret and be done with her; or keep the secret and stay together. The last option seemed indefensible, but it was the one
he wanted the most. He didn’t want to live without Kat. But there was Weeta. He had to do the right thing for her. He had to model right behavior. Secrets like this weren’t right.

  Imagining Weeta’s life without Kat, though, made him ill. Sean always thought that, when Kat seemed ready, he would propose. He expected that one day they would be a real blended family, officially.

  Sean’s mind bounced back and forth among all the terrible choices before him. He didn’t want to take Kat from Weeta. But Kat didn’t deserve his daughter. And on that night, as he stood alone in the dark hallway, Sean was, for the first time, grateful that they weren’t an official family. He could still walk away from Kat.

  Chapter 12

  Three cars whizzed by and Ashley nearly fell into the snowy ditch along the side of the road. Assholes, she thought. Assholes in luxury SUVs are the worst variety of asshole. Ashley was in a pissy mood, the kind that could only be mitigated by running until her legs hurt so bad she could hardly stand. The subfreezing temperatures were just a bonus on the torture scale. It hurt today. She hadn’t run in really cold air yet this season and her lungs were now making a sort of whistling sound. She welcomed it.

  A rusty gray sedan crept by slowly, proving Ashley’s theory about who was and was not an asshole. As it drove off, the car’s color blended with the color of the November dusk. She’d never get back to her apartment while it was still light out, which wasn’t ideal. She didn’t want to die. She just wanted to sweat until she wasn’t thinking quite so obsessively about Kyle and Sean and the explosive, secretive little group she’d stumbled upon in her otherwise boring time on Martha’s Vineyard. She wanted to clear her head a little and maybe get some perspective. Ashley always knew what she wanted.

  An oncoming car flashed its lights and passed slowly, which she understood to be a scolding for being a lady running in the diminishing light. Fuck off, this is what ambition looks like, she thought. She didn’t get to the top 10 percent in her class, or the most prolific researcher in her unit, or the hardest-working teaching assistant by not being intense. And intensity demanded some risk. No risk, no reward. That was a thing she only said to herself because she knew it probably sounded a little aggressive for a marine geologist, but she was sure it could be applied to nearly every goal in life.

  Ashley liked to tick through her ambitions, the still unfulfilled plans for herself, as she ran through the pain on her runs. It made the burning feel more purposeful, like those ESPN montages of athletes in training. But on this day, as the darkness started to close in and she focused on the dicey footing at the edge of the road, she couldn’t quite articulate her immediate ambitions. She still hoped to impose a little pain on Hunter—just enough to scratch that revenge itch for ditching her after they slept together. In the longer term, she wanted Sean, who was a better romantic prospect. The truth was that she couldn’t be sure whether the second goal was related to the first. If it was, then she would need to recalibrate her ambition. Revenge and lust sometimes blurred for Ashley when emotions were running hot.

  There was also the Kyle mystery, which she wouldn’t normally care about, except she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt the cops were wrong. And she felt sure there was a connection between her new friends and Kyle. They were keeping something from her. It was all the secrecy that made her crazy.

  This was good, Ashley thought. She was working through the questions in her mind, one by one, making great progress.

  Ashley huffed and whistled through her condensing breath. She watched her feet land out in front of her and thought of that old movie, Rocky. She’d never actually seen it, but understood its cultural symbolism. She ran, and she problem solved, and she watched the movie of herself in her head—and then she figured it out. Her obsession with Kyle and this group was mostly about the secrets. She had a keen sense for secrets, as someone who’d spent most of her childhood locked out of every social clique. That’s the price of being super intense: it’s not cool. She could always tell when the secrets were about her, which was horrible; and she could tell when they had nothing at all to do with her, which was less humiliating, but terribly lonely. Ashley didn’t know what the secrets in this strange friend circle were all about, but she was sure they were there. And she really hated secrets.

  The sweat accumulating under her hat was starting to chill her forehead, and her wheezing lungs were about to give way. Ashley decided to sprint for the final stretch. There was always a little more fuel in the tank. That was what she liked to tell herself. She decided to focus on Sean for the last leg because she was sure that he would be impressed by her dedication. Sean was a guy who valued commitment. Not like Hunter, who’d been primarily attracted to her good looks, the jerk.

  No, Ashley didn’t want to go down that path. She was just beginning to gain clarity, and she wasn’t going to lose it in another bout of anger over Hunter. Her very first priority for now—in addition to the completion of her PhD and becoming the youngest morphodynamics scientist at Woods Hole—was to track down the secrets. If she hurt Hunter along the way, that was just a bonus. If she seduced Sean along the way, even better. It was important to prioritize one’s goals.

  Ashley didn’t stop running until she got to the edge of her porch. Then she dragged her aching body into the first-floor apartment and closed the door. She lay there on the hardwood floor for two full minutes, listening to her breath and staring at the ceiling. This was always the best part of the run, when her mind was clear and her goals razor sharp. But it didn’t last. As soon as her breath slowed and her muscles relaxed again, her racing thoughts would be back.

  Ashley showered and dressed, made an omelet and a smoothie. And then she called Sean.

  “Hey,” she said tentatively.

  “Hey!” He sounded surprisingly excited to hear from her.

  “I was wondering if you wanted to get a drink?”

  “Sure, where?”

  Ashley hadn’t even considered an answer to this question. She expected that he would hem and haw, pretend to be doing something else, and then finally agree to one drink. He just seemed so conflicted about her presence all the time that she had come to expect a little work from these conversations.

  “It’s a Monday,” Sean thought aloud, “which means we don’t have a lot of options. Do you want to come here?”

  “Sure, that’d be great. I’ll pick up a bottle of wine.”

  “Sounds good. Maybe in like an hour?”

  “Perfect. See you then.”

  And that was that. So easy. Maybe Sean had just decided that Ashley was a good match for him, and this would be the night they test the waters. Maybe she should wear something slightly more flirtatious than usual. She could floss again and change into a better bra.

  Ashley dragged her finger along the inside of her empty smoothie glass and pulled out a sweet, foamy finger. She licked it and considered Sean. Maybe he was just a slow mover. He’d been thinking about her, weighing all her pluses and minuses, as one does, and had finally come to the right conclusion about them.

  Or maybe it was something else. Kat could have done something terrible that put the final nail in the coffin of their relationship. Or maybe she’d moved on to someone new. Tonight Sean could be after revenge sex or rebound sex or self-pitying tell-me-I’m-fuckable sex. It didn’t really matter to Ashley.

  * * *

  Sean greeted her at the door with a smile. “Hey, c’mon in.” He had cozy lamb’s wool slippers on his feet.

  “Hi.” She leaned in for a cheek kiss, and he obliged.

  “Do you want some pizza? It’s from last night, but I can put it in the oven.”

  Okay, cold pizza means no intimacy. “No, thanks. I just had something.”

  “Okay, cool. I hope you’re not offended if I have some later.”

  “Not at all.”

  Then again, maybe cold pizza doesn’t mean anything.


  Sean went to the kitchen to open one of the bottles and Ashley tried to find a position on the couch that made her look unintentionally desirable.

  “How are things with you?” she yelled.

  He returned and handed her a glass of red wine. “I’m good. Weeta was here through the afternoon because all the city schools were canceled today for snow.”

  “Oh, that’s nice for you.” Ashley never knew what to say about his kid. It wasn’t one of his pluses, that’s for sure. “And everything else? How’s work?”

  “Slow. How’s your research?”

  She shrugged. “It’s a slog right now. I was writing at the library all day. I need to piece together all these findings into a cohesive thesis.”

  “Can I ask you—” Sean leaned forward on his knees “—what is the story? I mean, what’s new about the island that we didn’t already know?”

  Ashley took a graceful sip of the not-delicious wine. “The new findings are about the speed of erosion. That’s what I’m focused on. All the same factors are still contributing to coastal erosion—wind, rain, waves and some human activities like agricultural runoff—but it’s happening much faster now than it did fifty years ago, and the speed of change is sort of exacerbating the problem. As your estuaries disappear with rising sea levels, the rest of your coastline is becoming more exposed. So, it’s momentum that’s new.”

  Sean watched closely as she spoke.

  She liked his attention.

  “It sounds boring, but I love it.” Ashley shrugged, hoping to seem modest.

  “It sounds interesting to me. How’d you originally get into this stuff?”

  She slipped her feet out of her shoes and tucked them under her body on the couch. “I discovered a rare marine gastropod when I was twelve.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, it’s like a tiny snail. I discovered this breed that they thought was extinct while I was working on a school science project. I was on the local news after that and my dad got really excited about the whole thing, so I guess that’s how I got excited. Momentum, again.”