Chapter 13: Gabriel's POV: The Beer Bottle

Gabriel's POV

I did not sleep on Monday night.

Rosalyn lay beside me in our bed with her back turned, breathing evenly, and her phone sat face down on her side of the nightstand.

I watched it until the window went grey.

At six I took my coffee down to the garage so I would not wake her.

I had a shelf to fix, or I told myself I did.

The trophy shelf in the den had come loose from the wall in the spring, and I had never touched it.

I sat on the workbench with a drill in my hands and did nothing with it.

The door from the kitchen opened.

Lainey came in wearing sweatpants and an old academy hoodie of mine, with her hair twisted up and her feet bare on the concrete.

"You're up early," she said.

"So are you."

"I couldn't sleep either. Her door was closed and yours was closed and I lay there listening to a house with three people in it."

"Don't be funny," she said. "I want to stay angry."

She sat on the bench beside me.

Her shoulder touched mine, and neither of us moved away.

I had been holding something for a year and a half, and the garage was quiet enough that I finally said it.

"Can I ask you one thing?"

"You can ask."

"At the Fourth of July barbecue, the summer you turned twenty-one, you were fine with me for most of the afternoon."

She went still.

"Then I handed you a beer," I said, "and you looked at my hands, and after that you wouldn't talk to me for a year."

"Gabriel."

"You answered in single words. You left rooms. You told your mother I was strict about curfews, and you were twenty-one."

"I know what I did."

"I went over it for months. I thought I'd said something. I thought you'd found out something about me. I almost asked your mother."

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