I’d misjudged my measurements.

In Tiffany’s mirrored closet, I turned, inspecting the results of my afternoon. I’d taken a ruler and a pair of scissors to the corduroy skirt, but it had come out shorter than I was comfortable with. Tiffany wouldn’t think twice about exposing so much leg, and Val probably wouldn’t, either. They knew about boys, and tonight was too important to mess up.

Mom had bought me a pink bra from Nordstrom with Tiffany’s discount she’d thought was “so cute.” Well, cute wouldn’t cut it, so I put it under a skin-tight, white baby tee I’d found in the back of Tiffany’s dresser. The hem stopped where the skirt started, a sliver of skin between the two.

As the steaks marinated downstairs, I sat on the bathroom counter and slathered my tanned legs in lotion. I plucked any stray eyebrow hairs and inspected my pores. When two car doors slammed out front, I straightened. They were early. Given Tiffany’s track record for tardiness, I hadn’t expected that. But could I complain about that? I hopped down and quickly swiped on mascara. I heard voices in the foyer. Damn it. I didn’t want to miss a second, especially not watching him come into the house, see the dining table set for him, smell the steak. The only heels I had were from the Homecoming dance and barely two inches. They didn’t match my outfit, but there wasn’t time to raid my mom’s closet. I tried to buckle them on so quickly, I kept fumbling, convinced I heard Manning’s sturdy footsteps moving to the kitchen.

I got the shoes on and flew down the stairs faster than I thought possible. The heels were low, but I must not’ve completely secured the left one, because it came loose, and I stumbled on the last step, blowing into the entryway, nearly falling on my face. I took a balancing step and stopped short.

Manning stared at me from the open doorway. His gaze slid down my top to my skirt, my legs, and shoes. He paused on the unbuckled clasp, then began to make his way back up.

He was ten times bigger than I remembered, ten times at least, and how was that possible when he was already the biggest man I’d ever met? He was taller, broader, more imposing. I’d expected him to look worn and weary, but his black hair, while longer than I remembered it, was cut, and his jaw shaved clean. He’d rolled up the sleeves of his crisp, white t-shirt and paired it with blue jeans and tennis shoes, also brand-new white. His muscles didn’t overpower him, but they were real. Solid.

Manning was still looking at my body like it was a piece of chocolate cake, and I figured that was a good thing. People turned down chocolate cake all the time, but nobody ever wanted to.

Our eyes met. His expression remained smooth, but my face flushed with the undeniable heat in his stare, so intense that he almost looked angry. Maybe he was, because he curled one hand into a fist. Was he seeing me, finally, not as a kid, but as a woman? There was more there I didn’t understand. A hardness in his eyes, frustration in his tensed arms. As I looked closer, I saw the visible signs of his time away—a scar on his upper lip, the way his nose now crooked a little to the right.

Tiffany came through the door, holding up a bottle of wine. “Got it. It rolled under the seat.” She looked at me at the mouth of the stairs and burst into laughter. “Why are you dressed like that?”

Her fingernails were the color of a firetruck.

“Red makes men horny.”

She’d one-upped me. Again.

“You mean like you?” I asked. “You wear slutty stuff all the time.”

Tiffany balked. “You look like you got dressed in the dark.”

“Half of it is yours.”

“Girls,” Mom said.

I turned, startled. I hadn’t heard my parents come in. Dad stood in the doorway of his study, staring at Manning, who hadn’t noticed him, either. He followed Manning’s line of sight to me. I saw the same anger in Dad’s face I’d just seen in Manning’s, but there was nothing exciting about it.

“Go put some clothes on,” he said. “Now.”

“I’m wearing clothes.” I sounded more confident than I felt—but it wasn’t fair! I did everything I was told, even if I didn’t want to. I’d waited so long for tonight, seventeen months to be exact. This was my time.

“You are so obvious,” Tiffany muttered, storming past Mom into the kitchen.

“It wasn’t a request,” Dad said. “Get upstairs, take off that ridiculous outfit, and put on some goddamn clothing.”

The back of my neck tingled, heat creeping up to my cheeks. Oh my God. This couldn’t be happening. There was nothing more childlike than being sent to your room by your father. It was so unfair and so typical of him to ruin anything important to me. “No. I’m not sixteen anymore,” I said, glancing at Manning. “I—”

“Please,” Manning said. “Just do it.”

We all turned to him. He wanted me to change? With his tormented words, I felt suddenly selfish. I had no idea what Manning had been through, or what he needed from me. I wanted him to see me, but not if it hurt him, so I took off my left shoe and returned upstairs, changing quickly so I wouldn’t miss anything. In a plain t-shirt and jeans, I went back down without shoes—but I still took the stairs two at a time.

Mom had set out a dish of black and green olives and was pouring two glasses of wine. “Charles,” she called as I entered the kitchen. “Why don’t you make Manning a drink?”

“I shouldn’t,” Manning said. “I’m meeting my PO tomorrow.” Before I could wonder what that was, he added, “Parole officer.”

“Oh, of course. Lake, go tell your father never mind. Could you drink in jail?”

Ugh. Seriously? I blew a sigh out of my nose and hurried out of the kitchen while trying to listen. “Prisoners can make alcohol if—”

“Make it?” Mom asked.

“It’s called pruno . . . not like cigarettes, which you can get—”

I stuck my head in dad’s study. “He doesn’t want a drink,” I said, then ran back through the house.

“What’d you miss most?” Mom asked as I entered. I moved out of the way so she could get in the fridge. “I should’ve had Tiffany call to find out so we could’ve had it here.”

Seated at the breakfast bar with a glass of wine and a half-smile on her face, Tiffany tried to get Manning’s attention. He leaned on the counter in one corner of the kitchen, keeping his eyes toward the doorway. I inched a little closer to him. I remembered him being stiff the last time he was here, but it was as if he weren’t completely present. His guard was up. I couldn’t fault him that. I needed to be alone with him to feel his presence like I had that night in the truck, and who knew when that would be?

“I missed a lot of stuff,” Manning said without inflection. “Carpet. Towels that aren’t falling apart. Privacy. But especially steak.”

Mom blushed. At the kitchen’s island, she checked on the tray of meat, turning the slabs over in the marinade. “You’re just saying that because I have it for dinner.”

“No, ma’am. The food inside was sh—excuse me. It was no good.”

“Poor thing. I can’t imagine how hungry you must be.”

Manning dropped his eyes to mine. “Starved.”

The word, only the second he’d said directly to me, pulled at my heart. No man of his size and importance should ever go hungry. I decided then and there—he’d never starve as long as I was around. It was worth the time and effort I’d put in to make sure every detail of tonight’s dinner would be perfect for him.

Mom hummed. “It’s a wonder you stayed so . . . healthy.”

Healthy was one way of putting it. I couldn’t remember Manning having any fat on him before, but somehow he looked more angular, hardened, his jawline sharper and his arms carved from stone.

“Wasn’t much to do in there worthy of a mention, except hard labor and education,” he said.

“Like school?” Mom asked.

“They had a guy come in for some classes, but I did a lot of reading myself.” Manning swallowed, as if talking this much was hard for him. “I’d like to go back and finish my degree at some point.”

Tiffany perked up. “Really?” she asked, smiling. “For criminal justice?”

The room got quiet—Tiffany didn’t even realize her blunder.

Manning scratched above his eyebrow. “No.”

“He’s not able to be an officer anymore,” Mom said quietly. “You knew that, honey.”

“Of course I know.” Tiffany sniffed. “I just meant, like, the other things he can do besides being a policeman . . .”

“Yes,” Mom said, “but you have to be more aware of what you say . . .”

While they argued, Manning’s gaze returned to me. His pain showed, the absolute depth of his hurt, right there in his eyes. It only surfaced when he looked at me. I did that. I caused him pain. His behavior began to make sense. His silence since the day he’d gone inside. My unanswered letters. His curled fists and quiet plea earlier.

Manning blamed me for this. The way he looked at me, like he couldn’t bear it. The way he wouldn’t speak to me. He’d probably done nothing for the last year-and-a-half but sit and wish I’d never forced my way into his truck or into his life.

“Sorry,” Tiffany said, exasperated with Mom.

Manning turned to her. “Don’t be. That wasn’t the path for me. I took a business course offered by the prison and did other stuff, like helping manage the construction of a new wing of the facility. Taught me a lot.”

“But you already knew how to build a house,” Tiffany said.

“I did, but I was self-taught or I learned on various jobs. Inside, I was forced to be involved in everything—planning, electrical, framing, roofing, welding, woodworking. When I got out of SHU, I spent a few months manufacturing furniture. It was a good education.”

“You can do more now,” I said. “You could be in charge on a site.”

Manning cleared his throat but didn’t look at me. “I could use some water if you don’t mind,” he said to nobody in particular.

I went and filled up a glass from the fridge while Mom took the steaks out to the grill. As soon as I gave him the water, he tilted back his head and drank. His throat worked, strong and veiny, his Adam’s apple bobbing. When he’d downed half of it, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

“Was it bad in there?” I asked. I sought out his chocolate-brown eyes, but he stared into his drink. Do you hate me for what I did to you?

Tiffany set down her wineglass with a clink that echoed through the kitchen. “Don’t be rude, Lake.”

I wasn’t sure how that was rude, it seemed worse not to ask.

We ate on the patio. January nights called for it. But even outdoors, tension thickened the air. Dad wasn’t happy. Tiffany stole glances at him and then Manning. Manning barely let an emotion surface. Mom had chosen a safe topic—décor for Tiffany’s apartment—that didn’t include me because I’d never decorated anything other than a wall in my room. But to be fair, it was a good wall that I was pretty sure Manning would appreciate. I’d cut up the inside flaps off some of my favorite albums, and hopefully my favorites were Manning’s, too. Pearl Jam, Jeff Buckley, Pink Floyd. I’d posted the album cover for The Dark Side of the Moon above the one of The Wall. The irony of that was lost on everyone in my family, or they just had no sense of humor was more like it.

“What are your plans, Manning?” Dad asked finally, cutting Tiffany off in the middle of a story about mispriced picture frames at Nordstrom. Sometimes I felt as if I worked there, too, I knew so much about that place.

“Maybe we can talk about that another time, Charles,” Mom said. “Let Manning just enjoy his meal.”

“It’s okay.” Manning swallowed his food, clearing his throat, the only sound except for crickets chirping on the other side of the pool. “I won’t lie. I don’t know yet.”

“No?” Dad cut aggressively into his meat, and I jumped when his knife scraped the plate. “But you’ll be living with Tiffany.”

“Yes, sir. At least, as long as she wants me there.”

Tiffany tried to throw an arm over Manning’s broad shoulders, but could only clasp as far as his neck. “I want you there, babe.”

She and Dad exchanged a look, but he quickly refocused on cutting his steak. “What about work?”

“He hasn’t even been out twenty-four hours,” Tiffany said.

“And he’s had a lot of time with nothing to do but sit and think about it.”

“I’m looking for something in construction,” Manning said, his voice deeper than usual. “I’ve got word out that I’ll take anything.”

“That sounds wise,” Dad said. “It’s not as if you’ll have a shot at law enforcement now.”

I set down my fork. Dad wanted to embarrass Manning by pointing out his mistakes, but he didn’t know those mistakes were mine. I was the one who was embarrassed. I’d ruined Manning’s future, probably in ways I still didn’t even know about.

Manning caught my eye. He stared hard at me as he intoned, “Like I said, I no longer want that. I don’t. Not at all.”

“Why not?” Dad asked. “A little disillusioned now, I imagine.”

“You could say that.”

“We’ll find you something else, babe,” Tiffany said.

I looked at Tiffany. She needed to stop using the word babe before I flipped out. It sounded worse than Dad’s steak knife scraping the china.

“I have some money saved up from inside,” Manning said.

Dad looked impressed. “How’d you manage that?”

Manning didn’t answer. “I’m happy to help with the rent.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Mom said. “You just focus on finding work. Use what you have to get yourself a nice suit for interviews.”

Manning closed his mouth, his jaw ticking. This was too much for me. I couldn’t imagine how hard it was for him. I wanted it all to go away. To go back in time and undo the mess I’d made. Opening my mouth to tell the truth would just make things worse. I was trapped.

Mom stood from the table. “I think we have some ice cream. How’s that sound?”

Nobody answered.

“Tiffany, help me clean up?”

“Why can’t Lake?” Tiffany whined, but took her plates into the kitchen. Since she’d left everyone else’s, I got up as well.

“Sir,” Manning said, “would it be all right if I went over to the wall and smoked?”

As much as I loved the smell of cigarettes for taking me back to Manning, hearing that he still smoked gave me a pang of disappointment. I’d hoped, even though the guards had taken the bracelet I’d made Manning, that he’d quit like he’d promised before he’d gone away.

Dad pushed his chair back and got up. “Just keep it away from the house.”

I picked up my plate and glanced at Manning from under my lashes. I might’ve expected him to be distracted by the mental warfare happening at the table, but he looked right back at me. It was our first moment alone. I went around the table to him, and his head tilted back. He didn’t look angry—just curious.

I piled his dish on top of mine. “Hi,” I said.

“Was the steak your idea?” he asked.

It wasn’t the question I’d expected. There was so much to say. I smiled. “Yes.”

He nodded once. Before I could say anything else, and there was a lot on the tip of my tongue, he shifted to get cigarettes from his back pocket and stood. His presence was suddenly so huge and hovering that I fumbled the dishes, dropping a couple forks.

He stuck a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, picked up the silverware, and gestured for me to go. “After you.”

We were closer than we’d been since the morning he was taken away—since that night in the truck. Remembering his hand inching up my shorts, my face warmed. I ducked my head and went around him, into the kitchen. Tiffany and Mom were arguing in hushed tones, but stopped when we walked in.

Manning stopped in the doorway and held up his cigarette. “I’m just going to . . .”

“Sure,” Tiffany said. “I’ll call you when dessert’s ready.”

He disappeared into the dark.

“But dad’s being awful,” Tiffany whined to Mom when they were alone again. “He’s going to scare Manning away.”

“It’s just because he cares about you. He doesn’t want you getting mixed up with trouble.”

“Manning isn’t trouble. I swear. I’m probably a worse influence on him than he is on me.”

“Trust me, I believe that,” Mom said.

I put the dishes in the sink, snuck by unnoticed, and slipped back outside. I spotted Manning’s cigarette first, a pinprick of orange light near the bushes, and then him with his back to the wall. Crossing my arms into myself, I went to him, the grass damp on my bare feet.

“Shouldn’t be out here without shoes,” he said when I was close. “You might cut your foot.”

“On what?”

“Who knows.”

In that way, he was still my Manning. Overprotective, always thinking the worst. I breathed a little easier knowing he hadn’t changed too much. “You’re smoking again.”

“I never stopped.”

“You said you’d try.”

He didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. I knew what he’d say. A lot had changed since that morning we’d stood outside of Reflection and I’d asked him to be better. “I still have your bracelet,” I said. “If you want it.”

It was mostly dark in our corner of the backyard except for the glare of the moon and the lights from the patio. Just enough to see him. Manning’s beautiful, angular face was even better than I remembered but undoubtedly harder. When he narrowed his eyes toward the house, little wrinkles formed at the corners like he was thinking. Or maybe he was just looking. For Tiffany.

“Are you really going to live with her?” I asked when the silence became too much.

He took a long, long drag, then turned his head over his shoulder and blew smoke out. He coughed a little, then squatted to put out his cigarette in the dirt. He was going to walk away. Almost a-year-and-a-half he’d been kept from me, and he was just going to walk away when we finally had a moment alone?

“Are you okay?” I asked.

He shook his head up at me. “I don’t want you to worry about me.”

“I can’t help it.”

“You have so much ahead of you. Focus on that.”

“You don’t. And it’s my fault.”

He stood quickly and flicked the butt over the back wall, into the yard of the house he’d helped build. He stepped a little closer, looking down at me. “You did what I asked. You did good.”

“I want to do more. Tell me how to fix this. Can I go to the cops once I turn eighteen? Will they erase the charge if I give them your alibi?”

He hesitated, then raised my chin with his knuckle. “I don’t want to hear another word about it, Lake. You’re not going to the cops. You’re not going to ruin your life by trying to help me.”

“And what about you?” I asked. I wanted to be cool, to not care so much, but it was all I’d thought about since he’d left and the words wouldn’t stop coming out. “Things are already ruined. You can’t do what you love and you’re with her—it’s all ruined. Everything.”

He lowered his hand. “I chose this knowing what it would mean for me,” he said. “I’ve accepted that. You need to also.”

I shook my head hard as tears formed in my eyes. I didn’t like to be told no. Maybe Dad was hard on me, but I normally got just about anything I wanted. Anything I could think to ask for. Manning still belonged to me, even if I was still too young, even if Tiffany was still holding on to him. “You don’t understand,” I said.

“Yeah, I do. You have to trust me, Birdy.”

Hearing his nickname for me again, my façade cracked a little. I closed my lids, my lashes wet on my cheeks. He tried to pretend he didn’t care, but he did. He hadn’t forgotten. “I can’t live like this,” I said. “Knowing what I did. That you’re mad. That you blame me.”

“I don’t blame you.”

I blinked away the threat of tears. “Then why didn’t you answer my letters? Why couldn’t I visit you?”

“Lake—”

“You could’ve called or written to tell me you were okay. I thought about you every day.”

“Christ, Lake.” He ran a hand through his inky hair, and it stuck up, slowly easing back into place. “Don’t tell me that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want you thinking about what-if or why this, why that. It’s just the way it is.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“Doesn’t it?” he asked.

It was all he needed to say. What were our options? I was still seventeen, and he’d always be seven years older. He lived with my sister. My father hated him and would never let me be with him while I lived at home.

I launched forward, throwing my arms around his middle. He didn’t hug me back, but his smoky scent calmed me even more than the new t-shirt smell underneath it. This was exactly where I wanted to be. “I have to know what it was like in there. I can’t stop thinking about it. I tried to get in to see you. I borrowed my friend’s car and lied about where I was going. I checked out books from the library—”

“Lake, stop. Just stop.” His torso expanded with an inhale, and his voice wavered. “Please stop. You don’t know what it’s like . . . and you’re . . .” He pinched the bridge of his nose and breathed out what sounded like, “fucking killing me.”

“I missed you so much.” I hugged him more tightly, hoping to wake him up, make him stop pretending this didn’t affect him. “I still do.”

He put a big hand on my forearm, a touch that put all my hairs on end, and turned it up a little. He ran a fingertip over my small scar. It was dark, but he looked almost longingly at it. “You miss the man I used to be.”

“That’s not true.”

“This is too hard. You gotta understand.”

I wanted him to slide his hand up, cup my face, and show me he’d missed me. Instead, he pried my arms from his middle. “Not yet,” I begged.

“Lake, it’s too dangerous.”

I shoved him away, but he was so solid, I was the one who stumbled back. “It’s always too dangerous with you. Everything.” I curled my toes into the damp grass. “If it were up to you, I’d live in a padded room without access to anything.”

“Maybe,” he said. I thought I detected a small, almost imperceptible smile, but it was quickly replaced with a scowl. “And I don’t want you dressing that way. Earlier.”

The cut-off skirt and tiny top both thrilled and embarrassed me. Dad had made me feel like a prostitute, but the heated look in Manning’s eyes was the only thing that made sense to me in all of this. He still wanted me, and not just a little. “It seemed like you liked it,” I said lightly.

He wiped his temple with his sleeve despite the temperate night, then took a step back. “What would make you think that?”

For the first time in a while, I read his body language clearly. The outfit made him uncomfortable. In the house, he couldn’t take his eyes off it. A minute ago, it’d made him angry. Now, he was looking toward the house, scratching under his collar. All that because of a short skirt and heels. I shrugged. “I guess it was the face you made.”

“I didn’t make any face.” He backed away a little more but didn’t try to leave.

“What didn’t you like about it?” I asked. “Was it the skirt? Was it too short?”

“I . . . it . . .”

I leaned in a little. “What?”

“Never mind. Just don’t dress like that.”

“How am I supposed to know what you mean if you won’t tell me what you didn’t like?”

His demeanor shifted. With the set of his jaw came the same white-hot glare from earlier. It could’ve been passion as easily as it could’ve been hate. I was upsetting him, but I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. “I didn’t say I didn’t like it.” He spoke slowly. “I said I didn’t want it.”

“Doesn’t it matter what I want?”

“No.”

And wasn’t that the truth? It was a good thing I wanted to go to USC, because it wasn’t like I had a choice. Dad would’ve made sure of it, just like Manning made sure I kept my mouth shut about his case, dressed like a pre-teen, and stayed away from him. I had no input about anything, and I was beginning to wonder if eighteen was just another number or if it’d actually mean a shift into adulthood. “I’m not sixteen anymore, Manning. I don’t even feel sixteen. You got older in there, and so did I.”

“Yeah? Did you?” he asked. I couldn’t tell if he was joking, and for a blissful moment, we’d turned back time. The weeks before his arrest, I’d lived for those moments when he’d teased me in his own subtle way. “Tell me, what’d you do while I was away? How’d you spend your days?”

“I told you everything in my letters.”

He frowned a little. “I want to hear it from you.”

“I ran a lot,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

There came a certain kind of peace once I pushed past the pain, the wheezing, the sweating. I had yet to find anything else that had gotten me there—except maybe the beer and joint I’d had with Corbin. “It helped.”

Closing his eyes, he said, “Me too.”

“You run?” I asked, straightening my back. We could run together, me and him, it could be our thing. He couldn’t say no to it, because it was something innocent and good.

But then he blinked a few times. “Nah. I mean physical activity. Labor. It helped me, too.”

“Oh. What else did you do? What else helped?”

He shook his head and trailed his eyes down my arm. “How’d you get the scar?”

“You know how.”

“No, I don’t, because I didn’t read your letters.”

My heart fell. “You never got them?”

“I got them. I just didn’t read them.”

Of all the scenarios I’d considered, that wasn’t one of them, especially since I’d have done anything to read even one letter from Manning while he’d been away. I’d spent hours of my life writing them, one of the only things outside of running that’d kept me sane. “Not even one?”

“You wasted your time.”

“Maybe I did,” I said, “but time never feels wasted on you.”

He swallowed, turning his face up to the sky. I loved when he did that, not just because the stars were ours, but because he exposed his strong, veiny throat to me. It made him, a man with callused palms and overpowering strength, seem vulnerable. “It was too hard.” He spoke quietly. Maybe it was easier for him to say when he didn’t have to look at me. “I wanted to, but I couldn’t.”

Though it hurt that he hadn’t read them, I understood. If he’d ever written me back, a letter from him would’ve been salt in my open wounds. A sting I would’ve welcomed, but painful nonetheless.

I wanted to look at the stars with him, but not as much as I just wanted to soak him in. Still studying him like he might disappear at any moment, I asked, “What’s up there?”

“Doesn’t matter. I saw the night sky once the whole time I was in there.” He inhaled through his nose. “It was only for a second, but you know what I saw?”

My heart skipped. Summer Triangle.

“Ursa Major,” he said. He took a breath and looked back at me. “What gave you that scar?”

There was only one answer to that question. “A great bear.” My great bear.

“Manning,” Tiffany called from the house. “You out here, babe?”

He wet his lips. “Be right in.”

He stepped back once then again. I put my fingers to my chin, attempting to hold on to the ghost of his touch. His eyes went to my mood ring. If he was shocked, he didn’t show it, just looked at it for a long minute.

Then he turned and stalked back to the house. Back to Tiffany.