During the trial, everyone found out Phil had feelings for Sarah. Lily said she already knew—she said anyone with eyes could tell. But Phil was not the type to run his mouth. Plus, he didn’t have the kind of friend group Silas had; he didn’t have anyone to brag to or confide in, except Silas. And Phil never told him a word about it. He didn’t find out until the rest of the town did, when every thought, every feeling Phil ever experienced, became hard evidence or fodder for horrified fascination. When Phil had lost the public privilege of being a person capable of love. When he became nothing but an animal and the conversation became about nothing but the size of his cage.

If Phil had told him, Silas thought as he threw a worn-down shard of glass into the bag, he would’ve stopped. But even as he thought it, he knew it wasn’t true.

Lily didn’t know that Silas had been sleeping with Sarah. No one did. At first, he kept it a secret because that’s what you did with a girl like Sarah Kelly. A girl like Lily for the football games and prom, a girl like Sarah for the nights in between, and nothing but opportunity looking forward. But after a while, when Sarah had never asked him why she entered his house only through his bedroom window, when she’d never bought a new dress or dropped hints about meeting his parents, it started to bother him. He hadn’t planned on climbing back into his bed so carefully after she snuck out, just to leave her imprint on his pillow undisturbed.

By the time his summer party was approaching, the dual life had become too much. Silas couldn’t stop thinking about Sarah whenever Lily kissed him. He was closing his eyes more and more everywhere that Sarah wasn’t, opening them only when she was real, right there in front of him and close enough his hands could prove it. He decided to end things with Lily once and for all. To make Sarah Kelly his girlfriend, and fuck what anyone had to say about it.

But then Lily told him she thought she might be pregnant, and his whole world stopped.

Men talk a lot about that moment. The moment they learn that they’ve made something new, something no one else could’ve made. The stories they decide to tell are full of giddy nervousness and reckless joy, with a dose of healthy, humbling fear. But the kind that’s still delicious, the way a static shock leaves a warm tingle on the skin. That was not Silas’s story. Not until he decided to rewrite it later. Now he couldn’t imagine himself without his kids. But back then, the news felt more like the arrival of death than that of life.