“I don’t know what you want me to say.” Her voice turns flat, her expression tense. All the warmth is gone, replaced by a growing wariness.

“I don’t want you to say anything. I just want the truth,” I tell her. “Do you remember when we went to the Pink Mansion?”

She nods in confirmation.

“Do you remember us arguing?” I say, frustrated, and she nods again. “Then what happened?”

She remains quiet, eyes focused on the road even though we’re driving around aimlessly, as far as I can tell.

“Elise—”

“We argued about Jack, about the night before,” she says, referring to what we did in Chattanooga. “Why’d you tell him, Remy? You promised. You promised you wouldn’t tell anyone, not even him. Why’d you do it?” She begins to cry. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” I answer, even though I do. I was scared—scared and confused. I didn’t know how to process what had happened. I didn’t even know what’d actually happened in the first place. Jack calmed me down, helped me piece through it.

But once he knew, he wasn’t going to let it go.

• • •

I rushed over to the Pink Mansion Sunday night, trying to prevent this very collision between them.

“It was harmless,” I told Jack over the phone as I drove to Elise’s.

“You know it wasn’t, Remy. It never is,” he said, and I could just picture him shaking his head sadly.

“No one got hurt.”

“That we know of. And that’s not the point, you know that,” he said, sighing.

“It was an accident. Fireworks can be dangerous.” Elise said—no, insisted—that it was an accident, and I wanted to believe her.

“Exactly,” he said. “They’re dangerous. And she knew that.”

Silence stretched tight between us.

“I’ll talk to her.”

“Remy—”

“I have to go,” I said, ending the call.

“Did you talk to Jack?” Elise asked once I arrived at the Pink Mansion. By the time I’d made it back home from Jack’s house, she was already up waiting for me. I had no choice but to tell her the truth. Where I was. What I said. What Jack said.

“I did.” I was slipping my espadrilles off by the door, and Elise was leaning against a wall in the foyer, her arms crossed.

“What’d he say?”

“He hasn’t changed his mind,” I said, not meeting her eyes. “But he will. I’ll explain and—” It was all just a big misunderstanding, I thought. If I could get them to listen to each other.

“You told him it was an accident?”

“I did.” We walked out onto the balcony, the air thick with humidity and still warm from the day.

“Why did you even tell him?” she snapped at me. “If you’d only—” She saw the hurt on my face and exhaled in frustration.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“You’ve put me in an impossible position,” she said, looking out at the water below. It’d been raining a lot recently, leaving the river swollen, its violent current a symphony filling the air.