All Chapters of Puck Around And Fall: Chapter 41 - Chapter 45

Mom told me the name Saturday night at nine fourteen.I know the exact time because I was looking at my phone when she came back, not at the screen, just holding it, and I saw the numbers change from 9:13 to 9:14 in the second before she sat down on the end of the bed and said it.Robert Callahan.She said it quietly and without drama, the way you said things that had been stored for a long time — carefully, like setting something fragile on a surface and waiting to see if it held.I said nothing.She looked at me."You knew," she said."I suspected," I said. "The timeline fit."She nodded. Said nothing else for a moment. Then: "He was a good person. I want you to know that. What happened wasn't cruelty. It was just — the weight of a life that was already built around certain expectations, and a twenty-year-old girl who wasn't part of the blueprint." She looked at her hands. "He made a choice that was right for him and wrong for me and both of those things were true at the same time."

I noticed Finn was gone around eleven.Not immediately. There was a long stretch of the bonfire where the three of us had been together and then Knox had been pulled into a conversation with the coaching staff about the regionals draw and I had been talking to Lila about the raccoon story she'd apparently been saving additional installments of for the right moment, and somewhere in the middle of Lila's description of the second raccoon — a detail I had not known was coming and which raised more questions than it answered — I turned to say something to Finn and he wasn't there.His hot dog was gone. His cup was gone. He was just not there anymore, which with Finn was not unusual — he moved quietly through spaces the way he did everything else, without production — but something about the specific quality of his absence tonight sat differently.I excused myself from Lila mid-raccoon, which she accepted with the understanding nod of someone who had seen things from behind a café counter