No Longer Waiting for the Wind

“Since when is that your business?” “If I don't look after you, who will?” Dale squeezed through the door and set the hot porridge and stomach medicine on the table. “I know car rides wreck your stomach. I ran two streets over for this.” “No cilantro.” He popped a pill out of the blister pack and held it to my lips. “Open up.” I turned my face away. “Weren't you keeping Antonia company?” “I came the second her scans were done.” He sighed and pulled me into his arms. “She hurt her foot. Was I supposed to just leave her?” “You're not like her.” “She needs looking after. You're the one I'm going to spend my life with.” Dale bent his head and kissed my temple. “Sadie, don't measure yourself against her.” So Antonia was the one who deserved to be cherished. And I only rated the place he'd arranged for me. “Did the application system really crash?” Dale's expression didn't change. “Why are you back on this again?” “I want to see the submission record.” “The examinations board already said it was a system problem. What else is there to look at?” “Which examinations board?” His hand stilled for an instant, then flicked my forehead. “Checking up on me?” “Fine. I'll dig up the emails for you tomorrow.” “And once you've read them, no more of this nonsense in your head.” He was too calm. Calm the way he'd been on the field, as if the confession were nothing more than a harmless joke. Dale rebooked me a room at a chain hotel, on the same floor as Antonia's mother. The doorbell had barely rung before Antonia walked in wearing his jacket, water still dripping from the ends of her hair. “I left my charger in his laptop bag.” She opened Dale's laptop and typed a string of numbers into the lock screen. The screen lit up. The password was her birthday. Antonia noticed me watching, and her hands paused. “Dale's always forgetting his password, so I set it for him.” “Don't read into it.” She took the charger and left. When Dale came out of the shower, his eyes went straight to the door. “Was Antonia here?” “Is her foot still swollen?” Only after the words were out did he seem to remember me, lifting me onto the bed. “I'm staying with you tonight.” “Tomorrow's your birthday. I've got a present ready.” He wrapped an arm around my waist from behind. “No more sulking over her, all right?” Half an hour later his breathing had gone even. I lifted his arm off me and went to the laptop. Sure enough, Antonia's birthday unlocked it. In the bottom-right corner of the desktop was a screenshot named “Sadie Final Applications.” Created June twenty-eighth, eleven forty-three at night. Seventeen minutes before the system closed. The “submitted successfully” screenshot he'd sent me was timestamped eleven fifty-seven. I zoomed in on the image. There was no green confirmation receipt at the bottom of the page. Just one line of small print, most of it cropped away. 【Application information not yet confirmed.】 I recorded the file properties, then opened the messaging app. The pinned contact was Antonia. The key text from June twenty-eighth had been deleted, but two voice messages remained. “The verification code came through.” It was Dale's voice. Right after it, Antonia pushing him along “Five minutes left. Delete it, quick.” I recorded the whole screen and uploaded it to the cloud. As I backed out, an empty folder in the corner of the desktop caught my eye. 【Southbay Meteorology Science Camp】 There was nothing inside it. I was about to check the deletion log when Dale's voice came from behind me. “Sadie.” My whole body went rigid. He didn't open his eyes, just reached a hand out toward me. “Come back.” Like every night of the past seventeen years. He was certain I'd come back into his arms. I closed the laptop. This time, I didn't take his hand. After daybreak, I printed all the screenshots at the hotel front desk. Before I left for the birthday party, I slipped a voice recorder into the inner pocket of my backpack and pressed record.

At the birthday party, Dale fastened a necklace around my neck. A white crane holding a crescent moon. He hooked the clasp from behind and kissed my earlobe. "Happy eighteenth, Mrs. Stephens." The whole room broke into whoops at once. "Dale's locking her down already?" "Sadie chased you for over ten years. Guess it finally paid off." Dale pulled me into his arms, grinning lazily. "She didn't have to chase." "She's been mine since we were kids." Antonia's face went white by degrees. She pulled up a chat log. 【Once you get into Kingsford, the crane-and-moon is yours.】 The sender was Dale. Dated two months ago. "Dale, wasn't this supposed to be mine?" The room went silent in an instant. Dale caught my hand as I reached to take the necklace off. "It suits Sadie better." "Why?" "Because she's my girlfriend." He answered it without a flinch. "You want something else, I'll buy it for you." Antonia ran out, eyes red. He went after her anyway. Five minutes later, Dale called me into the fire stairwell. He pinned me to the wall and bent down to kiss me. Soft, lingering. Only when my breathing had gone ragged did he cup the back of my neck and unhook the clasp. "Antonia's in a bad way. Let her wear it for one night." I pressed his hand still. "It's my birthday present." "I'll buy you something better later." He kissed the wet at the corner of my eye. "I've given you the wife's place. Don't fight her over a little thing like this." The crane and moon left my throat. By the time we came back to the room, it was already sitting against Antonia's collarbone. She apologized to me, eyes red: "Dale said you two will have everything someday." "I only get this once." There was mango in the slice of cake they'd given me. Antonia was the one who noticed my allergy first, and yet Dale frowned and scolded me for not taking care of myself. He remembered every food Antonia couldn't touch. When it came to me, all that was left was cleanup after the fact. After the meal, Antonia took out the innovation-contest entry form. "Dale, my model's still short a few pages of extreme-rainfall records." Dale looked at me. "You brought your mom's manual, didn't you?" "How do you know that?" "Didn't you book a scan for tomorrow?" His tone was offhand. "Over summer break, while you were at the hospital with your grandmother, I photographed most of the book." "Antonia's only missing a few pages that glare too much to read." My head snapped up. "Who said you could touch my things?" "They're just a few photos. Is it really that serious?" So even before he tampered with my applications, he'd already gotten used to going through my mother's things, then handing what was mine to Antonia. "You can't have the manual." "Antonia spent three months preparing." "That's her problem." Antonia lowered her eyes. "Never mind. I won't enter." Dale's face darkened. He yanked my backpack open and shoved the manual into her project bag. "I'll give it back once I've finished photographing the rest." I grabbed the strap. "Give it back to me!" Dale locked his hand around my wrist. "Sadie. That's enough." I stopped fighting and picked up my phone off the table. "Did the two of you forget? There are still two lines you never wiped clean." I opened the voice message I'd saved the night before. "The verification code came through." Right after it, Antonia's voice. "Five minutes left. Delete it, quick." The room fell dead silent. The impatience on Dale's face finally cracked open.

Antonia lunged for the phone. "It's not what you think." I stepped back out of her reach. "Then what is it?" "That night Dale had me pull the admissions data for Southbay. I thought he only wanted to reorder the choices." "Delete what?" Her lips moved. Nothing came out. Dale planted himself in front of her. "Come at me." Even now, he was still shielding her. I took out the printed forgery of the screenshots. "You said the system crashed." "Then where's the submission record?" "Why does this screenshot have no confirmation receipt?" The whole table went dead silent. Dale dragged me out of the private room. "We'll talk at the hotel." "Right here." "Sadie, don't push me." "Am I the one who pushed you to change my applications? Or to lie to me?" I slapped the printouts against his chest. The pages scattered across the floor. "Dale, I want the truth." He stared at me for a long time, then finally let go, leaned against the wall, and lit a cigarette. "I changed them." Four light words, wiping out six years of everything I'd held on to. "Why?" "Your scores weren't stable." "I was thirteen points over Southbay's cutoff for the program." "Over it last year doesn't mean you'd definitely get in this year." "So you made Rutherford my first choice?" "They offered you a two-hundred-thousand scholarship, and their applied meteorology is a state-key program." Dale blew out a stream of smoke. "Going to Southbay might not have worked out better for you than staying in Rutherford." "Then why didn't you go to Rutherford?" He looked away. "Antonia needs me." "You need me too." I laughed out loud. "So you go to Easton to keep her company, I graduate and join your family's company, and then I marry you?" "What's wrong with that?" Dale's voice shot up all at once. "The job, the wedding house, I've prepared all of it for you." "We marry the moment you graduate, and I take care of you for the rest of your life." "People beg for a life like that and never get it. Why do you have to make trouble?" School, work, marriage. He had arranged all of it long ago. He'd just never once asked whether I wanted any of it. "What you're afraid of isn't me failing the exam." I looked at him. "You're afraid that if I really went to Southbay, I wouldn't need you anymore." His pupils tightened all at once. After a moment, he actually admitted it. "That's right." "I just didn't want you to go." "You'd meet new classmates, new professors, people better than me. Would there still be room for me in your eyes?" Dale stubbed out the cigarette and laid his hand against my face. "Sadie, I only wanted to keep you close." "And Antonia?" "She's different." "Do you love her?" He was quiet for a moment. "I can't stand to see her suffer." "But the one I love is you, and the one I'm going to marry is you." His gaze went so deep it was almost tender. "When Antonia comes to me, I go soft." "But as long as you turn back, I'll always be here." "I've given you the place of my wife. Why do you have to force me to cut her off completely?" I looked at this face I'd loved for seventeen years, and all at once the anger was gone. "I don't want it anymore." Dale's hand froze in midair. "What?" "You. The place as your wife. The future you planned." "I don't want any of it anymore." His eyes darkened. "There's a limit to how much of a tantrum you can throw." I turned to pick up my mother's manual. But Antonia clutched the project bag to her chest. "Dale already agreed to lend it to me." "Give it back." I reached out to grab it. In the struggle, the project bag hit the floor hard, and Antonia's thermos, its lid never screwed tight, rolled out. Scalding coffee poured straight into the manual. I dropped to my knees to save it. Antonia scrambled for tissues. The waterlogged pages tore down the middle with a rip. My mother's handwriting bled fast into a blur. The photo tucked inside soaked through too. It was the last picture of my mother and me together. Antonia apologized, her eyes red: "I didn't mean to..." I raised my hand to slap her. Dale seized my wrist. "Enough, she already apologized!" "Let go." "If it's ruined, I'll find someone to fix it." "She can't breathe right now. Do you have to push her until something happens?" "That's what my mother left me!" Dale's voice rose too. "She's been dead for six years!" "Are a few pages of paper worth more than a living person?" The hallway went completely still. Dale seemed to realize he'd said the wrong thing; his face shifted slightly. "Sadie, I didn't mean it like that." He crouched down to gather up the manual. I knocked his hand away. "Don't touch it." Antonia suddenly clutched her chest and slid down the wall. "Dale, I can't breathe..." Dale rushed over on reflex and pulled her into his arms. I asked him: "If you leave with her today, we're finished." His jaw clenched all at once. In the end, he still lifted Antonia up. As he passed me, he lowered his voice: "Don't try to scare me with a breakup." "Wait for me at the hotel. I'll come make it up to you tonight." I didn't go after him. I only knelt there among the spreading stains, gathering my mother's ruined manual back together, page by page. That night, I got on the train back to Rutherford. As the car pulled out, I filed a formal named appeal with the state examinations board. My father reported it to the local police and applied to have the electronic evidence preserved. I turned off location sharing, canceled the family phone plan, and changed the number I'd used for six years. At two in the morning, Dale swiped his way into the hotel room, a strawberry cake in hand. The room was empty. On the table sat only the crane-and-moon necklace, and the receipt for the canceled phone plan. In our shared photo album, all two thousand three hundred and seventeen photos had been wiped clean. By the time he reached the station, the last southbound train had already left. The wind on the platform flipped the cake box over. The cream spilled across the ground. His phone suddenly buzzed. In his inbox, a scheduled copy had just arrived. 【Formal Named Appeal Concerning Dale Stephens and Antonia Winfield for Suspected Identity Fraud in Altering College Applications】 Footsteps came from behind him. Antonia had chased after him, her phone screen still lit. In the chat window was a line she'd sent a friend half an hour earlier. 【Sadie's finally gone.】 Dale read that line three times. When he looked up again, there wasn't the slightest trace of pity left in his eyes. "So from the very beginning, you were waiting for her to leave?" For the first time, the tears on Antonia's face bought her none of his softness.