Updated Apr 9, 2026 • ~9 min read
Chapter 8: The Case Against It
Kennedy
She told Tatum about the bench on Saturday.
She’d intended to tell her about something else — the grade-level meeting on Thursday, the new math curriculum the district was piloting that nobody had actually been trained to implement — but they’d been sitting in Tatum’s car outside the farmers market for twelve minutes and nothing Kennedy was talking about was the thing she was actually thinking about, and Tatum had the patience of a woman who was prepared to wait indefinitely for the real conversation to surface.
“I ran into him again,” Kennedy said. “On Thursday night.”
Tatum turned off the podcast she’d been half-playing. “Vaughn Nash.”
“At the corner store on Fletcher. Eleven o’clock at night.”
“You don’t buy groceries at eleven o’clock at night.”
“I had a craving. For ice cream.” She paused. “He came in for orange juice.”
“And?”
“And we ended up sitting on the bench outside for forty minutes.” Kennedy looked at the farmers market stalls visible through the windshield — a flower vendor with orange dahlias, a man selling preserved lemons. “We talked about Tyler. And his parents. And my dad.” She stopped. “He apologized for not warning me. About Tyler.”
Tatum was quiet for a moment, which meant she was organizing herself, which meant what came next was not going to be a small thought.
“Kennedy,” she said. “I need to say something and I need you to let me finish before you respond.”
“That’s never a sentence that leads anywhere comfortable.”
“I know.” Tatum turned in her seat. “I like Vaughn Nash from what you’ve told me. I think he sounds like a genuinely good person and I think the way he’s handled all of this — the guilt, being honest about the grocery store — sounds like someone who operates with more integrity than Tyler ever did.” She paused. “I also think you need to think very carefully about what you’re walking toward.”
Kennedy said nothing.
“Tyler is not over you,” Tatum said. “I know he hasn’t contacted you. I know he blocked you and moved on like you didn’t exist, but that’s Tyler’s way of managing his ego, not his feelings. The second he finds out his brother is spending forty minutes with you on a bench at midnight he is going to — Kennedy, he’s going to lose his mind. And Vaughn will be caught between you, and Tyler will make himself the victim, and the narrative is going to be messy in ways that neither of you can fully control.”
“I know all of that,” Kennedy said.
“I know you know it.”
“The thing you’re building toward —”
“Is that *knowing* isn’t the same as *stopping*,” Tatum said, “and I need to know if you can actually stop, because there’s a version of this where you let it go a little further and get hurt worse, and I’ve watched you process Tyler and I don’t want to watch you do it again.”
The farmers market was filling up around them — people with canvas bags, a woman with a toddler on her hip. An ordinary Saturday morning performing its ordinary Saturday quality.
“He told me he’s been thinking about warning me for eight months,” Kennedy said. “Before Tyler and I broke up. He knew Tyler was treating me badly and he didn’t do anything because he chose the quieter path. And he owned that. He didn’t make an excuse for it.” She looked at her hands. “I spent two years with someone who never owned anything.”
Tatum’s expression did something complicated.
“That’s not an argument against my concern,” she said gently.
“I know.” Kennedy leaned her head back against the seat. “I know it isn’t.”
“It’s actually almost an argument for it. Which is what worries me.”
She was right. Kennedy had been having the same conversation with herself — privately, in the gaps between things she was supposed to be thinking about — and she’d arrived at the same place every time, which was: Vaughn Nash was everything Tyler had performed being, and there was a particular danger in that, because you could be careful about the thing that hurt you once, you could identify the pattern, and still walk directly toward the better-dressed version of the same wound.
Except she didn’t think that was what this was. Which was what she thought about her father. Which was what she’d thought about Tyler.
“Tell me the case against it,” she said. “All of it. Don’t manage it.”
Tatum looked at her for a moment, then nodded.
“Tyler will try to weaponize it,” she said. “He’ll call Vaughn a traitor, call you a —” she stopped, chose a word, “— whatever his version of that is. He’ll rewrite the narrative so that he’s the person who was wronged, and some people who know both of you will believe him because Tyler is very good at that.” She counted on her fingers. “Vaughn’s guilt about Tyler is complicated. He raised him. He gave up school for him. That guilt doesn’t disappear because he’s decided he has feelings for you — it’s going to surface, probably at the worst moment, and you need to know that going in.”
“I know that.”
“Your mother is going to have thoughts.”
“My mother has thoughts about everything.”
“Your brother Hudson is going to have specific thoughts about a Nash brother appearing in your life after what the last Nash brother did.”
Kennedy closed her eyes briefly. “I know.”
“And Vaughn knows all of this too,” Tatum said. “He’s not stupid. He’s been sitting with this since the coffee shop. The reason you can tell he’s a good person is that he’s been trying to *not* pursue this because he knows what it costs.”
“So why isn’t that working?”
“That,” Tatum said, “is the question you need to be able to answer before you take another step.”
She thought about it for the rest of Saturday. Through the farmers market, where she bought dahlias she didn’t need and a jar of blackberry jam she absolutely did. Through lunch with Tatum at the noodle place on Third, where they talked about the math curriculum and the grade-level meeting and other things, and Kennedy kept returning to the question like a tooth you couldn’t stop pressing with your tongue.
*Why isn’t that working?*
The obvious answer was: because she had feelings for him. But the obvious answer was also the shallow answer, and she’d been wrong about feelings before, and what she needed was the answer underneath.
She made tea that evening and sat at her kitchen table and thought about it properly, which meant not performing the thinking but actually doing it.
Vaughn Nash had recognized her in a coffee shop and chosen to say something, when the easier choice was nothing. He’d apologized for someone else’s behavior because he felt responsible for what he hadn’t done, which was more self-awareness about the cost of inaction than Tyler had ever shown about the direct harm he’d caused. He’d told her the meetings weren’t coincidental — not when she pushed, but before she pushed, because he’d decided honesty was better than a convenient story. He’d sat on a bench in the cold talking about his dead parents and his brother and his guilt, and he’d asked her a question about Tyler that most people wouldn’t have asked because the answer was uncomfortable, and when she’d given him the actual answer he’d listened without redirecting.
He’d accepted a spoonful of ice cream at eleven p.m. from a woman he was pretending not to have feelings for, and it had been so normal, and so much like the version of something she’d been waiting for that she’d made herself stop counting the minutes because that was the kind of accounting that told you things you weren’t ready to know.
She’d been careful for six months. She’d been doing the right things — therapy, the friendship with Tatum, letting herself grieve the Tyler thing before doing anything reckless. She’d been responsible and measured and she’d earned the stability she’d built.
She also knew that the reason she’d built it was to be ready for something worth the risk.
She didn’t know if this was that. She didn’t know if she trusted her own judgment yet, after Tyler. That was the honest answer, and it was important that it was honest — she couldn’t tell if Vaughn was what he seemed, or if he was the better-looking version of the same mistake, and she didn’t think she’d been wrong about him the way she’d been wrong about Tyler, but she didn’t know.
She picked up her phone. She put it down.
She thought about what Tatum had said: *the reason you can tell he’s a good person is that he’s been trying not to pursue this*.
She thought about the gymnasium. *I wasn’t only thinking about the guilt anymore.*
She thought about the bench, and the cat, and forty minutes of conversation she hadn’t planned for, and the fact that she’d gotten home and made tea that she didn’t drink because she’d been sitting there thinking about it instead.
She picked up her phone again. She put it down again.
She was not going to text him. That was a line, and she was going to hold it, because Tatum was right that she needed to know if she could stop.
She went to bed at ten and lay in the dark for forty minutes thinking about blue-gray eyes and the specific quality of a person who told you the truth because they’d decided you deserved it.
She didn’t text him.
She was aware that not-texting was not the same as not-wanting-to-text, and that the distinction was relevant.
She was also aware that she’d just spent four hours thinking about a man she’d talked to four times.
She was going to be a problem for herself. She’d known it since the gymnasium. She was just taking her time arriving at the full acknowledgment.
Outside, the city did its late-night thing — sirens somewhere distant, the sound of rain starting, the particular quality of an October night that smelled like wet leaves and something ending and something else about to begin. She listened to it for a while and did not examine too closely what it was she was hoping for.
She fell asleep eventually.
She dreamed about nothing she remembered.
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