“They’ve won…at least for tonight,” I mumbled, my face in my pillow. I reached up and pulled the band out of my hair, letting the nearly dry mass tumble down my back. I knew it would be a wreck in the morning if I didn’t get up and brush it, but I didn’t have the energy to do even that. You’d have thought I’d swum double my laps, rather than none, as lethargic as I felt.
I heard a sharp intake of breath from Jane and looked over, expecting to see her staring at her phone screen with shock from the sound of her. But she was looking at me. Not so much at me, as in looking at my eyes or face, but at my body as a whole. “What?” I asked. But she just shook her head and continued to look over at me. “Is there, like, a bug on me or something?”
“No,” she said softly. She put her head down, but then she looked over at me again, even squinted at me.
“What? You’re freaking me out.”
She shook her head and got off her bed. “Sorry, just zoned out for a second. You sure you don’t want to go out?”
I turned my head back into my pillow. “No. But don’t be going to any clubs in Chesney, either.”
She laughed. “No worries. I’m going to zip over and see if Syd’s around and wants to go. I’ll be back to get dressed in a minute. Maybe you’ll change your mind.”
“I won’t,” I said, then heard the door to Syd’s side of the suite open and close.
I didn’t notice that she’d taken my phone with her.
I lay there and thought about Lucas and what I’d given up. And then I thought about how it had ultimately been the right choice. No matter how badly it hurt.
Sitting up in bed, I pulled my laptop over to me, quickly opening a blank Word doc before I lost my train of thought.
“As I write this today, the person I am is…” I began. My fingers began typing furiously. “Loyal and unique, although sometimes it takes seeing yourself through someone else’s eyes to see that. And above all, I am strong. And I didn’t realize it until I had to give up the thing I loved the most.”
The damn thing nearly wrote itself, and I had to edit quite a bit to get it down to the assigned three thousand words.
Chapter27
Jane
“Lily?It’s kind of late to be calling—are you okay?” Grayson Spaulding said when I called him using Lily’s phone. Syd wasn’t around, which was just as well. I sat on the forgotten Megan’s bed.
“Mr. Spaulding. This isn’t Lily. This is…Jaybird Winters,” I said, using the name I gave up in seventh grade, demanding everyone call me Jane. I had it legally changed to Jane at fifteen.
“Jaybird? Jane?” Yep, that got his attention. “Is Lily okay?”
“Lily’s fine. I just borrowed her phone.”
A pause, then: “To what end, Jane?”
No wonder my dipshit of a father kept Spaulding close…he was one shrewd SOB. Emphasis on SOB.
“I’m aware of the deal you and Lily made a couple of weeks ago.”
Nothing.
“And I’d like to make a deal of my own with you.”
“I’m listening,” he said after a moment’s pause.
“I want you to let Lily out of her deal and allow her to see Lucas.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Isn’t your daughter’s happiness reason enough?”
“No.” No pause or anything. Suddenly, growing up with an absentee father didn’t seem so bad.
“Okay. If her happiness means nothing to you—”
