For some reason, a lump came to my throat and I couldn’t seem to swallow past it.
“We’ve always been really close,” I finally managed, and I knew Grace would be able to hear how ragged my voice was. “Her mom…Chloe wasn’t around much, even when we all lived in New York.”
I thought about all the days, both before and after the divorce, that I had spent taking care of Josie. Ever since she was a tiny baby, I was the one she relied on. I changed most of the diapers, fed most of the bottles. As she got older, I was the one cooking breakfast and packing lunches. I was the one reading bed time stories and helping with homework. Even when Chloe was home with us, she never demonstrated much interest in all the little, every-day details of her daughter’s life.
“That’s hard on a kid,” Grace said, and the pain in her voice reminded me that she was speaking from experience. Grace’s mom had made Chloe look like a saint. “I’m glad she had you, though,” Gracie continued. “Anyone can tell how absolutely devoted you are to that girl.”
Grace hadn’t had even one parent to take care of her. I thought about Josie that morning, calling her mom, leaving her the heartbreaking message that Chloe would probably never return. That had been Grace’s entire childhood, waiting for a parent who didn’t care to show up and love her. I pictured the stoic look on Josie’s face, the way she’d straightened her shoulders when she came to the table.
Without thinking, I reached over and grabbed Grace’s hand. I had hated seeing my daughter like that and I hated knowing that Grace had spent her childhood feeling exactly the same way.
I figured she’d pull her hand back, maybe start blushing or rubbing her collarbone in agitation. So I was surprised when she tightened her fingers instead.
“Give Josie time,” she murmured as she squeezed my hand, taking the comfort I tried to bestow in that simple gesture and giving it right back to me. “I know she’ll come around and start feeling better. She loves you.”
I watched my daughter up ahead, laughing at whatever Elliot had said, and for the first time in a while I found myself holdingonto the hope that Gracie might be right. Maybe Josie and I were going to be okay after all.
CHAPTER 11
When I spent time with Liam as a teenager, it always amazed me how quickly I could go from completely comfortable to a giggling nervous wreck. In the early days, I had been nervous all the time. Here I was, this dorky little sophomore with glasses and frizzy hair, sitting within touching distance to one of the most popular, most gorgeous guys in the school. I spent weeks being red-faced and tongue tied.
Eventually, I’d started to feel more comfortable around him. That was the thing about Liam—he was good at making anyone comfortable. I think that had a lot to do with his popularity. He was nice to everyone, no matter what clique they hung out with. He never acted like he was too popular or too cool for anyone.
Slowly, I found myself less nervous around him. Then, one day, he offered me some of his mom’s homemade cookies after our session was done. So I sat at the O’Conner’s kitchen table with the hottest guy in the school, eating chocolate chip cookies and talking about the Spiderman movie that had just come out.
A few weeks after that, Liam’s mother invited me to stay over for dinner when we were wrapping things up. When I tried to decline, Liam insisted. His parents were every bit as nice as he was, and I found myself wondering what it would be like to livein a house like that. The O’Conners didn’t have a ton of money, but you could tell just by looking that they took good care of what they had. The house was clean and cozy, there was always plenty of food, and Liam went to bed every night with a full belly, knowing that his parents loved him.
I would have been jealous—if they weren’t all so friendly.
Dinners started to become a regular occurrence. Sometimes we would have our sessions outside of the house, at a nearby diner or coffee house. After a while, it started to feel like Liam and I were actually friends.
He liked to tease me. I think he probably thought I’d let him get away with it, seeing as how I came across as pretty shy. But he failed to consider that I had a twin brother. Teasing was nothing new to me. So I gave it back to him as good as I got. I could tell he liked that—he always laughed uproariously whenever I made a joke at his expense.
That’s how we spent the hours, three days a week, every week, from freshman year until we were seniors. I was more comfortable with Liam O’Conner than I was with anyone except Andy. His parents treated me like a family friend, not someone they were paying to help their kid keep his grades up. Even Liam’s jock friends were nice to me at school—but that might have been because they were afraid of Andy.
But as comfortable as I felt with him, he could turn me into a blushing, stammering mess with little more than a pointed glance. All it would take was for him to lean closer to me when I was explaining something, and my heart would break out into a dance. Every time his hand brushed against mine—which seemed to happen more and more as time went by—color would flood my cheeks. A few times he even touched my hair. On those days I was pretty sure I might just drop dead right there in Leigh O’Conner’s kitchen.
The day I spent with Liam and Josie at the botanical garden reminded me a lot of those old high school feelings. For the first time since I’d run into him at the bar, I actually felt myself relaxing around Liam. He just looked so worried about his daughter, I had to comfort him. And once I’d done that—a simple touch of my hand on his arm—it suddenly felt just like old times.
We might be a lot older now, with a hell of a lot more history and baggage, but Liam O’Conner was still that same kind boy. And I was still his friend.
And, just like the old days, I found it exceedingly easy to slip back into the squirming, blushing, Liam-obsessed girl he used to turn me into with no more than a heated glance. As we followed the kids along the trails, Liam continued to hold my hand. I didn’t think much of it at first—it had only been a comfort thing, because of the heavy subject matter. But the longer we walked without him dropping it, the lessfriendlythe action felt.
When Liam brushed his thumb along the sensitive skin between my thumb and forefinger, heat exploded in my belly so quickly you would have thought he’d done something far less PG. And he didn’t stop. The entire rest of the hike he held my hand, stroking my wrist, making me feel like I was going to burn away into hot lava at any moment.
I was glad the kids were getting along. But their budding friendship also meant they weren’t underfoot to distract me. The farther ahead they ran down the path, the more tension settled over us. I felt hot and shaky and way off balance and I had no idea what to do to ease my suffering.
It might ease your suffering if you throw Liam down on the path and kiss the hell out of him,a voice in my head whispered. Funny, the voice sounded an awful lot like Peyton.
It would also traumatize his daughter, who happened to be one of my students. Yeah, I needed to get a handle on this crush before I did something totally inappropriate.
“I’m hungry,” Elliot whined eventually.
“Me too,” Josie said.
Liam turned to me, smiling. “What do you say, Gracie? Want to grab some lunch?”
I had no good reason to refuse. And if I was being honest with myself, I didn’twantto refuse. I wanted to stay right there in this gorgeous man’s orbit, soaking up his smiles and the gentle rumble of his laughter like a plant to sunshine. I knew from experience that there was going to be a time, probably sooner than I wanted, when Liam would once again be gone from my life. I wanted to absorb every moment I could while I still had the chance.
