Freddie nodded again. ‘Of course. Just thought it couldn’t hurt to ask. And moving back to England wouldn’t be the worst thing. I’d know Alice, at least.’
‘I don’t know, sounds pretty dire to me.’ Freddie cracked a smile at that, and Briar reached over the desk to squeeze his hand. ‘I’ll do whatever I can.’
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Well, I better get back out there. I’m playing hide and seek with Cabin 11.’
After he left, Briar sighed, leaning down to open the desk’s bottom drawer and pulling out her mom’s laptop. When Briar had first arrived, she’d taken one look at the device and had promptly shoved it out of sight. Now, Briar was assaulted by a series of windows opening, the laptop regurgitating everything her mom had been doing the last time she’d logged on.
Luckily, one of the tabs was her email. There were nearly three hundred unread emails. Briar couldn’t read them; instead, she typed Freddie’s name in the search bar, hoping to find the email her mom had sent him and that it would somehow give her a convenient solution.
Instead, the first email to pop up was from Alice, dated nearly a year before. The subject line readJust checking in…Briar’s eyes caught on the message preview:How was your holiday? I saw Freddie while he was in town. I hope he passed along the shortbread…
Briar clicked on it, intending to scroll to the beginning of the thread just to satisfy her curiosity. She kept scrolling, stunned. There were hundreds of emails between her mother and Alice, spanning years. The words passed in front of Briar’s eyes, but her brain didn’t retain any of it. It was a protection mechanism, probably, since the last thing Briar needed right now was to know for certain that Alice had always cared more about her mom than her. She finally hit the bottom of the page and saw that the thread had started in the fall of freshman year. Not even a full month after Alice had stopped speaking to Briar.
Briar’s throat seemed to have fallen through to her stomach, and she couldn’t breathe. Her mother had stayed in contact with her ex-best friend the entire time. Nearly a decade of correspondence, and Susan had never once mentioned she’d heard from Alice. As it turned out, Alice hadn’t abandoned her entire life back home; she had just abandoned Briar.
She scrolled back to the top, intending to exit the page, but her eyes caught on a recent message.
Alice, my darling girl,
My cancer is back. There, I told someone… It’s inoperable, unfortunately, and the prognosis is fairly bleak. Do keep this to yourself, dear. I’m still sitting with it.
All my love
Susan
It was dated a month before she had died.
Tears blurred her vision, and Briar slammed the laptop closed. She stood, feeling like there was too much blood rushing through her veins, and frantically paced. Every moment from this summer where it had felt like she and Alice had been almost rebuilding something like a friendship suddenly shattered. How could her mother have told Alice that she was dyingfirst?
She did the only thing she could think of. She called Noah.
‘Hey.’
‘Hi.’
‘What’s wrong?’ Noah asked, his tone shifting immediately. Briar could picture him leaning forward, brows furrowed. She didn’t know how to explain to him the complete betrayal the emails represented. Honestly, she wasn’t sure who she felt more betrayed by: the friend who’d disappeared from her life or the mother who simply hadn’t thought to mention it at any point in the last ten years.
‘Oh, you know,’ Briar said vaguely, waving a hand in front of her even though she knew he couldn’t see. She couldn’t tell him about the emails even if she’d been able to make sense of it; telling him would mean admitting more about her relationship with Alice than she ever had before. ‘Everything’s shit. How are you?’
He ignored her question. ‘Is it Alice?’
‘Always.’ Briar sighed. She felt foolish for letting herself soften towards Alice, as if they could ever be friends again, as if they hadn’t crossed too many lines to go back to what they’d had.
‘Well, I bet you’d call a week ago, but Harper had more faith in your ability to coexist. I owe her dinner now. Thanks for that.’
Briar choked out a laugh, her throat still feeling like something was stuck in it.
Noah hummed on the other side of the line. ‘Anything I can help with?’
Briar mentally ran through the long list of things that had gone wrong in the last week and a half. ‘Our AC is out?’
Noah’s laugh was warm and tender, making Briar’s chest ache. His side of the line sounded so pleasant: air-conditioned, lice-free, and, most importantly, far away from Alice.
‘I don’t think I can do this,’ Briar said numbly. ‘Alice being here. I mean, she’sactuallyhelping, and that’s so much worse. Like if she’d shown up sooner, my mom wouldn’t have died.’ She squeezed her eyes shut. ‘No, I don’t believe that. But maybe my life wouldn’t be such a mess right now? Does that make any sense?’ Her breath was shaky and weak. ‘I just don’t think I can forgive her.’
‘I know,’ Noah said, and there was a brief pause that Briar knew meant he was gearing up to say more. He always seemed to understand her when it came to Alice, and it made sense, because they had both been heartbroken over her at one point. Even if Noah had never known the full story. ‘Itisokay to forgive her, though, if you want to. She was your friend first. If you’re doing this out of some kind of loyalty—’
‘I’m not,’ Briar said, before he’d even finished his sentence. ‘Alice and I…’ She sighed, still at a loss for how to tell him what was going on. She would never be able to explain her feelings about Alice, especially to Noah. ‘It’s got nothing to do with you.’
