“Sure. The huffing and that tone tell me you are one hundred percentfine.”
“Look, what are we doing here? I’m really not in the mood.”
Harper pulls the car into one of several open spots in the beach parking lot. The sun is dipping low against the water, orange and yellow giving way to dark blues. A family is flying a kite along the shore.
“Trust me, okay?” Harper reaches behind her and chucks my coat at me.
“Fine.”
Pulling up my jeans, I trudge through the sand behind Harper. It’s then I notice the group of people around a bonfire pit a ways down the beach.
“What in the world?”
“I had to get you here somehow.” Harper winks at me before joining the crowd in front of me.
Troy. His family. My family and grandparents.
It’s hard to focus on Troy when I see my dad and his dad talking.
“Hey.” Troy’s hands are stuffed in his hoodie pocket. The one that I loved wearing whenever I wasn’t with him. Deep, purple bags sit under his eyes. He’s doing about as well as I am from the looks of it.
God, I’ve missed him. How has it only been a week? It feels like it’s been years since I’ve seen him.
“What’s going on?” I ask him, hoping I can get a straight answer.
“A peace offering. If you’ll take it.”
“A peace offering?” I peer behind him, and everyone has stopped talking, now looking at the two of us.
I feel like I’m in a fishbowl with all these eyes on me.
“I love you, Angie, and I don’t want you to have to choose between me and your family.”
“But—”
“Can we talk, sweetheart?” Dad interrupts him.
I have half a mind to say no. I can be just as stubborn as he is. It’s where I get it from.
“Okay.”
Troy gives me a soft smile. One that causes butterflies to erupt in my stomach. I don’t want it to. Because if this goes badly, I don’t know if I’ll ever recover from losing him.
I follow my dad down to the shore. The waves are rolling in, kissing the sand. I wrap my coat tighter around me as a cold breeze blows in off the water.
“Do you know what one of the hardest days of my life was?”
“What?” My brows pull together at the question. The hardest day of his life? “When Nick was born?”
“Funny,” he says with a laugh. “The day I dropped you off for your first day of kindergarten.”
“Really?”
My dad crosses his arms, staring out across the Pacific. His rainbow band is snug on his wrist. It matches the one that I’m wearing.
Even if I was pissed as hell at him—still am, for that matter—I didn’t take it off.
His eyes are glassy when they turn to face me. “The best thing football gave me was the offseason and getting tobe at home with you and your brother. I hated being away from you guys. Every season got harder and harder as you got older. But it wasn’t until I dropped you off on your first day of school that it hit me.”
