When people say their whole world crumbles, they mean this. This devastating sense of everything sliding away. Mum. Evie. The bearings in my life. The light from it.
“Is there something you need, Drew?”
I assume he’s not offering emotional support or twenty-three years’ worth of parenting. But he can be assured I don’t need to bepaidto stay away from the woman who has just let me down in such a friendship-shattering, irreversible way.
“I won’t ask you again to leave,” I say.
He might be many things, but he’s not the type to make a scene. Not in public. My attention is snagged on Evie. Working things out goes against everything she said the other night—and everything she seemed to feel. I won’t take Anderson’s word for it.
But just as I resolve to have one final shot at talking sense into her, I receive what is potentially the most bizarre and over-the-top text message she, or anyone else, has ever sent me. Reading the words, I realize I can’t do this anymore. Can’t let this woman or that family derail another second of my life.
Pretend we never met. Promise me, Drew. If we ever meet again, you will pretend you don’t know me.
the PRESENT
63
Evie
“When did we last speak?” I ask Bree, still trying to come to terms with her short hair. She’s stunning, but everything about her is different. Edgier. Older, obviously. She’s one of those cool, accomplished classical musicians—I can picture her on an album cover in some pop-classical ensemble—flowy black pants and a sequined handkerchief top, violin propped on her knee …
She’s pulling up our messages on her phone, and so do I.
“Let’s see … Well, we messaged at your graduation … You’d just gotten engaged. Then Drew turned up and you were telling me he was ‘taking pictures of a girl’ …” She winks. What is the wink about? What girl?
“That would have been Meg,” Drew says, matter-of-factly.
How many girlfriends has hehad?
I scroll to the same messages, hoping she doesn’t read them aloud.
“Then there’s the one just after you had the fight with Oliver. You’d stormed out of the restaurant?”
“Which one is that?” I’m not seeing it in my phone.
She leans over and shows me on her phone:Bree, it’s over. I’ve broken up with him. Where are you?
That message is not in my phone. “It’s not in my history. Why did I delete it?”
She and Drew both look at my screen. Then at Bree’s, and then back at mine. They put their heads together and scroll down, on both phones, comparing. Then Drew gets his phone out and looks through his own messages. There are none to compare them to on mine, as he’s not in my inbox at all, but the two of them are wearing equally concerned expressions.
“Wow,” Bree says softly to Drew. “Missing messages might explain a few things?”
She sighs and looks at me in a way she never has before. With pity and years of regret, almost as if she’s on the verge of an apology herself. “Then you sent me a message from Drew’s house,” she adds. “The night his mum died.”
His mum died?Looking at him now, I see it. That same feeling I remembered, looking through the kitchen window before Bree arrived. That sinking grief I couldn’t place. “What did I say?”
She glances at Drew, and then passes the phone to me rather than reading aloud another message that’s missing from my own record. It says,Bree, I’m with Drew. I think I’ve made a terrible mistake …
I stare at Drew on my parents’ deck. What terrible mistake did I make?
And all this time I’ve been harping on about fictionally losing my parents and he hasn’t told me to shut up, like I would have done if it was the other way around. Instead, he did everything he could to reunite me with my mum and dad. He saw my relief when we got here. He convinced my dad to let us stay.
“Is your dad still alive?” I ask him suddenly. I’m grasping at straws. It’s not like the presence of one parent makes up for the loss of the other.
He looks out over the garden. Body tense. “It’s messy,” he tells me. Is there a single aspect of Drew Kennedy’s life thatisn’tmessy?
“You can trust me,” I say.
