Daphne doesn’t stall once as I turn around.
CHAPTER 2
Ibacktrack along the same road Maggie and I took into town, and all too soon a form takes shape ahead of me. It’s been nearly a year since I saw him, and yet I remember his features perfectly—the gray eyes, the strong jaw, the too-long brown hair only a few shades darker than his tanned skin.
We went to the same high school for two years, a high school whose entire student population topped out at about four hundred people. Even though I was a still a junior when he graduated this past year and I must have seen him more times than I can count, I can’t recall exchanging a single word with him. I don’t know what he looks like smiling with a group of friends, any more than he does me. I know him only as looking tense and stoic through my silent tears.
The haunting memory threatens to overtake me as the thunder continues to roll, loud and angry around me—through me. The air is growing heavier with the promised deluge as I slow Daphne while my pulse does the opposite.
He knows my car this time, and my gaze is so trained on him that I see the exact moment recognition hits him.Hitsis the right word. He flinches back even before he sees my face. I pull over into the opposite lane beside him. We’re closer this time when I stop just feet away, inches really. His eyes, even narrowed, are as startling now as they were that last day in court. Hard. Cold. Full of something I didn’t want to look at then any more than I do now.
I swallow. “Do you need a ride?”
A bead of sweat forms and trickles down my temple, and I feel his gaze trace it. Despite the storm clouds unfurling overhead, there’s no breeze to cut through the thick, humid heat. He’s still staring at me, silent, when the sky cracks open.
The rain pours down in fat, stinging drops, slapping against Daphne’s hood like bullets. In seconds, he’s soaked through. In minutes there’ll be water streaming along both sides of the road. Within an hour, whole stretches will be submerged if the rain holds. The crack of lightning bursting brilliantly in the sky promises at least that long.
“It’s just a ride,” I say, but it’s not. Beyond the fact that he’s looking at me as though I’m roadkill, my family would be horrified that I’m asking, and I can’t even imagine what his family would think of us riding in a car together. And suddenly I’m not sure I want him to accept. We’re inches away from each other, and I don’t know what his voice sounds like. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it, never even officially met him.
“You want me to get in your car?” he yells over the din of rain, like I’m asking him to eat the roadkill in addition to looking at it. “Why?”
I draw back farther against my seat, wishing I could crawl behind it and never see anyone look at me this way again, however much I understand it. There’s so much I can’t say to him, so much I don’t know how to say to him, so I say the simplest and most honest thing I can. “I don’t want you to have to walk in the rain.”
There’s a flash, quick as the lightning, where the wariness in his eyes changes to something that causes my breath to catch in my throat. He gazes at me a moment longer, then he’s moving, crossing around the front of the car. There’s no point in dashing anymore—he’s as wet as he’ll ever be. I don’t have a towel or anything to protect my seat, and I don’t care. He lets himself in through the passenger door and closes it with enough force that I don’t even try to hide my flinch. It’s not for the door though.
Heath Gaines is in my car.
I start driving again, smooth, no stalling. Once I learn something, I never forget it.
“You can drop me at the garage on Main.” His voice is low, and I hear the drawl that the rain muted before, the one that says we’ve both lived in Texas our whole lives. I tell myself that the raspy quality is from disuse rather than distaste at having to talk to me, but he’s not looking at me, and I can see him only from the corner of my eye. “They’re used to towing Cal’s truck.”
“I remember it breaking down a lot,” I say before I can think better of it. And then Heath is looking at nothing but me. My guilt is a straitjacket strapped tight. That’s not new—but the pain that twists deep at my tiny admission is.
If I didn’t know Heath, I knew his older brother even less. Cal and Jason had been wary rivals in high school and didn’t become friends until they were assigned as roommates at the University of Texas their freshman year. They made the six-hour road trip home from Austin together a few times along with Jason’s girlfriend. Calvin seemed nice the few times I met him. Always called my momma’amand my dadsir. Made a fuss over my little sister Laura’s cockatiel and ensured her eternal devotion, beyond that which he inherently had as Jason’s friend. He even let me drive his truck the day I got my driver’s permit, when Jason had been reluctant to hand over his keys. Calvin had told me not to worry about anything, that I could drive into a tree if I wanted and the damage would just add character to an already beat-to-hell truck. He let me drive all the way to the ice rink before my shift so that I could get in some skating time.
I didn’t hit any trees, then or now.
Omitting any mention of Jason, I tell Heath the story. The more I talk, the more my eyes begin to prick, until the road ahead of me blurs despite the rapidly moving windshield wipers. I come to a stop sign with no other cars in sight. The garage is just ahead. Once Heath gets out, I might never see him again. I move through the intersection and into the parking lot. With tear-filled eyes, I turn to him. “I’m so, so sorry about your brother.” It’s the first time I’ve said that, aloud or to myself. Everything that happened to Calvin is connected to Jason, and until that moment, that memory, I hadn’t known I could feel for one without taking away from the other. I hadn’t let myself try.
Heath’s gaze is slow to meet mine, and when it does, I see pain so staggering that a tear spills free from my eye. I leave it.
He turns away from me and looks out the windshield before lowering his head and locking his jaw. I resist another urge to press back against my door. Not because I’m physically afraid of Heath, but because I am afraid of what he might say and how his words could shred me if he wants them to.
He glances back at me, just his head turning. The pain and everything else is gone, shuttered behind an expression as flat and impenetrable as mine must be naked and raw. “Thanks for the ride.”
Then he opens his door and steps into the rain.
CHAPTER 3
Idrive to Polar Ice Rink on autopilot. Jeff, my manager, gives me a funny look when he sees me coming through the door.
“You’re not scheduled today,” he says, accusation causing his still-boyish voice to rise a few octaves even though his thinning red hair and pallid lined face put him somewhere in his early forties.
The handful of people waiting in line to buy wristbands turn to look at me too. I keep my head down pretty much everywhere but especially at work, where I’m forced to wear a nametag. Not everyone recognizes me by sight anymore, but add a name to a vaguely familiar face and whispers start tearing through the rink faster than a brush fire. Small towns—and with a population of less than ten thousand, Telford, Texas, definitely qualifies—are wonderful, until they aren’t. I hold my breath as so many gazes settle on me, but today people only frown at my seemingly innocuous appearance and dismiss me.
“I know,” I say, exhaling and raising my skates for Jeff to see. The funny look doesn’t vanish. And calling itfunnyis easier than calling it what it really is. “I’m just here to pick up my check and skate a little.” He can’t stop me, much as he’d clearly like to. I do my job and I do it well—the spotless floor and the smooth-as-glass ice I left the night before are proof of that. Normally, I’m here early or late, a schedule that everyone prefers, but as it is for all employees, the ice is always open to me.
I move through the door before he can make another pitch for directly depositing my checks so that I come in less often—as if I would. I take every excuse I can to be on the ice, despite what it costs me personally. I can’t help my involuntary pause, no more than a heartbeat in length, when I see Elena behind the register. I used to call the slightly rounded, salt-and-pepper-haired woman my fairy godmother because she used to let me stay late and skate whenever she closed instead of Jeff. Now I don’t call her anything at all if I can help it. It took her a little longer than most to stop interacting with me, and I tell myself that I’m glad her gaze lowers quickly as I pass her.
