Page 75 of Hard to Score

I won’t, can’t, let the what-ifs spoil this moment. This memory. She was alive here. Warm, loving, filled with joy.

And that has to be enough for me.

“This is the best gift anyone has ever given me. One I never knew I needed. By the blubbering idiot I became, you can guess I loved it.”

“I’m just glad it was still here.”

I pull out my phone and take a picture of the memory and have Drew take one of my hands fitting in my mom’s. “I think we should go before we get in trouble for being here.”

“They knew we were coming. I was able to find their number and ask if it was still here.”

“You did that for me?” I ask.

He just gives me a shy smile and helps me to my feet in response.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

BREXTON

“WHAT WAS IT LIKE AFTER your mom died?”

I look up to meet Drew’s gaze from where my head is resting in his lap. The pebbled sand is warm beneath us and kids are still splashing in the water about ten yards away. The beach is still busy despite the afternoon’s sun slowly beginning its descent from the sky.

How do I answer that question? How do you explain what it’s like to have your heart ripped out the week after your sixteenth birthday so that you fear you’ll never feel again? So that you throw yourself into situation after situation—even if that means getting your heart broken time and again—just to prove to yourself that you can still feel. That your heart is still beating when it feels like it died.

I twist my lips and hold those blue eyes of his before speaking. “It was like trying to find a new rhythm that you knew would never feel normal no matter how much time passed. It was like being thrown off a cliff without a parachute and being told to figure out how to land. Even if you didn’t think you’d still survive and the pain would be unbearable.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It was a long time ago,” I say and shift so I can see him better.

“But we weren’t around for you guys. We could have been.”

“Your world was busy falling apart too, Drew.”

He physically rejects the words with a shake of his head. “The lake feels smaller now. It used to feel massive when we looked out at it from here as kids.”

The sudden shift in topic couldn’t be more obvious, and I struggle with how to navigate this. Let him change the subject and brush it under the rug or just flat-out ask him?

The fact that we’re here—that we’ve come this far figuratively and literally—means I have no choice but to ask.

“Why are you so afraid to talk about what happened with me?” I shift so that I can sit up and meet his eyes.

“Talk about what?” He averts his gaze and I grab his hands in mine.

“Your family. What happened. Anything and everything that is keeping me in your blind spot.”

He stares at my hands, his shoulders sagging with what seems like the weight of the world. “My dad is sick,” he whispers. “The other night when I landed, when I canceled on you, I’d received a frantic phone call from my mom that he’d been admitted to the hospital.”

“Drew.” I gasp the name out, terrified for him.

“He’s fine. It’s fine now. He had a reaction to his new meds and I don’t know . . . it was total frantic chaos and she needed me.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me that? Why . . .” I’m at a loss over what to say. Why the secrecy? It shouldn’t be that hard to tell someone who’s known you for a long time that a family member needs you. It’s what family does. “All you had to do was tell me.”

“I don’t know.” He traced a fingertip over the top of my hand. “I felt like telling you was betraying him.” I open my mouth, and with a shake of his head, he stops me before I can speak. “I know it doesn’t make sense to you, but it does to me. No one knows he’s sick. Not a soul and it needs to stay that way. And the last person I think he’d want to know is Kenyon’s daughter, especially after everything that happened.”

I force a swallow as I try to comprehend what it is that Drew thinks my father had a hand in. What did Gary tell his son to displace the blame to make him appear in a different light?