Page 22 of All the way home

But it hadn’t been a lie.

Kieran hadn’t told her a thing, not even after she’d begged him, sat outside his closed bedroom door and wheedled until she nearly cried tears of frustration.

Tilting her screen so Lucas can see, Rena purses her lips.

The further he reads, scrolling up with his index finger, the deeper Lucas winces. The messages are more of the same: Josiah indignant, Rena helpless.

“Why do you ask?” After a moment’s consideration, as a peace offering, Rena leans her shoulder against Lucas.

His expression brightens, soft at the edges. “He is my cousin, remember?”

Rena frowns. “That you never talked to before this summer.”

“What? We got to be friends,” Lucas reminds her. “Like, I know that whatever happened between him and Kieran was probably awful, but we were all friends, right?”

It’s true.

Rena hadn’t started the summer with the intent to make friends. She’d been content to go along with their parents’ plan to spend most of July and August frequenting the club they’d just become members of. Naturally, Kieran had dragged his feet incessantly at the prospect. He’d been adamant that he wouldn’t do it—“Do you know how many cool people spend their summer at a country club, Irene? Do you know how many gay people will be there? Zero.”—and had only conceded on the grounds that he’d be able to dismantle the whole system from the inside.

In contrast, it hadn’t taken much convincing on Rena’s part. She had found her mother’s argument compelling: there was a tennis court; Rena already knew the endless intricate social rules of the club’s demographic; and a summer where Rena could keep an eye on Kieran practically the whole time sounded wonderful to her.

Not that she necessarily enjoyed the premise of clubs, but free—to her—food was free food, and family time was family time.

Of course, because nothing ever goes to plan, Rena had been the one horrifically bored. All summer she’d been stuck playing tennis against the same four women who were more interested in the limitless drama of the gossip cycle—because Deborah had gotten divorced—than in scoring a point.

And while she had been reading at the poolside, drowning in tedium, Kieran had been falling in love.

But the shock of it had been the best part of the summer. Watching him smile again, properly, seeing him come alive, flirting audaciously with Lucas’s cousin who worked as a cart jockey, pretending like he didn’t loathe golf just for an excuse to talk—Rena had almost been able to convince herself that she’d never lost him.

Almost.

“He’s perfect,” Kieran had whispered one evening in July, the sky overhead a deep, dusky blue, running his fingers over the neatly trimmed grass. “You don’t understand.”

“I don’t,” Rena admitted. “But I’m happy for you.”

“I think I—”

Whatever he thought, he’d never finished the sentence, because in the distance, a door slammed shut with a brittle echo. Josiah called his name from across the field.

It wasn’t hard to guess what he’d been about to say, though.

Rena knew.

She watched him get up, watched him go. Every time she did, it got easier. Every time, she’d been more convinced that he’d be all right.

For the rest of the summer, they’d spent every moment possible together, all four of them: Kieran, Josiah, Rena, and Lucas. Cracking ciders in the crisp, fever-haze heat; getting caught in the sprinklers at sunset; staying up past midnight watching Lucas’s curated collection of comedy shows, Kieran and Josiah crying with laughter, Rena so relieved she thought she might burst with it.

A blur of a summer. Perfect. Perfect.

Nearly.

“I guess you’re right,” Rena admits to Lucas now. “Do you guys talk a lot?”

“Not really. Just the occasional check-in. He keeps asking—” Lucas cuts himself off.

Rena nudges him. “Keeps asking what?”

“He’s joking,” Lucas says. “Just—he keeps asking me if Kieran’s alive.”