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I feel like the boy who cried wolf, because now when I really need them to understand, no one believes me.

Coach Harris is bright red with his own fury. And I know, this is embarrassing to him; I should probably be embarrassed myself but all I can feel is the suffocating pressure of years of anger.

“Sit the fuck down, Toren,” Coach Harris whispers into the sudden silence of the locker room. I open my mouth to protest, but he cuts me off. “We will discuss this issue in my office as soon as this meeting is over.”

“You just love being in there, huh, Kane?” a freshman mouths off, but Holden smacks him hard on the back of the head.

“Coach LaBlanc,” Harris says, and the sound of that name from his mouth makes something in my chest burn. “I apologize. Please continue.”

“No need.” He sighs, eyes still locked on mine for a beat before he trails around the locker room as he speaks. I can’t hear what he’s saying over the pounding of my own heart, the roaring of blood rushing in my ears.

This can’t be real. This can’t—

“You good?” Holden whispers, eyes locked on our new coach. I shake my head, not bothering to lie.

“No. I have to—” I swallow down the rasp of emotion in my voice. I won’t even give him that.

Holden tries to grab my arm, but I jerk away, skirting the room and slipping out the door without any of my belongings. Desperate to escape, again.

Chapter 2

Lily

Trying to smuggle a box from the old house into my new town house was a more difficult feat than I planned for. But it worked—the large, pristine, royal blue box that once held a pair of Stuart Weitzman leather boots is now sitting just beside my knees where I was about to push it underneath my bed.

Two strangely distinctive types of anxiety race through me as I look back and forth from the box to the door.

Just check, really fast.

I pull open the box carefully, as if it contains crystal and glass—not piles of canvas, paper, and hidden sketchbooks. Paintings that are rolled, never to be stretched over wood. My fingers sweep across swirling colors and lumpy masses of oil paint, across the thin pencil lines of my sketches, across the textured feel of the paper.

Checking over them all once, to make sure none are damaged or crushed from the bumpy ride over, I sigh in relief.

In my chest, it turns into something more like grief, my fingers carefully touching each painting and sketch with a near desperate longing to—

A knock sounds at the corner of my door; it’s my dad with his arms crossed, taking up much of the doorway.

I jump, hands fumbling to shove the open box and the lid unceremoniously under my bed.

“You’re back already?”

If my ill-timed, slightly bumbled question offends him, I’ll never know. He doesn’t bother responding, only inspecting the room quickly, before looking down at me pointedly.

“All good in here?”

I nod, dusting my hands across the legging material on my upper thighs and sitting back on my heels. The bed lies between us, so I know he didn’t see anything, but my heart is racing anyway.

“You’re still sure you need to do this?”

It had been a long road to get here, to this moment in this room—my own room in my own (rented—so, temporarily my own) town house. Harvard was one thing. I’d gotten in on my dad’s coattails and coasted right down to flunking out, despite his near desperate help to get me to pass. Scraping by for a year worked out only once, before the classes got harder and I just . . . stopped trying.

Since then I’d been living in North Carolina again. In Walden Bay with my dad in the same house I grew up in. Being back there was like huffing paint, high on memories and pain so constant I could barely get through my online classes, let alone hold a job for more than a week.

And then . . . things had gotten worse.

It’s embarrassing, Lillian, my father had said, over and over again until the words lost their meaning to me. It was embarrassing. A shame to the LaBlanc name, I’m sure. I wanted to care—maybe I did care, but it was hard to tell. It was hard for me to feel much of anything sometimes.

Our relationship had always been strained and difficult, but it was all I ever knew. My mom died when I was young and my father . . . he never left.