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Brooke stared at her father’s name on the prescription label. She didn’t know how to feel about that any more than she knew how to feel about everything else that was happening.
She dropped the antidepressants into the sack and swept the rest of the bottles in with them. Moving on, she grabbed a few pieces of fruit out of the bowl on the counter. In the pantry, she found a Costco-sized box of granola bars that she snagged as well.
The last thing her mother wanted from the kitchen was the small magnetic whiteboard and marker that hung on the side of the fridge. For her father, who was currently unable to speak.
Refusing to think about that too much, Brooke moved on to her parents’ bedroom.
Even though everything was exactly the same, as she moved through the house it all felt much smaller than she remembered. It was like her memories had gotten muddled up, and the ones from when she was small had wound up superimposed over the later memories. Or maybe she’d just done such a good job blocking out her last few years in this house, she’d accidentally reset her memories of it to an earlier time.
As much time as she’d spent ruing this place and the childhood she’d spent here, it hadn’t all been painful. There had been plenty of good times among the bad. For better or worse, the experiences she’d lived here had made her into the person she was now.
In her parents’ room she found the bed neatly made as always, covered by the same handmade quilt they’d had for at least twenty years. Brooke gritted her teeth at the lingering scent of her dad’s drugstore aftershave as she went into their bathroom to collect toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant, and other sundries her mother had requested for the two of them. From the bureau, Brooke gathered an assortment of socks, underwear, and pajamas, before moving on to the closet, where she selected clean clothes for her mother and a robe and slippers for her father. The shopping bag was getting too full, so she got her mother’s overnight bag down from the shelf in the closet and repacked all the clothes and toiletries into it.
When everything on her list had been collected, Brooke paused and looked around her parents’ room. For some reason it felt odd to think of them continuing to live their lives here the same as they always had. All their kids grown and gone now. Just the two of them shuffling around this empty house.
She shook her head as she turned to go. On her way down the hall, she paused at the closed door of her own bedroom. Her fingers wrapped around the doorknob, and she pushed it open.
To her surprise, nothing had changed in there either. It hadn’t been turned into a sewing room or a home office. Her old polka-dotted comforter still covered the bed, presided over by the stuffed bulldog she’d gotten for her thirteenth birthday. Her Ian Somerhalder and Robert Pattinson posters still adorned the walls. Pep squad ribbons and Academic Decathlon medals decorated the corkboard over her desk.
Everything she’d left behind was still here. Waiting for her.
Funnily, the sense of nostalgia was lessened in her own room. The things in here were the things that didn’t mean anything to her anymore. The things she hadn’t deemed important enough to take with her when she left.
Brooke pulled the door shut and made her way down the hall, past her brothers’ old room, through the living room, and to the front door. She cast one last look around before turning off the entry light and stepping out onto the porch. It took her a second to fumble the house key out of her purse and remember the trick for wiggling the old sticky deadbolt into place.
When she finally turned around, Dylan was standing on the front walk.
Chapter Twenty
Brooke’s heart stopped at the sight of him. Then it started up again beating double time. She put a hand to her chest and felt it thumping wildly against her ribs.
Dylan’s smile was weary and hesitant. Behind him, she could see the outline of his house with its red shutters and white trim, and the yard where she’d first laid eyes on him eighteen years ago.
“You’re here,” she said, still a little in shock.
He wore loose black jeans with a tight gray T-shirt, and he was the absolute last person she’d expected to find standing on the cracked front walk of her parents’ house.
But maybe he shouldn’t have been, because Dylan Price always showed up exactly when she needed him most.
Brooke sucked in a hitching breath that turned into a sob. Her eyes blurred as he came toward her.
Dylan’s arms closed around her, strong, comforting, supportive, and for one beautiful moment her whole world became the smell of his skin and the warmth of his chest. Squeezing her eyes shut, she choked back another sob, fighting the urge to let herself fall apart all over him. She wanted to—so badly—but if she let herself start crying now she wouldn’t be able to stop, and she needed to know what he was doing here and what he was thinking. Before she took advantage of his comfort, she needed to know where they stood.
She knew it would hurt when he let her go, and it did. Her body immediately went cold at the loss of contact, even though it was a sweltering eighty-degree night, still brutally hot this late in the year.
He stepped back, shuffling his feet uncertainly. She could see the struggle in his eyes as he gazed at her.
“What—what are you doing here?” she asked, her voice ragged and a little choked.
“My mom told me about your dad.” He gave a small shrug, as if that explained everything. The air around them smelled like pine needles and fresh-cut grass, with a faint whiff of sulfur from the nearby refineries, and Brooke was seized by a powerful sense of childhood nostalgia.
“And so you just jumped on a plane?”
“Well, yeah.” He shrugged again. “I thought you might need a friend.”
She couldn’t stop the small sob that escaped her then, and Dylan’s brow furrowed as he came closer again, his hands reaching out for her upper arms and squeezing.
“I thought—” Brooke swallowed around the lump in her throat. The bags she was holding cut into her palms as if they weighed a hundred pounds. “I thought you were done being my friend. I thought I’d screwed up and lost you.”
