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It’d been the last time I’d seen the case. That night at the party it had broken, but I didn’t remember that. Mom had told me after the fact, and I supposed that was how it had ended up in the box. She’d put it there.
“He’d looked so sad,” Mom continued, staring off as if to a memory. Maybe she was. After all, she was the only one who’d seen him.
I didn’t remember.
“What did he look like?” I asked, my thumb lazily brushing over Wolf’s letter. I felt like I’d asked the question over a dozen times in the past. It was natural because he did come up whenever Mom and I talked about my sobriety. My recovery had started that day of the party.
It’d been the beginning of it.
Mom’s laughter hummed beside me, but I barely heard it. I suddenly felt high off the ground, the place where sound escaped and oxygen was lost. I swallowed, reminding myself to breathe. Mom opened a box. “Dearest, you are asking me to pull from middle-aged memories for something that happened so long ago—”
I faced her, and upon making eye contact with me, Mom’s head tilted. “I don’t know. I suppose I recall him being handsome. A handsome young man.” She smiled to herself. Again, as if to a memory. Her shoulders lifted. “Not that I could make out too many of his features. He had a lot of hair. These big, vibrant curls that—”
I had my phone in front of my mother’s face, a picture I had to scan a second to find. I’d gone to social media, easy.
Mom took my hand, bringing the phone closer. Her eyes narrowed, and the longer they did… the longer she didn’t say anything, my heart raced.
“I don’t understand,” she said, awe in her voice. Her awe was at the photo, the image in front of her. “How do you have this? A picture of him…”
I said nothing, goose pimples lining my skin. “That’s him?”
“Yes, um,” she started, but then stopped. “Honey, I don’t understand. How do you have this? Do you know the boy from that night?”
She knew the boy from that night.
She apparently just didn’t know.
I’d shown my mom pictures of my boyfriend in the past, but none of them had been the description she’d just given. She’d seen Wolf after treatment. She’d seen images of him with buzzed hair, and later, short curls. She actually hadn’t seen a picture of him since he’d grown his hair out.
Not that he looked the same.
Wolf was a man now. He was a man who’d been through so much, and I stared at the image my mom recognized. A boy in the middle of three friends. Younger versions of Dorian, Wells, and Thatcher were with him, and Wolf himself barely looked at the camera. His expression was tight, his eyes downcast.
My gaze fell from that image to the letter. It glided over the flower at the bottom to the one on the phone case. They were the same flowers.
They’d always been the same flowers.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Ares – age 16
Dorian: Where the fuck are you? We’ve called you a million times, and you need to pick up!
Wells: You need to come home, Ares. Your parents are worried sick…
Thatcher: We’re worried sick.
I shut off my phone after reading the guys’ texts. The phone started to ring again, so I shut it off.
There wasn’t a point to answering it.
After I did, I drew back a swig of beer. I’d stopped tasting it about five beers ago.
Flick. Close. Flick. Close.
I didn’t know where I’d gotten the old pocketknife, but I liked watching the blade.
Flick. Close. Flick. C—
