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“Are you sure?” I squirmed in discomfort, eyeing the horrendous-looking cut. “Because it looks recent and it’s hurting me just to look at it.”
“Yeah,” Hugh agreed, tone hard as his eyes locked on her thigh.
“Didn’t know you were working today,” she replied, folding her arms across her chest.
“Wasn’t supposed to be,” Hugh replied, not taking his eyes off her thigh. “What happened?”
Ignoring my brother, Lizzie moved for the edge of the pool, not stopping until she had eased herself into the water. “I’ll see you later, Claire.”
“Yeah, okay,” I called after her, worrying my lip. “Are you coming to the beach campout?”
“Is Thor going?”
“You already know the answer.”
“Then you already know my answer.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to come?” I asked, forcefully cheerful. “It’s going to be super fun.”
“I’m sure I’d rather drown than voluntarily spend time with him,” she called back and then she disappeared beneath the water.
“Oh crap.” I turned back to my brother, feeling a surge of anxiety fill my chest. “That’s weird, right?” I gestured to where Lizzie had disappeared beneath the water. “She’s not okay, is she?”
“How am I supposed to know?” my brother bit out, tone thick with emotion. “I’m hardly her confidante these days, am I?”
“Yeah, but you used to be,” I blurted out, uttering the words I’d vowed many years ago to never repeat. Seriously, speaking about it was as taboo at Tommen as saying the name Voldemort at Hogwarts. A big no-no.
Hugh and Lizzie’s fractured relationship was one that was stored in the memory vault labeled Never bring up again for the good of our friendship circle.
My brother’s eyes flashed with pain, and I felt like the biggest jerk in the world.
“Yikes.” Squirming in discomfort, I reached out and patted his shoulder. “Sorry.”
“I don’t know,” he repeated in a low tone—I presumed to hide the tremor in his voice. Because Lizzie affected Hugh badly, and she always had. For some reason, my brother had been infatuated with my prickly bestie since the beginning of time. And for some even stranger reason, the feeling had been mutual for Lizzie.
Throughout the course of our entire childhood, they’d stuck together like peas in a pod. By the time we’d made it to fifth class of primary school, their friendship title had been upgraded to that of boyfriend and girlfriend. Not that any of us had a clue of what that meant. In our young minds, it simply meant that they were each other’s favorite.
Either way, they were together for a really long time, even after everything seemed to fall apart for Liz after her sister died. Hugh was the one she leaned on back then. Come to think about it, he was the only one she was willing to speak to for months. It was a pretty dark time in our lives that had followed us long into secondary school.
Over time, Lizzie’s grief had taken ahold of her in ways none of us were equipped or mature enough to handle, and by the start of second year, Lizzie and Hugh’s relationship, along with a lot of her relationships with other friends, had completely unraveled.
I stuck in there with her, taking on her mood swings and erratic behavior because I loved her like a sister, but it wasn’t easy. Especially when she focused all of her pain on Gerard because of a rumor that involved his stepbrother.
It sucked because Liz and Gerard used to be really good friends before that. We all were. We had this tight little circle that had been shattered after Caoimhe died.
After the breakup, the rest of our close-knit circle mentally vowed to never discuss it or bring it up again. To this day, we were completely oblivious as to the inside details of their breakup because Hugh and Liz could hardly bear to spend more than a few minutes in each other’s company, let alone talk about it.
Even though they’d been together since primary school, the breakup didn’t seem to affect Lizzie too deeply because she started seeing someone else within days of them calling it off. Hugh, on the other hand, spent several months moping around the house like a dark cloud until he collided with Katie in the hallways of Tommen and the sun started shining for him again.
Deep down inside, I knew the reason Hugh tried to keep me away from Gerard was because he was projecting his own experience on me. When my brother said that he was afraid of me getting hurt, what he really meant was that he didn’t want me to get hurt like he had.
“Hugh, it’s happening again, isn’t it?”
He flicked his gaze to me, and I could tell from one glimpse of his brown eyes that I wasn’t alone in my worrying. “I don’t know.”
“She’s still so angry.”
“Yeah, Claire, I know.”
