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“Hadley men don’t fall in love,” I say.
“What?” His mouth falls open.
“That’s what my dad said after I broke up with April because I couldn’t be what she needed.”
The expression on Quinn’s face. Like someone just told him the earth is flat. Disbelief and scorn and…
It fills me with something like hope.
“Oh,” he says. “I mean, he’s definitely right.”
His words hit me like another blow, but when I lift my head to make eye contact with him, he’s looking right back at me, level and a little challenging.
“But you know what? You’re not a fucking Hadley.”
He points at my chest.
“You’re a Hott.”
He reaches for my hand, and I flinch but then relax and let him uncurl my fingers and open my palm to reveal the scar at the base of my thumb from our blood vow.
We both look down at my scar, and then he opens his fingers, too, and lays his hand right next to mine. His scar is almost identical.
“We didn’t mean to set ourselves up for failure,” he says, frowning at the twin white lines crossing our thumbs. “We didn’t mean to make this so hard on ourselves. We were just kids. We thought we were making a promise that would be easy to keep. But it wasn’t.”
I’ve never really thought about it, all of us agreeing to something that big when we were that young.
“We all got hurt and wounded, and we needed to run from the place where bad shit had happened to us. It was easier than staying and facing it. So we ran, but then we blamed ourselves for running. Maybe we even punished ourselves for running. Maybe you’re punishing yourself for running by telling yourself you don’t deserve Rush Creek or the Hott name or—” He hesitates, and his eyes flash to mine.
My chest is so full it hurts, and I think of Ivy saying, Just so you know, I love men who cry.
Well, that’s a good thing.
“Shane?”
“Or Ivy.” My voice is rough.
“Or Ivy,” he repeats and hands me his napkin without comment so I can swipe my eyes dry.
40
Ivy
“Earth to Ivy.”
My sister has roused me from a sport I’ve been engaged in all too often: wondering if things could have turned out differently. I’ve caught myself a hundred times in the last week going over the last few times Shane and I were together, searching for meaning in his words and actions. Wondering if I could have seen sooner that I was hurtling toward disaster. Wondering if I could have said something to talk him into staying. Trying.
I saw him only a handful of times more. Later that same day with January to coordinate the announcement that we were generously letting January and Tobias have their wedding spot back, that our wedding was postponed till a not-yet-specified date in the future. Once when I dropped his T-shirt, which I still had, at his hotel. I meant to leave it at the front desk, but I ran into him and?—
God, it was painful. He wouldn’t look at me. He thanked me for the T-shirt, and then he thanked me for helping out him and his family, and then he pulled my ring out of his pocket and gave it back to me.
“This is yours,” he said. “I bought it for you. I want you to have it. If you don’t want it, you can sell it and use the money for the theater.”
He took my hand and pressed the ring into my palm, a reversal of what I’d done to him. He closed my fingers around it.
The feel of his hand around mine almost broke me. I fled, clutching the ring.
Turned out I still had his T-shirt in my other hand. I cried into it in the car. It still smelled like him, which of course made me cry harder.
