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Logan’s face filled with pity.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know.” He paused. “At least, I didn’t know that you were her.”
I shrugged. “It’s okay.”
It wasn’t, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it, either.
It was what it was, and that was the way it was going to be until the end of time.
I just needed to learn to live with it.
“You’ve heard about the poor girl whose fiancé went off to war and never came home?” I asked. “I didn’t realize that people knew that much about it.”
That was a lie.
Kilgore was a small town.
Luca was also a big hero. He was an all-star football player. The star quarterback that went to war instead of taking his full scholarship to Texas A&M where he could’ve gone all the way. Everybody who was anybody knew who Luca Maldonado was.
Which, by association, meant they knew who I was, too.
“Uhhh,” Logan said. “Yeah.”
I snickered. “I know. It’s not the best kept secret in the world. I swear when I go to the grocery store, I can feel everybody’s eyes on me. I’m fairly sure the paper did an article on this one last week, too.”
Riel blinked. “They did?”
I nodded. “Cora, Luca’s sister, called me to tell me about it. I didn’t read it or anything, though. I try to stay away from those things.”
“Hmmm,” Riel said. “I’ll have to go look for that one.”
I snorted.
He wouldn’t be looking for it. He’d be avoiding everything there was when it came to the Kilgore paper.
Dinner flowed smoothly after that.
There were no other mentions of Luca. There was no other real focus on Riel or me at all.
At least until dinner came and everyone watched me put away almost all of my food.
The stuff I had left I boxed up, and Piper was still shaking her head in amazement.
“If I ate like you,” she said. “I’d be the size of a house.”
She gestured to where her own plate, a salad that she’d finished exactly half of, lay.
“I got my dad’s genetics,” I said. “But, saying that, when you only eat one meal a day, you’re allowed to consume all the calories with no repercussions.”
Piper snickered.
“I like you,” she declared.
I liked her, too.
Five minutes after that, I gave the waitress money for my part of the bill, then stood up.
“I have to go,” I said to the group at large. “Thank you for allowing me to eat with y’all.”
There were a ton of murmurs of ‘any time’ and ‘thanks for joining us.’
After saying my goodbyes, I was unsurprised to find Riel walking me out to my car.
“You could’ve finished your food,” I said to him.
He shrugged. “I wasn’t too impressed with the steak.”
No, he never had been. He and Luca used to cook their own steaks and find them quite a bit tastier than that particular restaurant.
I hadn’t thought that I needed to tell him, though.
He would’ve been curious if he hadn’t figured it out on his own.
“You and Luca used to make some great steaks,” I said. “Y’all would go buy the biggest steaks you could get your hands on. Then you’d grill them up and eat them all without any sides.”
He grunted out a sound that was somewhere between a ‘cool’ and an ‘interesting.’
I decided not to say anything else.
At least, I’d intended not to.
But then he’d finally walked me to my car which was still parked in the fifteen-minute pickup parking spot.
I turned to see him standing with his arms crossed over his chest.
“Your car is a piece of junk,” he said.
I rolled my eyes.
That’d been a familiar argument between me and Luca.
Apparently, Riel was going to continue it now that Luca was gone.
“I know,” I said. “I need a new one. It’s on my to-do list.”
After I paid off my student loans, anyway.
Or, at least, the student loans that I had.
My dad had covered what he could. And those he couldn’t, Luca had tried to cover.
I hadn’t allowed him to and thank God I hadn’t leaned on him for that. Because there was no way I could’ve ever guessed where my life would’ve proceeded.
But I was thankful that I’d at least succeeded in winning that one argument.
Riel shifted to the shadows as he was used to doing, and I allowed my eyes to flicker to his face.
“You look a little rough, Riel,” I said to the man that walked me out to my car after our meal.
The rest had stayed, ordering dessert.
“I’m tired,” he admitted, sounding lost.
“Do you sleep okay?” I wondered. “I’d imagine there’s some underlying PTSD. It could be…”
“No PTSD,” he said. “For there to be PTSD, there’d have to be a memory there for me to remember. Which I don’t. So, with no memories to torture me, I’m just a blank slate. Nothing fucked up about me. I just can’t sleep.”
