AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She backed up into someone and stumbled. “Oh! I’m so . . . sorry.” She trailed off as she turned to see Garrett Austin, dressed in a black suit and a pale blue tie. Her cheeks burned as their eyes met.
“Um, hey,” he said, flushing as red as she was.
“Hey,” she echoed. Beyond the little alcove, the church’s sound system had started to play a delicate acoustic guitar track. Garrett took a deep breath.
“You have no idea how sorry I am,” he said, not quite meeting her eyes. “I can’t believe how I treated you.”
Emma shook her head. “You didn’t know.”
“It doesn’t matter.” He shifted his weight, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Even if you had been Sutton, I shouldn’t have acted the way I did.”
“It was a . . . confusing situation, I’m sure.” Emma tugged at her skirt to even the hem. “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you before. The whole birthday thing—I know it looked like I just threw that in your face. I didn’t mean to humiliate you. I just couldn’t . . .”
“I know,” he said quickly, blushing a shade deeper. “I get it.” He leaned against the column, avoiding her eyes. “The truth is, Sutton was about to break up with me. I knew it that night I saw her in the canyon. When I saw you the next day and you didn’t say anything about it, I couldn’t believe my luck. I thought Sutton had changed her mind.” He looked down at his shoes. “Did you ever hear about what happened to my sister?”
“Yes,” Emma murmured, biting her lip.
“I know it’s no excuse. But I’ve just been so . . . so angry since it happened. I don’t know why I can’t move on.” A single tear cut down his cheek. “Sutton was more patient with me than she should have been.”
Emma listened, her heart twisting with sympathy. “That’s a lot to work through by yourself.” Impulsively she grabbed his hand, squeezing it in hers.
He shook his head. “Well, I’m done making excuses. I’m starting therapy on Monday. If I’m so unstable that someone can suspect me of murder, I need help.”
“So you heard Ethan was trying to frame you?”
“Yeah.” He shook his head wonderingly. “That guy . . . I mean, he had us all fooled. We all thought he was crazy about you.”
A knot formed in Emma’s throat. She glanced away, turning toward a small marble crucifix nestled into an alcove. “Yeah,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper. “So did I.”
Garrett opened his mouth, as though he was about to say more, when suddenly some kind of commotion started in the nave. He and Emma turned around to face the crowd, who all seemed to be looking up at the wall behind the altar. The guitar music jerked to a halt, and the lights flickered out.
A disembodied voice spoke over the intercom, echoing through the church.
“Sutton Mercer . . . we salute you!”
Emma barely had time to realize that it was Charlotte’s voice before the staccato drumbeat of Fun.’s “We Are Young” started blaring out of the speakers. At that exact moment, a projector hidden at the back of the church kicked into gear. Images flashed above the altar, videos of Sutton and her friends, edited to the music. One showed Sutton, Madeline, Charlotte, and Laurel toasting one another with flasks in the hot springs they used to sneak into. In another, someone held a shaky camera to Sutton’s face on a roller coaster. She screamed with laughter, her hair billowing around her face. There was footage of Sutton cannonballing into Charlotte’s pool, footage of her singing karaoke with Laurel and dancing with Thayer. In one she, Gabby, and Lili got into a food fight, the Twitter Twins overpowering her and squirting a crown of whipped cream into her hair, all of them giggling.
And finally, there was a cut of Sutton doing a pin-up pose in a slinky silver dress. She was on Charlotte’s patio, and behind her one of the Lying Game’s exclusive parties raged.
“You can’t keep a good diva down,” she said coyly, her voice amplified through the church. Then she blew a kiss at the camera, and the video went dark.
Emma realized that her cheeks were streaming with tears. As the lights came back up, a long and echoing silence descended. Mr. Mercer had broken down, his face hidden in his wife’s shoulder. Half the tennis team was sobbing—Clara wailed out loud, her cries cutting through the stillness.
As I watched the video, my friends’ final tribute, my heart felt like a flower opening its bloom to the sun. Pops of color and light filled my mind, and suddenly everything—every memory, every moment of my life—came flooding through me. Everything I thought had been lost was returned. I remembered pouring pretend tea for my mother from her antique tea set. I remembered my father handing me a set of binoculars, pointing to where a red-tailed hawk nested in a tree above. There I was, playing with Laurel in a pillow fort on a rainy night. Meeting Charlotte on the school bus in third grade, and Madeline at recess the next year. Getting my first tennis racket for Christmas. Swimming in the Pacific Ocean on a vacation, staring out at the miles and miles of lonely blue. Printing the official Lying Game cards at Charlotte’s house, giggling over the titles we’d invented for ourselves.
Kissing Thayer for the first time, and the second, and the third. All our kisses, every sun-drenched moment we spent together, came back in perfect focus.
Every prank, every secret, every adventure came back to me. And it was all so beautiful, so vibrant, so real. It was my life. Ethan couldn’t take that away.
