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There’s an adorably sexy smattering of freckles on his shoulders. I trace some with my finger, skimming my hand across his back and then down toward his waistband. “My mom used to do this when I couldn’t sleep,” I tell the space between us.
He doesn’t respond, but I hear him breathing. A car pass
es outside.
I graze my nails up and down his skin. “I never told Rich that. Or anyone, I guess.”
“You’ve never mentioned her.”
My instinct is to shut down the topic, but Finn shared with me tonight. Now it’s my turn. What’s more—I want him to know. This is an enormous part of who I am. “She died when I was fifteen.”
“That’s when you went on the antidepressants?”
“Yes.”
When I graze his shoulder again, Finn reaches back and scoops my hand into his. He brings it to his mouth, kisses my palm, and releases it. “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“Is that what your tattoo means?”
My ears warm. “Yes. I wanted to memorialize her life, not her death. She loved birds.”
“Is it a certain kind of feather?”
“No—that’s the thing. She had birds growing up, all different kinds. She named them after colors. Baby Blue, Pink Polly, Lily Lavender. That’s why the feather’s colored in pastels. But she didn’t care about species or even their actual colors—she just loved them all.”
I resume scratching his back. I can’t believe I’m going here with him. I don’t like talking about it for a number of reasons, and I usually only do it when I have to. I could blame the alcohol for my loose lips, but I’ve already lost my buzz.
“She must’ve been young,” he says. “Was she sick?”
“Car accident.” I swallow. “I was in the car.”
“Fuck. Were you hurt?”
“The other car. Not hers.” My heart pounds. I’m sure Finn can hear it in the silence that follows.
He turns around to face me. “What?”
“We can stop here,” I warn. “It’s not exactly my finest moment.”
“Were you . . .”
“I wasn’t driving. Thankfully, I guess, although it doesn’t change the outcome. My, I don’t know what he was, my short-lived boyfriend, I guess—he was.”
“Drinking?” Finn asks.
“Yes.” It pains me to say it. I could’ve stopped Bobby from having even one beer. I could’ve spoken up after his second, or when he got his car keys from his pocket. I didn’t want him to see me as childish, though. “I wasn’t that kind of kid,” I say. “I really was good until I wasn’t.”
“I believe you,” he says. “What happened?”
I go back to the beginning. “I grew up in Westchester, where my dad still lives. My parents had high expectations, but I always met them. Usually at the expense of a social life.” That’s putting it mildly, but Finn doesn’t need to know just how unpopular I was. Growing up attending Broadway shows, I’d had it in my head I wanted to be a famous playwright like Samuel Beckett, so I joined the drama club. It was the only hobby my parents hadn’t forced on me, and through middle school, I took it seriously. I wrote plays and practiced my lines alone in the cafeteria at lunch, not caring that people snickered and called me a freak behind my back. “Like I told you, I was a little overweight, and I only had a couple friends. I never got asked out. And then Bobby came along.”
“The driver,” Finn says.
I nod. “He was the ultimate bad boy. Every girl in school wanted him, but oh my God, when he asked me to the winter formal—me—nobody could believe it, least of all me.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Finn says. “I’ll bet you were the perfect package and never knew it.”
“I wasn’t. I was an outcast, Finn. Bobby was the first guy to take me out. We dated a short time before the dance. I even cut one of my semester finals. I didn’t care, but my parents did, and they banned me from the dance. So I snuck out, and Bobby picked me up down the street. It was the craziest night I’d ever had. I lost my virginity to him.”
“While he was drunk?”
“Yes.”
Finn watches me closely. He inches closer until we’re almost touching. “He sounds like a piece of shit.”
“In hindsight, he was. Anyway, he drove me home later that night, or by that time, it was early morning, three thirty-seven to be exact. My mom had found me missing from my room. My dad called the cops and she got in the car to look for me. She was less than a mile from the house when . . .” A lump forms in my throat, and I try to breathe through it. I’ve told the story enough times—to my psychiatrist, Dad, Rich, law enforcement—that I can do it without getting emotional. Just the facts. But it isn’t working at the moment. “Less than a mile when . . .”
“You don’t have to say it.”
“I killed her.”
“You didn’t kill her.”
“I’m the reason she’s dead. Same thing.”
He cups my face. I think I hear a lump in his throat when he says, “You made a mistake. You were a kid.”
I cry. I haven’t cried for my mom in a long time. Too long. I’m not even sure it’s her loss I’m mourning.
Finn strokes my hair. “That’s it. Let it out.”
“It happened the weekend before Christmas. Bobby’s dad was a politician and my parents had been regulars on the social scene. They tried to keep it quiet, but it was too juicy. Some local tabloids picked up the story. They claimed I was an out-of-control, sex-crazed teenager who’d seduced the senator’s son and disgraced her poor, widowed father. That’s part of why I’m adamant about staying anonymous.” My classmates were sensitive to my mom’s death until a certain point. Many of them also believed what they read, as if I’d led some kind of secret life that’d killed my mother and made Bobby into a real live bad boy. “I was institutionalized for depression by mid-January.”
Finn stops playing with my hair. “Like a psych ward? Jesus.”
“My dad had to carry me to the car and then into the facility because I couldn’t get out of bed. I was there less than a month, even though I wanted to leave from the moment I stepped in the door. He told everyone I went to stay with relatives.”
“That’s wrong, Halston. You were grieving, not mentally unstable.”
At the time, they were one in the same. At least, that’s how it was put to me. I didn’t get to grieve as hard as my dad, because I’d caused it. Nobody at the institution was compassionate toward me about the accident after they’d heard how I’d been involved.
“My dad didn’t know what to do with me.” I shrug one shoulder, and more wetness leaks from my eyes. “Still doesn’t.”
Finn wipes it from my cheeks with his thumb. “I know what to do with you.”
I can’t help smiling a little. When I look up at him, moonlight and tears make little crystals in my vision. “You do?”
“Mhm.” He pulls the hem of my t-shirt up my belly, just under my breasts. “Turn over and take this off.” Then he adds, sternly, “In that order. Whatever you do, don’t flash me.”
I switch sides so I’m facing his bedroom door, and together, we get the shirt over my head. He smooths my hair out of the way, then begins scratching my back as I’d done for him.
I close my eyes and shudder as I release a few silent sobs. “That feels nice.”
“Just relax,” he murmurs.
I haven’t been touched so lovingly in over ten years.
After what I just confessed, it’s not the reaction I might’ve expected from him.
It confirms what I think we both suspect.
Finn was meant to find that journal. To find me. To be a salve for, and perhaps even heal, a heart I’d worried was destined to ache forever.
16
While I scramble eggs, Marissa makes a case for owning a horse. Thing is, it’s not so far-fetched. She has friends with them. Kendra had one growing up. One of the many reasons I had to get out of that family—horses shouldn’t be standard pets.
“Do you need one to be happy?” I ask her.
“No, Dad, and I knew you’d say that. But a horse would make me more happy.”
“How?”
“I’d get to ride it. You’re always telling me to go outside more. And some girls are so good, they’ll go to college
free.”
“Is that so.” I scrape some eggs from the pan to a dish and try not to think about Halston sleeping down the hall. I want to focus on my time with Marissa. “Where are you going to keep this horse?”
“At grandma and grandpa’s.”
I serve Marissa her breakfast. Without my prompting, she’s already packed, dressed in jeans and a sweater with her blonde hair in a neat ponytail. Sometimes I think she’s got it together better than her mother or me. “Look, you know I’d buy you a pony if I thought it was a good idea.”
“Not a pony, Dad. I’m not five years old.”
“Sorry. My mistake.” I turn back to the stove to make myself a plate. “Pets require a lot of upkeep. Are you going to go straight to Gran’s every day, right after school, to take care of the horse? Then go home and do your homework? You won’t have time for friends or fun or anything else.”
“It won’t be that hard if we’re living there,” she says.
I set my plate on the table and sit across from her. “Where?”
She chews, shrugging. “Gran’s.”
“Why would you be living with your grandparents?”
“Mom said maybe. She hates the apartment.”
I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s not news to me that Kendra thinks she’s too good for the place I helped her pick out earlier this year. Moving in with her parents, though? Kendra’s beyond help, but Marissa still has a shot at growing up well-rounded and cultured—not sheltered and spoiled like her mom.
And since Kendra’s family is loaded, any job Kendra’s ever had has been for pleasure. I never cared what Kendra did with her days until the divorce went through and left me paying alimony and child support to a woman who has over a million dollars in her trust fund. Marissa needs a dose of reality, and Kendra obviously isn’t going to give that to her. That’s why I wanted to bring her to the city in the first place. But that was before the divorce.
I pour us each a glass of orange juice as I formulate my argument. “Horses cost money,” I say. “A lot of money.”
She picks up a piece of bacon. “Never mind. I’ll just ask Gran.”
“Why?”
“She has money. You’re broke.”
