The bitterness in that last line hits harder than he probably intended. Or exactly as hard as he intended.
Behind me, laughter rolls out of the card room. My friends, my chosen family, enjoying another evening of wealth and freedom and uncomplicated lives. Everything I've spent ten years building and defending.
But Evan's in a hospital bed tonight. And no matter how far I've run, some bonds don't break.
"Fine. I'll come." Two short sentences, the plainest I've produced all night, so naturally I can't leave them alone. "Tell Evan if he wanted my attention, there were cheaper ways to get it."
"Tell him yourself. First thing tomorrow?"
"First thing."
"Define first thing. Because Mom is literally pacing holes in the waiting room floor, and I've got Tyler asleep on two chairs."
"Jesus, Col. It's almost midnight."
"And you've got a perfectly good plane sitting at Teterboro. You know, the one from all those adventure posts and livestreams. Hell, you could drive to the North Fork in under two hours. I'm sure you've got a car or ten to choose from."
I want to argue. Want to tell him my life doesn't revolve around Bardot Vista's schedule anymore. But he's right. I'm two hours away, I've got a brother in the hospital, and a mother who, for all her faults, doesn't deserve to face another family crisis alone.
"I'll be on the road as soon as I can." Already my head is repacking the week. "Tell Mom I'm on my way."
Back inside, I cash out in about ninety seconds. The table reads me before I reach my chair, and the ribbing dies fast when I give them rough details: Family thing back in the hometown, brother's leg, nothing fatal.
Damien nods, slow. Brad, who would walk into traffic for his five-year-old daughter Abby without breaking stride, just says, "Go."
My concern is on my brother, on my family, but the thought of returning to Mattichogue carries a weight I don’t want to acknowledge. It carries a history, one that instantly brings to mind a quiet girl with big hazel eyes and thick, coffee-brown hair.
Darcy Gable.
I want to say I haven’t thought about her in years, but that would be a lie. I’m sure I’m the last person she’s wasted a single thought on in the time since we knew each other in school. I like to think I’m generally not a dick, but she’d likely testify to the contrary.
“I gotta go.” I grab my jacket and key fob.
Wyatt swears a solemn oath to defend my chair from lesser players. Gabe just watches me leave, offering no comment at all.
The penthouse gets four minutes of my time and loses half its gear room. Base layers, trail runners, the duffel that's been on four continents and smells faintly of all of them. I leave my Colorado crew a forty-second voicemail postponing the trip. The land will be there when I’m done dealing with the family crisis in Mattichogue. Colton asked for two weeks. I’m hoping I can slip out of there in a few days.
The Ferrari and I are through the Midtown Tunnel before two a.m., the city peeling off behind me a borough at a time.
Here's what I'm not doing for the next hundred miles. I'm not thinking about the vineyard, the flat green miles of vine rows, the water waiting at the end of every road. I'm not thinking about the high school, or the public library with its radiator smell, or how quiet the stacks got at four in the afternoon when practice hadn't started and I had nowhere to be that I'd admit to.
And I am definitely not thinking about the girl hiding away in those stacks with her legs folded under her and a paperback held up like a Do Not Disturb sign. The way she'd mouth the big words to herself, silent, certain, gone somewhere I couldn'tfollow. I used to watch her from the atlas section and tell myself I was hiding from coach, even though I knew better.
Dictionary Darcy.
I haven't let that old nickname surface in years, and up it comes anyway, easy as a cork.
She's probably long gone. The smart ones leave. The smart ones end up professors in cities with better libraries, and they do not waste one syllable of their excellent vocabularies on the idiot kid who made fun of their endless love of books.
The sky over the Expressway goes from black to bruise to gray, and the road empties out the farther east I push, the way it always did.
Ten years of running, and the first thing to catch me isn't the town, or the vineyard, or my father's disappointed ghost at the head of the table.
It's a brown-haired girl with a book in her hands.
CHAPTER 2
DARCY
