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PROLOGUE
LUISA
“It warms my heart to see you two together. We’ve missed you around here,” Sorcha said to Press when he and I approached her.
I waited for him to argue, tell Sorcha we weren’t together, but he only thanked her for her hospitality.
“Are you stayin’ here tonight, then?” she asked.
“At Seahorse. But I’ll return before zero eight hundred.”
“Shame,” she said, nudging me with her elbow.
“Sorcha,” her husband, Laird, admonished.
She rolled her eyes and winked at me before saying good night.
“I fear Sorcha is getting the wrong idea about you and me,” Press said when we walked up to the door of the cottage where I was staying on Sorcha and Laird’s Butler Ranch.
“She’s not the only one,” I mumbled more than said.
“My apologies.”
“What for?”
“If people getting the wrong impression about you and me makes you uncomfortable.”
“It doesn’t.” I leaned up, kissed his cheek, and went inside.
I’d just finished brushing my teeth, washing my face, and changing into the sweats and T-shirt I slept in when my phone vibrated. I threw myself on the bed and grabbed it, hoping it was Press, asking if I wanted him to read to me before I went to sleep, something he did to help me keep my nightmares at bay.
Instead, when I swiped the screen, I screamed.
I
1
LUISA
PREVIOUS OCTOBER
San Luis Obispo
“I’m tired, and I have a lot of homework to do tonight, Jorge. Please just drop me off at my mom’s,” I said when we left the restaurant where we’d had dinner.
“You can hang out a little while longer. We’ll watch a movie. You can pick.”
I didn’t want to go to Jorge’s tonight or any other night. I couldn’t stand his roommates and wasn’t too crazy about him anymore, either. I should’ve broken up with him before our date tonight, but as usual, I’d chickened out. It wasn’t that I was afraid to do it as much as I hated confrontation. I had skirted it all my life.
My childhood memories were riddled with recollections of my parents fighting. The last was when my dad left for a bar after dinner and never came back. He didn’t die that night; four other people did. A father, a mother, and their two kids were on their way home when a drunk driver plowed into their car head-on, killing them all instantly. The driver, my father, survived. But, he lingered in a coma for four years. Long enough for our family to lose everything—all our money, him, and my mother, since she spent every day of those four years sitting beside his hospital bed.
That same year, I lost all my friends too, except for one. Jada Yáñez. She stuck by me no matter how horribly every other kid at our school picked on me for being a “murderer’s kid.” They taunted me daily, saying I should’ve been the one who died. And everyday, I wished I had.
The only thing that stopped me from killing myself back then was what it would have done to my sister, Seraphina. She’d already lost more than I had. Instead of being a carefree college student, she became my surrogate mom when she was eighteen and I was twelve, since she was basically all I had.
Was that when my inability to stick up for myself began, or had I always been this way? I remembered very little about my life before my father’s accident.
I looked over at Jorge, wishing that when I said I wanted to go home, myboyfriendrespected me enough to take me there. Was that on him or me?
