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“I’m asking you not to do this.”
“Do what? Go to a party?” I said, reaching the bottom of the stairs.
“Don’t go to the party,” said Badger. “Don’t—you know.”
I’d made the mistake of telling Ainsley that I planned to sleep with Evan that night, and overnight the whole group knew.
“Why not? I’m seventeen.”
“He’s a bad guy, Madeleine. Can’t you see that?”
Later I’d find out that Evan had been sleeping with Steph the whole time he’d been with me. But I didn’t know that then. All I knew is that everybody kept telling me to stay away from Evan, and all I wanted to do was be with him. They say we don’t fall in love with other people, we fall in love with how they make us feel about ourselves. And my time with Evan made me feel alive. He’d awakened something in me, and that thing wanted to break free of all the things that tethered me—the good girl, the A student, the loyal friend, the loving daughter, the abandoned child. The Sheriff’s daughter.
You don’t have to be what they say you are, Evan had told me.You can just be the Madeleine you decide to be.
“Idon’tsee that,” I said to Badger as I tried to push past him to go to the party, feeling heat rise to my cheeks. “No. He’s good to me. Isn’t that what counts?”
As I brushed past him, he reached for my wrist and tugged me back. I stopped to look at him, startled by the strength of his touch.
Maybe for the first time I stopped seeing the snotty nosed first-grader, the kid who used to get black eyes in fights at school, cried when he fell off his bike once, got tongue-tied in front of the class when he had to do show-and-tell, and saw the man he had become. Elegant bone structure and searing dark eyes, full pouting lips, strong, broad.
I tugged my wrist back from him, heart thudding.
“Madeleine,” he said, voice catching. “I love you. I always have.”
The words landed like a gut punch and I realized, yes, that was true. Badger loved me. It was a thing I knew but never acknowledged. I loved him too. But not like that.
“Don’t be stupid, Badger.”
He bowed his head but not before I saw the lash of pain I’d caused him. “We’re friends. Best friends,” I added too late.
And because I was selfish and stupid, moving toward something I didn’t understand, wanting to be someone other than who I was, I left my lifelong friend there in my foyer, brokenhearted, and I didn’t even look back.
“I’m sorry,” I say now, sitting at my father’s desk trying and failing to make any sense of his notes, the files. “About that night. What I said. I should have treated you better. I should have listened to you.”
“Ancient history,” he says with a shake of his head. His favorite phrase, but not true in any way.
“When did you start seeing Bekka?” I ask.
“After that night,” he said. “She was there for me. I leaned on her. Losing Steph, Ainsley, Sam, almost losing you. It was a dark time.”
I never really thought about how much Badger had lost that night. All of us, in a sense. Even me. I was still here but never the same after that.
“Even after I was so horrible to you, you were still there for me,” I say now. I spin in the chair to look at him and he glances up from his place on the floor.
“Love is a resilient thing. It doesn’t die even when you try to kill it.”
I can’t help but smile. “That’s very poetic.”
He smirks at me. “You’re not the only one who ever read a book.”
“Oh, really, what book did you ever read?”
“I’ll have you know that I have readThe Mechanic’s Biblecover to cover about a hundred times.”
“Well, that explains all the deep thinking you’ve been doing lately.”
We’ve been down here for hours. I get up and move over toward the box that has “Suspects” scrawled across the top. I lift the dusty lid, start sifting through the files. Evan’s jacket is the thickest.
