AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Suck?” I interrupt.
He smirks. “Yeah.”
“I look forward to the day it starts to sucks less.”
“Me too.”
He makes sure I’m okay before walking away, and then it’s just me and Allie, and my dad’s grave. She doesn’t say anything as we start to walk to her car, and I’m honestly proud of her ability to not grill me until we get in her car.
“Okay,” she says, finally, “who was that?”
“Wyatt.”
“Wyatt who?”
I shrug. “We aren’t really on a last name basis.”
“But you’re on a help-me-not-die-from-a-panic-attack basis?”
“Apparently.”
Allie shakes her head and starts to pull out of the cemetery.
“He was kind of hot,” she states.
“Allie, we just left my father’s grave. I’m not really thinking about how hot the guy was.”
“But youdidnotice the hotness. That’s all I’m saying.”
I roll my eyes but look out the window to hide my smile.
Yeah, I noticed.
I take a minute and close my eyes, resting my forehead against the cool window. Allie’s blasting the heat, but it’s the middle of January and her car is cold. And despite the cool air, my hands are sweaty and I feel sweat on my spine from the panic attack.
The soft country music playing on the radio calms my racing heart and I breathe in deeply. I have no idea how I’m going to get through this. Wyatt’s easy smile comes to mind, so does his promise that one day this will suck less.
I’m not sure I believe him.
Chapter One
Lucy
Five Months Later
Griefisafunnything. Some days I wake up and I feel perfectly fine—like my world wasn’t ripped out from under my feet a few months ago. Other days I can’t get out of bed because it’s all just too much, and nothing makes sense without him here. But most days I just kind of move around in a routine of feeling, but not really feeling.
It’s May, and the weather is finally starting to warm up and stay that way. I sit cross-legged in front of my dad’s headstone, picking at a blade of grass. The morning dew is starting to seep into my jeans, and I push the sleeves of my sweater up, the sun warming my back.
“I know you would’ve hated the headstone thing, but I find it a lot easier to talk to than an empty urn, in case you were wondering. I’d feel stupid talking to a decoration. And anyway, Mom would move it around the house so much I’d probably never even find you. Which would be terribly inconvenient, and I’d probably just go insane or start talking to random objects. And I do not think my therapist would be pleased with that.”
I feel the wind lift my hair slightly and I smile, imagining it’s Dad laughing at me.
“Anyway, I’m graduating in a few weeks. I hope you’re not too terribly disappointed about my change in majors. Medical school just doesn’t feel right anymore, you know? A business degree just seems more . . . practical now. Mom’s worried I made a mistake, but I don’t think I did. I don’t know what I want to do yet, but I think I made the right decision. Even if I didn’t, I’m an adult now. These are my decisions to make, right?”
The silence gets to me, and I sigh, burying my face in my hands.
“I miss you so much, Dad. So much it hurts,” I whisper. “I’ve had a broken heart before. You remember Jason Stone, my first boyfriend? God, when we broke up, I thought it was the end of the world. And then when I had that awful crush on Derek Hilton my first semester in college and found out he liked Allie, I thought I’d cry for years. But this is a whole different kind of heartbreak, Dad. It feels like my heart has cracked into a thousand tiny pieces and I’m having to physically sew them all back together, without anesthesia—and I’m sewing them back all wrong. I would’ve been an awful surgeon.”
