Chapter 63
the PRESENT
63
Evie
“When did we last speak?” I ask Bree, still trying to come to terms with her short hair. She’s stunning, but everything about her is different. Edgier. Older, obviously. She’s one of those cool, accomplished classical musicians—I can picture her on an album cover in some pop-classical ensemble—flowy black pants and a sequined handkerchief top, violin propped on her knee …
She’s pulling up our messages on her phone, and so do I.
“Let’s see … Well, we messaged at your graduation … You’d just gotten engaged. Then Drew turned up and you were telling me he was ‘taking pictures of a girl’ …” She winks. What is the wink about? What girl?
“That would have been Meg,” Drew says, matter-of-factly.
How many girlfriends has he had ?
I scroll to the same messages, hoping she doesn’t read them aloud.
“Then there’s the one just after you had the fight with Oliver. You’d stormed out of the restaurant?”
“Which one is that?” I’m not seeing it in my phone.
She leans over and shows me on her phone: Bree, it’s over. I’ve broken up with him. Where are you?
That message is not in my phone. “It’s not in my history. Why did I delete it?”
She and Drew both look at my screen. Then at Bree’s, and then back at mine. They put their heads together and scroll down, on both phones, comparing. Then Drew gets his phone out and looks through his own messages. There are none to compare them to on mine, as he’s not in my inbox at all, but the two of them are wearing equally concerned expressions.
“Wow,” Bree says softly to Drew. “Missing messages might explain a few things?”
She sighs and looks at me in a way she never has before. With pity and years of regret, almost as if she’s on the verge of an apology herself. “Then you sent me a message from Drew’s house,” she adds. “The night his mum died.”
His mum died? Looking at him now, I see it. That same feeling I remembered, looking through the kitchen window before Bree arrived. That sinking grief I couldn’t place. “What did I say?”
She glances at Drew, and then passes the phone to me rather than reading aloud another message that’s missing from my own record. It says, Bree, I’m with Drew. I think I’ve made a terrible mistake …
I stare at Drew on my parents’ deck. What terrible mistake did I make?
And all this time I’ve been harping on about fictionally losing my parents and he hasn’t told me to shut up, like I would have done if it was the other way around. Instead, he did everything he could to reunite me with my mum and dad. He saw my relief when we got here. He convinced my dad to let us stay.
“Is your dad still alive?” I ask him suddenly. I’m grasping at straws. It’s not like the presence of one parent makes up for the loss of the other.
He looks out over the garden. Body tense. “It’s messy,” he tells me. Is there a single aspect of Drew Kennedy’s life that isn’t messy?
“You can trust me,” I say.
He looks at me as if that isn’t true. Again, I wonder where it went wrong between us and what I did to him. What was this mistake I made?
I watch as his body seems to harden in defense, and I can’t tell if he’s subconsciously bracing himself against his dad—or me. “He’s not worth our oxygen.”
I can sense the schoolboy I must have known. And the adolescent. Tangible memories try to push forward, for a friendship I remember only in glimpses. But even without distinct evidence, I increasingly trust this connection.
“I’m going for a quick shower before your parents wake up,” Bree says. “We’ll talk later, Evie.” She moves off the seat and hugs Drew again on the way past, but my envy has evaporated. This is the best friend I remember and the one I forgot, and there’s something beautiful about that.
“Do you want to talk about your mum?” I ask Drew, once Bree has closed the sliding door behind her.
“No.”
I suppose I can’t be allowed to walk back into our relationship just because I’ve finally been convinced it existed. “What’s our happiest memory?” I ask, changing tack. The sight of Bree hugging him like she’d trust him with her life has helped me jettison my remaining doubt.
He rakes his hand through his hair. Trying to dredge up some happiness to share?
“Come on, Drew. We were best friends. We must have happy memories. I know you’re scared to break me …”
“Because I’ve got form.”
I wonder what he means. Did he break me once before? Or someone else? “Tell me something gentle, then.”
He clasps his hands behind his head and looks at the sky as if I’m asking him for the moon. His T-shirt rides up and my eyes drop to the strong line of muscles making a V shape above his waistband.
“You all right?” he says, catching me staring.
Not as such. No, I haven’t seen abs like that on a man outside a Calvin Klein billboard.
“All right. Bioluminescence,” he says, tugging his T-shirt down. “We spent a night in Jervis Bay, splashing around in the water under the stars. It was …”
“Magical,” I whisper. “It’s on my bucket list.”
“Technically you’ve already ticked it off,” he explains. But he must notice how crushed I look. “You can always do it again. I just don’t know if we can top that night. They say you should never go back …”
“But I have to go back! I have to redo the good stuff, or I’ll lose it all.”
“It wasn’t all good. That night ended badly. Bad news about Mum.”
“Tell me I went with you,” I whisper.
He sits beside me again and puts his hand briefly over mine. “Of course you did.”
The idea of anything going wrong between us at a critical point like that makes my heart hurt. What we used to have was clearly something . Before I wrecked it.
He says we weren’t together. That I was crazy about Oliver. So why do I feel so heartbroken over him? And what’s this electric energy I can’t ignore whenever I’m near him?
“Do you think we can start our friendship over?” I ask.
He looks guarded. And torn. And ten types of exhausted. He takes a moment, then looks at me with an intensity that stirs something inside me. It brings a bunch of feelings flooding back. A memory blunders forward that absolutely conflicts with the “we were just friends” narrative he’s been spinning.
“We were more than friends,” I tell him suddenly, breathless excitement shooting through my body. “Drew, you kissed me!”