Chapter 11
Briar
Briar heard a knock and turned to see Freddie standing in the door frame, a look of trepidation on his face.
‘Er,’ Freddie started, ‘could we sit?’
Briar nodded to the seat in front of her. ‘What’s up? You’re making me nervous.’
‘So, thing is,’ Freddie said, looking at his hands, ‘I’ve gotten some bad news.’
She suddenly became aware of her heart beating through her whole body, like she now did whenever anyone said anything even vaguely ominous.
It was like she was expecting to hear her mother had died all over again, her body constantly pitching her back into that feeling of the floor falling out from under her.
‘The job I was meant to start in September says they can’t sponsor my work visa anymore,’ he explained.
‘Oh,’ Briar said, feeling guilty at the relief rushing through her system. ‘That sucks.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, his mouth a tight line. ‘Anyway, I was wondering if you could maybe hire me in the fall and sponsor me? I could do admin stuff, whatever you need.’
She blinked, wracking her brain for something to say.
Hiring Freddie should’ve been easy, and she wanted to help him.
He was one of the best counselors they’d ever had.
This was just another item on the don’t sell your mom’s legacy to the highest bidder, you idiot list that she’d been keeping a running tally of.
‘Susan had emailed me about it being a possibility when I was still waiting to hear back,’ Freddie continued, anxiously running a hand through his hair. ‘Obviously, I understand if that’s not possible anymore.’ He fidgeted, looking more unsure of himself than Briar had ever seen him.
‘Um, can I get back to you?’ Briar asked, already running through her very short list of options, fleetingly wondering if she could call in a favor and get Freddie a job at the bar. ‘I just haven’t quite figured out the fall yet.’
Freddie nodded again. ‘Of course. Just thought it couldn’t hurt to ask. And moving back to England wouldn’t be the worst thing. I’d know Alice, at least.’
‘I don’t know, sounds pretty dire to me.’ Freddie cracked a smile at that, and Briar reached over the desk to squeeze his hand. ‘I’ll do whatever I can.’
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Well, I better get back out there. I’m playing hide and seek with Cabin 11.’
After he left, Briar sighed, leaning down to open the desk’s bottom drawer and pulling out her mom’s laptop.
When Briar had first arrived, she’d taken one look at the device and had promptly shoved it out of sight.
Now, Briar was assaulted by a series of windows opening, the laptop regurgitating everything her mom had been doing the last time she’d logged on.
Luckily, one of the tabs was her email. There were nearly three hundred unread emails. Briar couldn’t read them; instead, she typed Freddie’s name in the search bar, hoping to find the email her mom had sent him and that it would somehow give her a convenient solution.
Instead, the first email to pop up was from Alice, dated nearly a year before. The subject line read Just checking in… Briar’s eyes caught on the message preview: How was your holiday? I saw Freddie while he was in town. I hope he passed along the shortbread…
Briar clicked on it, intending to scroll to the beginning of the thread just to satisfy her curiosity.
She kept scrolling, stunned. There were hundreds of emails between her mother and Alice, spanning years.
The words passed in front of Briar’s eyes, but her brain didn’t retain any of it.
It was a protection mechanism, probably, since the last thing Briar needed right now was to know for certain that Alice had always cared more about her mom than her.
She finally hit the bottom of the page and saw that the thread had started in the fall of freshman year.
Not even a full month after Alice had stopped speaking to Briar.
Briar’s throat seemed to have fallen through to her stomach, and she couldn’t breathe.
Her mother had stayed in contact with her ex-best friend the entire time.
Nearly a decade of correspondence, and Susan had never once mentioned she’d heard from Alice.
As it turned out, Alice hadn’t abandoned her entire life back home; she had just abandoned Briar.
She scrolled back to the top, intending to exit the page, but her eyes caught on a recent message.
Alice, my darling girl,
My cancer is back. There, I told someone… It’s inoperable, unfortunately, and the prognosis is fairly bleak. Do keep this to yourself, dear. I’m still sitting with it.
All my love
Susan
It was dated a month before she had died.
Tears blurred her vision, and Briar slammed the laptop closed.
She stood, feeling like there was too much blood rushing through her veins, and frantically paced.
Every moment from this summer where it had felt like she and Alice had been almost rebuilding something like a friendship suddenly shattered.
How could her mother have told Alice that she was dying first?
She did the only thing she could think of. She called Noah.
‘Hey.’
‘Hi.’
‘What’s wrong?’ Noah asked, his tone shifting immediately.
Briar could picture him leaning forward, brows furrowed.
She didn’t know how to explain to him the complete betrayal the emails represented.
Honestly, she wasn’t sure who she felt more betrayed by: the friend who’d disappeared from her life or the mother who simply hadn’t thought to mention it at any point in the last ten years.
‘Oh, you know,’ Briar said vaguely, waving a hand in front of her even though she knew he couldn’t see.
She couldn’t tell him about the emails even if she’d been able to make sense of it; telling him would mean admitting more about her relationship with Alice than she ever had before. ‘Everything’s shit. How are you?’
He ignored her question. ‘Is it Alice?’
‘Always.’ Briar sighed. She felt foolish for letting herself soften towards Alice, as if they could ever be friends again, as if they hadn’t crossed too many lines to go back to what they’d had.
‘Well, I bet you’d call a week ago, but Harper had more faith in your ability to coexist. I owe her dinner now. Thanks for that.’
Briar choked out a laugh, her throat still feeling like something was stuck in it.
Noah hummed on the other side of the line. ‘Anything I can help with?’
Briar mentally ran through the long list of things that had gone wrong in the last week and a half. ‘Our AC is out?’
Noah’s laugh was warm and tender, making Briar’s chest ache. His side of the line sounded so pleasant: air-conditioned, lice-free, and, most importantly, far away from Alice.
‘I don’t think I can do this,’ Briar said numbly.
‘Alice being here. I mean, she’s actually helping, and that’s so much worse.
Like if she’d shown up sooner, my mom wouldn’t have died.
’ She squeezed her eyes shut. ‘No, I don’t believe that.
But maybe my life wouldn’t be such a mess right now?
Does that make any sense?’ Her breath was shaky and weak. ‘I just don’t think I can forgive her.’
‘I know,’ Noah said, and there was a brief pause that Briar knew meant he was gearing up to say more.
He always seemed to understand her when it came to Alice, and it made sense, because they had both been heartbroken over her at one point.
Even if Noah had never known the full story.
‘It is okay to forgive her, though, if you want to. She was your friend first. If you’re doing this out of some kind of loyalty—’
‘I’m not,’ Briar said, before he’d even finished his sentence. ‘Alice and I…’ She sighed, still at a loss for how to tell him what was going on. She would never be able to explain her feelings about Alice, especially to Noah. ‘It’s got nothing to do with you.’
‘Cool,’ Noah said. ‘Just wanted to make sure you knew.’
Briar didn’t know what else to say. She stayed like that, the landline receiver pressed to her cheek, cool against her overheated skin. She listened to Noah’s breath, comforted by knowing he was there.
‘Look…’ Noah said, ‘I’m not gonna pretend to understand why she never reached out to you after everything went down, but I do know what you were like after she left.
’ Briar scrunched her eyes shut against the onslaught of memories.
Memories of sleepless nights that fall semester, of constantly checking her phone for messages, of drafting her own – paragraph after paragraph of apologies, explanations, appeals – of the deafening silence from across an ocean.
‘I wasn’t in great shape either, I know.
’ Noah sighed. ‘I guess, just… be careful?’
Briar nodded, feeling like that advice had already come too late.
‘I gotta go,’ Briar said.
‘Okay.’
She hung up, pausing for a moment before racing out the door and into the woods, trying to outrun her thoughts.