12. Holly
TWELVE
HOLLY
“Don’t get lost or arrested.” I slapped at the bill of Graham’s NCWU hat.
His smile matched mine as he laughed. “Funny. We’ll see the hotel and the hockey arena. That’s about it.”
“You’ll sneak out.”
“I’ll leave that one to Tanner. You gonna miss me?”
Graham had taken to asking that question every night we went our separate ways after the night at The Grille, which was most of them. We spent most of the nights curled on his couch watching movies until I had to head back to Deer Creek. Sometimes we spent the night with his friends and Tracey.
He was getting ready to leave for the team’s trip to Pennsylvania for spring break, where they were finishing the regular season games before playoffs began. We were waiting outside the science building for Eli’s last class to finish up so they could head out together. This was always his longest trip of the season, and he wouldn’t get back to school until late Saturday night before classes resumed after break. We had plans to spend Sunday together. Probably at his place, catching up on all his laundry.
He’d be playing the game he loved and doing it with his friends. I’d be slaving away at The Grille and meeting with a career counselor to start applying for jobs post-graduation.
“I might,” I teased, because we both knew it was a lie. I’d taken to texting Graham as much as he reached out to me.
“You’ll miss me. I know it.” Graham bent down, swiveled his hat around backward, and kissed me. Like every time his lips pressed to mine, my bones turned to jelly and my heart turned to a puddle of mush. If this was what falling for someone felt like, it was all warm and gooey and comfortable and terrifying at the same time, and yet that ship had sailed.
I was falling, starting to dream those dreams he’d put in my mind weeks ago.
Maybe we could do this.
My phone buzzed in my coat pocket, and I ignored it, focusing on the way his mouth pressed to mine, the way his tongue teased at the seam of my lips.
“Gross,” Eli groaned. “You’re supposed to keep it PG around me.”
He flung his arm across my shoulders and yanked me away from Graham. Before I could get too far away, Graham grabbed my arm and pulled me back until I was facing Eli and tucked securely to Graham’s side. “And she’s mine,” he grunted. “Hands off.”
“Jealous?” I rolled to my toes and kissed the side of his neck.
“Yes.” There wasn’t a hint of that teasing tone I liked so much.
What a silly man. Eli was his best friend. “How was the test?” I asked him.
“A killer,” Eli groaned. “It’s a good thing I love science, or I’d be rethinking my dreams of med school.”
I’d recently learned Eli was heading to Chapel Hill in the fall for medical school.
He traveled constantly for hockey. He was graduating with a 4.0 in chemistry, treated life like it was one giant game of fun, never seemed stressed, and beneath all his jokes and laughter, was also one of the nicest guys I’d ever met in my life. At least, outside Graham, anyway. I’d also learned he was only playing hockey in order to keep a scholarship after being raised by a single dad most of his life. Eli Howell was impressive indeed.
“That bad?” I asked, because the man had to be close to genius IQ levels, if not surpassing them.
He groaned again. “If I hear the word immunopathology again, I’m going to stab someone.”
“Yeah, pretty sure you’ll never hear that word around me.”
Both guys laughed at me.
“And that’s why we like you,” Eli said. “When we need a nap, you put us to sleep with all the fun talk about amortization schedules and the economic growth and development of third world countries.”
I snorted. “That was one time.”
In my defense, he’d started it by asking about my major and what I was learning.
“Besides, won’t you study immunology in medical school?” I asked.
He turned around and started walking backward ahead of us and jabbed a finger in my direction. “Didn’t I just say if I heard that word again I’d stab someone?”
“Better me than a med student. Or a patient,” I joked.
“Nah.” Graham squeezed me tight to his side. “The world can live with one less doctor. Not sure you’re replaceable.”
“Gross.” Eli coughed and made a gagging noise to punctuate it.
“Yeah, ’cause it definitely needs more bankers.”
“No.” Graham grinned down at me, and the softness in those gold flecks of his made my knees wobble. “Just needs you.”
Heat burned my cheeks. He was often complimentary, always polite. Definitely always sexy and patient, but this…this tenderness was new.
My phone buzzed again, this time getting Graham’s attention since it was in my pocket by his hip. “That’s been going wild. Does Tracey have an emergency?”
“With Tracey, you never know.”
I doubted it was Tracey. She was packing to leave tomorrow to go on a cruise with her family. I’d offered to take her to the airport, since I didn’t really have anything else to do, but instead, she was hitching a ride with another student to Charlotte and getting dropped off at a hotel near the airport.
“Probably Caroline wondering when I’ll be in.”
It could have been, but I doubted it.
“Hey, G!” He stopped, and a friendly smile swept over his face as Piper waved her arm.
“Hey, P. Thought you already went home.”
“No.” She grinned at him, and I noticed she made a studious attempt not to glance at me as she neared us. “Don’t you remember when we talked last night? Mom’s coming to get me later.”
She looked at me then, and if she thought I’d be upset hearing that they talked, she was wrong. Graham had taken to telling me every time Piper reached out to him.
“Right,” Graham mumbled, but his brows tugged in. “So what’s up?”
“I just wanted to wish you good luck on your trip. I know how nervous you always get flying.”
She held out her hand. In her palm was a small, square box wrapped in neon yellow wrapping paper with a hot pink bow on top.
Whatever was inside, Graham knew, because he scowled at the box and then at Piper. “Are you serious?”
For the first time, Piper stopped hiding the hatred she had for me in her eyes before nodding and smiling up at Graham. “Yeah. Of course I am. You know Fee would want you to have it. She had it made for you. Engraved and everything. I found it last week when I was visiting her parents.”
“Fee made you something engraved?” I’d tried…I’d tried so hard to stay out of their conversation. This wasn’t the first time Piper had shown up when Graham and I were together and took little jabs at how well she knew him or when they talked. What she didn’t know was that Graham usually shared them with me first, and yeah, I didn’t like it.
But mostly because there was a secret there. Something was brewing, and Piper’s presence always seemed to bring it simmering to the surface. Someday, it’d all come out, and I was trying to be brave enough to weather the storm.
“Yeah, our friend Sophie. She’s gone, died actually. Well, really she was killed last year by some loser of a drunk near here, but Graham and me and her were like best friends. They were going to get married…”
Water stormed my body, my ears, making everything else she said a giant blur. I barely heard a thing until she mentioned the worried “married,” and I stumbled back a step, out of Graham’s reach. “Married?” It came out as a rasp, and I took another step back as Graham tried to reach for me. Eli looked on, and humiliation and horror washed over me at the exact same time.
Eli had known .
“Of course.” Piper grinned, and there was nothing kind about the venom in her tone. “Graham told you, right? I mean, he told me he told you about our friend who was killed, so I just assumed that he told you they were engaged?—”
“That’s enough, Pipe,” Graham snapped and put himself between me and her, but the damage was done.
“But Graham,” she whined.
“Eli, get her out of here,” he demanded, and then he was in front of me, blocking my view of everything.
“She had to know, G. You know Fee would be so ticked about this. She loved you!” As she shouted, her voice turned shrill but quieter. I imagined Eli picking her up and throwing her over his shoulder to do what Graham had told him to do, and I would have laughed, but there was absolutely nothing to laugh about.
Sophie Alston was killed by a drunk driver.
Sophie Alston was the governor’s daughter.
Sophie was also the girl my father ran off the road.
My father was the loser drunk driver who killed Sophie.
And Graham was going to marry her.
“I have to go.” I sputtered the words, and as Graham reached for me, I shook my head. “Don’t. I have to go.”
“I’m sorry,” Graham whispered. “That’s not…please…listen to me for a second.”
I’d listen to him for hours. I’d let him explain everything. But it wouldn’t change a thing.
Because once I opened my mouth and explained everything back, whatever we had growing between us would be lost forever.
“Bye, Graham.”
* * *
“It could be a coincidence,” Tracey whispered.
Her arms were wrapped around me as we sat in her small living room she shared with three other girls.
“How many other Sophies were killed by a drunk driver in the last year?”
Man, my throat hurt. My eyes did too. My lips were cracked and dry, but it was my throat that hurt the most.
No, my chest. Definitely the pain crushing my chest like an elephant was stomping on my sternum was the worst of it.
And my damn phone kept buzzing. It’d been going off and on all day long, and I should have answered it just to shut him up and get him to leave me alone, but I couldn’t bring myself to hear his voice.
Not after what I’d just learned.
It wasn’t just my dad calling, either. It was the calls and texts that started coming in from Graham that made me toss my phone into my bedroom and shut the door as soon as I called Tracey.
I’d barely gotten a word out, more like a single sob before she said, “On my way.”
That felt like hours ago. A lifetime. How could everything change so quickly?
I was already dreading having to tell him about my dad eventually and the guilt I felt that I hadn’t yet, not when he’d been so honest. But this?
How did I recover from this?
And had he been as honest as I thought?
“Okay, maybe not a coincidence, but maybe there’s an explanation? I mean…how did he not recognize you? And being engaged? That was never mentioned in the trial. You’d think the lawyer would have used that in opening or closing arguments, or something. And Graham was never there. I feel like we would have seen Piper too, you know?”
“I only went to court once,” I reminded Tracey. She’d followed it online, but the three-day trial hadn’t exactly been national news. It was all over the local television, though, but my dad didn’t have much of a defense.
He was drunk.
She was the governor’s daughter on a weekend ski trip with her family over the New Year’s holiday weekend.
One day she was there. That night she went into town to grab some snacks for her family to take back to their Airbnb mountain rental home, and then she was dead.
I went on the day of the opening arguments, sat in the far back corner, and left as soon as I could. My father never knew I was there and didn’t seem to care either way.
He was sentenced immediately following his trial, and I’d met him at the courthouse in the holding area before he was taken away to the prison near Durham. He hadn’t bothered to give me a hug, not that he really could with his hands and ankles handcuffed, but I hadn’t expected it. Nope. After telling me this was all a bunch of bullshit, his parting words to me were, “Make sure you put money in my account.”
“What do I do?” I asked her and got up to get some water. I could guzzle the entire town’s water supply, and my throat would still hurt. My chest would still feel the weight of everything that was coming.
“Talk to him,” Tracey suggested.
Laughable. “Sure. I’ll do that. That sounds like a fun time. ‘Hey, you know that girl you were friends with your whole life? Yeah, well she’s dead because of my dad, so…wanna make out?’”
Tracey sighed. “Maybe leave the make out part out of it?”
“It doesn’t matter, Trace. Whatever we had was gone.”
“It doesn’t have to be. He really likes you, Holly. You’ve never opened up to someone the way I’ve seen you do with him. Maybe he’ll understand.”
Such optimism. I almost felt bad crushing it.
“He was engaged to her, Tracey.”
Engaged or not didn’t matter. He still knew her.
He’d still cared about her.
Nothing I could do would change that, and once I told him the truth, nothing I could do would keep him.