Chapter 16
Sixteen
Everly
“You look terrible.”
Julia McMillan is not a woman who sugarcoats.
It’s what makes her a great lawyer. And it’s what makes her a great best friend.
Because while everyone else’s friends will look them dead in the eye and tell them their terrible haircut looks great, mine will be in the trenches, fighting for punitive damages.
She doesn’t hold back. She read every draft of my first novel, back when I still wrote he said/she said religiously after every line of dialogue.
“I look fine,” I grumble, popping the lid off my H?agen-Dazs as I flop back onto the sofa, my phone propped up on the coffee table.
Julia raises a brow from her side of the phone. “You’re wearing the same pajamas from Monday.”
“These are different pajamas.”
“I can see the hot-sauce stain on the left sleeve. It was there Monday. It was there yesterday. It is there today. You are wearing a timeline.”
“It’s called water conservation, Julia. I’m saving the earth, one missed load of laundry at a time.”
“Have you left the house?”
“I went to the mailbox.”
“The mailbox is twelve feet from your door.”
“Twelve feet is a significant distance,” I respond around another spoonful of double fudge cookie dough.
Julia’s face softens. The lawyer giving way to the friend—the friend who knows my side of the story that’s been running rampant across every local news station this week, because I called her at 7:45 a.m. on Sunday from the back of an ambulance and told her everything in a voice that was ninety percent smoke inhalation and ten percent heartbreak.
“He’s an idiot,” she says. “A complete, weapon-grade idiot. Are you sure you don’t want me to come over? I could—” She squints, glancing at something on her desk. “Oof. Actually, I’ve got court today, so—”
“I’m okay.”
“No, you’re not. That slimeball hurt you, and when I get a minute—just, like, any two-hour block where I’m not booked for a deposition or—”
“Julia. Stop—” My voice breaks. The crack that keeps coming back, threatening to break me apart whenever I think of his icy-blue eyes catching mine across the parking lot. Right after, of course, he said those words: She’s nothing.
Yeah, I can’t unhear that. It found my soul.
And I can’t keep talking about it. “I’m fine. I’m eating. I’m vertical.”
“And I love that for you, babe. I do. But”—Julia’s voice drops, pulling her punch in a very uncharacteristic way—“you also need to shower. And maybe eat something with a different food group in it.”
Yikes. I must really be in bad shape if she’s doing that.
“And then…you should probably just bite the bullet and answer your dad’s texts.”
“Oh yeah? And then what? Should I start a fund to stop world hunger? Solve the problem of self-sustaining energy?” It comes out a little crazed, my spoon waving in the air, nearly dripping on my hair. “Maybe let’s just pick one, Julia. Shower, eat, or deal with my dad.”
“How many times has he texted?”
I sigh. “Eight.” The texts sit unopened, hanging out in my notifications like a black spot.
Dad
Evie, we need to talk. Come by the house. Please.
“And you haven’t responded.”
“No. He keeps asking me to come over, but…I just can’t…”
“Maybe because you’re afraid of what he’ll say about Beckett.”
And there it is—the nail hit on the head. The nagging, etching fear in the corner of my mind. The reason for the pajamas and ice cream. Beckett. My dad’s star player.
I can hear his voice—the coach voice—sitting me down like I’m one of the team. Beckett can’t afford any distractions right now. Whatever’s going on between you two, it needs to end.
Take one for the team, Everly. Beckett’s needs are more important. Always.
Julia tilts her head, her voice softening as though she knows exactly what’s going on inside my head. “Go,” she says. “Whatever the conversation is, you need to have it. Because hiding in your house eating ice cream is not doing for you what you think it is.”
“When did you become a therapist?”
“I’ve always been your therapist.” She winks. “Go. Shower first. And for the love of all that’s good, change your shirt.”
The drive takes twenty-two minutes, and I almost turn around three times.
The first time is at the on-ramp. A phone call accomplishes the same communicative objectives without requiring eye contact.
The second time is at the exit. Maybe I just put it off until the news cycle dies and the sound of his laughter stops echoing over every new station.
She should have stuck to the stands, if you know what I mean.
The first knife to the chest.
The third time I nearly abandon my quest and hightail it home is in Dad’s driveway. I sit with the engine running and my hands at ten and two, white-knuckled.
This shouldn’t be so hard.
I let out a breath, drop my head against the wheel, count to ten.
A text comes in.
Aw, he’s seen me. Probably. I don’t look at the text, but I turn off the engine.
My dad answers the door. Six foot two. More silver on his temples than gray. He looks bone weary, dark bags under his eyes. Three days of image management has really done a number on him.
But underneath the tired, there’s something else. An expression I don’t recognize from the sidelines or the game tape. It’s not a part of the Coach Hart archives.
“Come in, Evie.”
He leads me to the study. The old sanctuary.
The place I’d find him night after night, diagramming plays after a practice.
I used to love this room, used to love reading in that old leather chair with a juice box and the absolute certainty that the world was safe because my father was in it.
At least, before he got the house in the divorce and Mom and I left to go live in a cramped apartment.
Same desk. Same leather chair. Same smell—coffee and paper.
But the desk is covered in something I don’t expect.
ARCs. Advance reader copies, bound and cover-design ready. Not just one—a stack. Dog-eared, spine-cracked, the wear pattern of books that have been loved, not displayed. I recognize the covers before the titles—simple, one solid color, title in Times New Roman.
My advanced reader copies.
My books. All of them. Every E.J. Hartley. Every Sutton Blake.
A copy of Breakaway lies open across the desk. And it’s covered—almost bleeding—in handwriting I would recognize from space.
My father’s handwriting, angular and only half legible, scrawled in the margins of my novel.
Hero needs to show vulnerability earlier—readers need the wound before the wall.
This villain is too smart for this mistake in Ch. 12. Revisit.
The letter scene is the best thing you’ve written. Don’t change a word.
“Where did you get these?” I ask, my heart suddenly racing.
My dad rounds his desk, leans against the sideboard behind his chair, hands stuffed into his pockets. His eyes seem to skim over the books, as though hoping to find the words somewhere inside them.
“I have something I need to tell you, and I don’t know how to other than just to…tell you.”
He turns his computer screen toward me. And the room tilts.
The screen is open to his email, set to a folder titled S. Anderson. The contents extend down, every email filed from the last three years.
S. Anderson. The anonymous beta reader who’s given me some of the most valuable, honest feedback of my career.
Of E.J.’s career…and Sutton’s. Feedback so insightful I once told my editor: I don’t know who this person is, but they understand my books better than I do. I got them on the ARC list early days.
I thought it was clever, really. S. Anderson—probably for Sherwood Anderson, the writing coach of Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and even Jack London.
S. Anderson is my dad.
I can’t breathe, my chest squeezing as I try to make sense of the information.
“You know about Sutton Blake.” The words wheeze from my lungs, every fundamental thing I knew about my father crumbling before my eyes. “How long have you known?”
“Since Frigid,” he says, quoting the earliest variation of my debut romance, Too Cold for Love. The one that started chapter by chapter on an internet blog and eventually landed me an agent and a contract. (It’s languishing in some used bookstore somewhere. Don’t go look for it—it’s not very good.)
“After your mother left, and you with her, I felt like I didn’t know you anymore.
I didn’t know what was going on with your life.
So when your mother mentioned that you were writing, I did some research.
” A ghost of a smile touches his face. “It wasn’t too hard.
E.J. was easy to find. She didn’t seem to be hiding too much. ”
That’s true. I was never really hiding E.J. Not from him, at least. The wig and the makeup, that was all branding. I remember giving him a signed copy from my first print run, remember how proud he looked—proud, but not surprised.
Right. That makes sense now.
“Sutton took a little longer,” he says, his gaze running over the books again. “It was a few months back—the Blue Ox practice rink was under maintenance, so we practiced back at Sutton, and I decided to stop by Blue Line Books, see how your inventory was looking. I was a proud dad, what can I say?”
He reaches for a book in the pile, the spine nearly nonexistent. Floppy. Worn. He hands it to me.
It’s a first edition Breakaway, from the very first print run, a special edition with the “Dear Reader” note in the front cover.
“This one caught my eye on the way out—Sutton Blake. I don’t how I knew, but I did.”
My fingers trail those little white stripes down the spine, my heart racing. “And you never said anything?”
“You used pen names for a reason. I thought you didn’t want me to know.” He looks at me. “I’ve coached enough players who use their jersey as a mask to know what it looks like when someone is terrified of being seen.”
The words land where my eleven-year-old self lives—desperate to be seen, terrified of being unwanted.