Chapter 20
Briar
I chewed the edge of my thumb as I waited.
Diana’s text had been vague but urgent. Not a healthy combination in my opinion. I glanced at the phone again — no update.
I caught myself from pacing. I like to move when I’m restless, and I was definitely restless.
Had I ever felt calm since I got here? I don’t think I had.
“Hey.”
I turned and watched as Diana hurried up to me. She was wearing her PT uniform. With black leggings, a white polo shirt with the team’s logo, and a form-fitting zip-up jacket, she fit right into their program.
“What’s happening?” I demanded as we walked. “Do you know it isn’t even seven in the morning?”
Diana gave me a look that I knew well.
“Yes, Bri, I do. Because I just walked out of the stadium to see you.”
“Do they know you’re here?”
She shook her head. “No, I made sure all of them were on the field when I texted.”
The campus was quiet. It was seven a.m., after all. The students who were awake either had early classes, hadn’t gone to bed yet, or were simply insane.
“Talk to me,” I urged as I followed her around the back of one of the bigger buildings that hid us from the main quad’s sight.
“Noah and the wide receiver got sent to PT for IV drips this morning, and—”
“They did? Why?”
Diana ignored my question. “I was talking to TJ in the coffee station. And they walked in.”
“I thought you and him were keeping it cool at work?”
“Yeah, well, that was before he decided to take interviews for a job somewhere else and didn’t tell me,” she snapped.
“Okay, I get you’re pissed. I’m on your side, remember?”
She ignored me again. “We were talking, Matthews and Slater came in, I went to get them IV drips and left them.”
“Why did they need IVs?” He’d left me quite late. Did he go somewhere else? To someone else?
“Who cares?”
Right. That should be my answer too.
“I was only gone four, five minutes tops. I came back, and both of them looked pissed, and TJ walked out of there like a bear with a sore paw.”
“What happened?”
The look I received was not friendly.
“Jesus, Diana, will you dial it down? I’m not the one you’re mad at.” I thought about it. “Am I?”
“They didn’t tell me, the guys, I mean. So when I was done with them, I went and found TJ.”
“Because you weren’t done with him either?”
“Right. And he . . .” She shook her head, looking away from me, her eyes filling with tears. “He reminded me how disposable I am.”
“What?” I reached out and touched her arm, rubbing it gently. “That’s horrible.”
“I know.” She took a step back, breaking contact, hastily wiping her eyes. “He said those two knew more than they should, and they weren’t being careful. He told me that I need to be careful and stay away from them.”
I frowned. “But we have been.” I shook my head. “He was the asshole who put you on the QB in the first place!”
“Yeah, but not because of why we’re here. I think he wanted his golden boy far from the PT Doug to ensure he was properly treated. I don’t think he ever thought we’d be in the same conversation as we are now.”
“You told him they knew we knew they knew!” I was incredulous.
Diana gave me another flat stare. “No. I’m not stupid, but neither is he!”
I paced. It was time. I’d been still for too long. “So he suspects they’ve told you. And he knows Tiff was your family.” I felt like shit for asking. “Does he know about me?”
She shook her head. “No. I’ve kept our friendship quiet. Even when TJ and I are together, I keep the phone locked.”
“Your relationship sounds healthy.”
“Shut up, Briar.”
I didn’t say anything else. She’d heard my thoughts on her hooking up with one of the coaches before. TJ Hembry hadn’t been on the staff when Mason was there, but that didn’t absolve him of any crimes in my opinion. He was there now; he couldn’t possibly be blind to it all, and he stayed.
I didn’t give a damn if he was looking to leave. He’d been there for over three years. No way he wasn’t part of the rot.
“That’s all he said?” I asked her. “That you were disposable?”
She nodded. “But it was the way he said it. It was more than just about this job, it was . . . it felt like he meant it.”
“I think we all got that when he was interviewing out of state, Di.” Her look was so wounded, I felt like shit. “Sorry. I don’t always think things through before I speak,” I muttered.
“I have to get back,” she said, looking at her watch. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Dump him.”
Again with the look.
“For fuck’s sake, Diana. He’s going anyway. I don’t think you were ever going to be asked to go with him, and to say you’re disposable just underlines that in bold. He’s a shady shit. He’s been a shady shit from the beginning.”
“You’re letting your anger cloud your judgment.”
“Damn right I am! More importantly, why aren’t you? She was your cousin!”
Diana took another step back. “I knew this was a bad idea.”
I gaped at her. “What the fuck does that mean?”
She gave me a very Diana look — slightly patronizing and wholly superior. “I got this job on my own merit,” she reminded me. “I actually wanted to work here.”
“Because you’re crazy.”
“Because I want to make sure what happened to Tiff doesn’t happen to anyone else.”
“What happened to Tiff? Not what happened to Mason?”
She let out a loud sigh. “They’re the same thing.”
“They’re really not.”
She rubbed her forehead. “Look, let’s just . . .” She looked away again. “I think we’ve been a bit reckless in telling them what we know. Those guys are young, they’re uncontrolled, they’re not careful like we are.”
“You’re fucking one of the coaches.”
She gave me an icy stare.
“What? You were talking about being careful. So far, they’ve been more discreet than you have.”
“You’re defending them?”
“I’m not judging them. So far, they’ve been doing it right; they aren’t drawing attention to themselves.”
“You hate that I’m with TJ, but you said you knew it was separate.”
“How can it be?” I cried. “You let him into your bed, and from the way you’re reacting about being disposable, which he said to you, remember, you’ve let him into your heart.
You came here to learn more about what happened to your family.
You came here to make sure that the ones who looked the other way were looked into.
You didn’t come here for dick and a relationship! ”
“And how’s Matthews’ dick?”
I stared at her, stunned. “I wouldn’t know.” I took a deep breath. “And fuck you.”
“I’m going back to work. I think it’d be better if we kept our distance.”
“Yeah. Go.”
I watched her walk away, and I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or scream.
She’d always been flaky. Tiffany was younger than I was, and her cousin older, but somehow the loss of Tiffany had brought the two of us closer.
We had absolutely nothing in common, except what happened to Tiff and my brother.
We’d bonded over a Mai Tai and a bowl of pretzels in our hometown.
When I got the job here, I mentioned it to her. Since she’d also been looking to move, the opportunity appealed to her too. Despite the fact that the football program was a steaming shit pile, the athletics PT department at Wrighton U as a whole had an excellent reputation.
She’d been genuinely excited to get the job.
And unlike me, that excitement had been for different reasons. She’d agreed to keep me informed of anything unusual, but I don’t think she’d ever been actively looking.
Whereas I had been through every archive I could find.
I pulled my hair off my face. Then I checked my watch to see what time it was.
I got out of bed at six forty-five for this. To have some weird relationship drama conversation that shouldn’t have been her focus at all, and sure as hell wasn’t mine.
“Fuck.”
“Hi.”
I screamed. I’m not proud of it. I also jumped like a frightened rabbit. Again. Not my best moment.
“I didn’t mean to scare you.”
I looked at the brown-haired girl. Hadley.
“Well, you did.” I saw her eyes widen in surprise. “Sorry. I’m really not my best self in the morning.”
She held up a to-go cup and shook it. “Me neither. Need the caffeine first. I ran out at home.”
I looked around. She lived beside me, and the campus coffee shop was in the other direction.
“Why would you walk this way?”
If I sounded suspicious, it was because I was.
She flushed. “Oh, my boyfriend,” she paused, “huh, that still sounds weird. Anyway, that picture Dustin showed you of us, you know the one with his di—”
“I know the one, Hadley.”
She blushed again. “I think the angle of the shot was from the back of these buildings. So I took some this morning to compare, when no one was in the street, you know.” She shrugged. “I don’t want any funny looks. And when I was done, I needed coffee. Two birds, one stone kind of thing.”
She watched me. I watched her. Was that bullshit? It sounded conveniently bullshitty.
“What do you think?” She opened her photo app and showed me. Sure enough, she had about twenty pictures of our side street from different angles, all taken within the last thirty minutes.
“Believe me now?” she asked quietly.
I didn’t hide my smirk. “I’m naturally distrustful.”
“I get it.”
I looked at her. Maybe she did.
“You know you’re in college, right?” I looked her up and down, not in a bitchy way, but she was in jeans, a sweater, and her hair was tied back in a ponytail. “It’s really early, you should be sleeping because you were out at a party the night before.”
Hadley laughed. “The funny thing is I told Dustin to sleep in his own bed last night because I wanted a long lie with no distractions, and didn’t want him waking me up when his alarm went off for practice. Then my cat woke me up at five anyway for her breakfast.”
“Time to get rid of the cat,” I muttered. I saw her reaction and plastered on a smile. “Joking. Obviously.”
We stared at each other for a moment longer.
“So that explains why I’m lurking behind a building . . .” Hadley looked at me with expectation.
I looked down at my yoga pants, the T-shirt from last night, and knew I needed to lie.
“I was running.”
“From what?”
Wow. Excellent question. Also, suspicious much? “Exercise.”
“With your hair down?”
“Yeah, I like the way the breeze runs through it.”
Hadley looked at me for half a second before she burst out laughing. “Or just say ‘mind your own business, Hadley.’”
I grinned. “Mind your own business, Hadley.”
She smiled, and I felt myself relax a little. “Show me the picture again.” I held my hand out for her phone.
She wordlessly handed me the picture of her and Dustin together over the phone, and I did my best to avert my eyes as I focused on the angle and the lighting.
“Show me this morning’s pictures.”
“Oh, you can scroll, that’s the most incriminating picture I have in there.”
“Well, it’s a doozy,” I mumbled as I studied the ones she took this morning.
I flicked between them. “You’d need to recreate the lighting properly,” I said as I peered closer. “So it’s hard to say, but I’d say from the angle you’re at, and the way the shadows are, this was taken higher than ground level.”
Hadley took the phone back and spent a minute flicking as I had.
“Shit.” She looked back down the street. “He was sure it was from the library. He would have seen someone in the shadows watching us. I didn’t believe him.”
“To be fair, I’d doubt his other senses in that moment, too.” She glanced at me, and I semi-shrugged. “He was quite obviously focused on you, and what you were doing, I think a herd of pink elephants might have passed him then, and that guy wouldn’t have looked away.”
She looked pleased.
“Not sure that’s a compliment,” I reminded her gently. “I know I said you shouldn’t be awake so early because you’re in college, but there’s living a little, and then there’s recklessness.”
“You sound like a mom.” She looked up at me, startled. “You’re not, right?”
“Eh, no. I’m about two years older than you, Hadley.”
“So you’re twenty-four?”
Damn it.
“No, erm, sorry, I thought you were twenty-one.”
“So that would be three years. But you said two.”
I nodded, wetting my lips, breaking eye contact. “Journalism is definitely your calling, girl.”
She positively beamed at me.
“Right, well, I think you need to go get that coffee, right? I’d try the second floor of the library. And I need to go to work. So . . . bye.”
I started to walk away.
“You live that way?”
Fuck. I did not want her to know I was in the next building. “Kind of.”
“Huh.” She hesitated. “Okay, bye.”
“Bye.”
I walked away, and she called me back.
“Hey, Briar?”
I turned. “Yes, Hadley?”
“Are you okay?”
“What? Why would you ask me that?” I took a few steps forward.
“Earlier, when I met you, you looked upset, and you know, you swore in the street.”
“I swear a lot.”
She smiled. “Me too, but you know . . .”
“Hadley, I know what?” I was beginning to lose my patience.
“What you’re doing is risky, I know you know that, and you’re not messing around, and they’ve already proven they aren’t either. I just want you to know, you’re not alone in this.”
I believed her. That was the problem. I watched her watch me. Was she offering me friendship? It was lonely here, but still . . . “I’ll be okay.” I gave her a small smile. “Practice what you preach, Hadley. They don’t fuck around, and you haven’t graduated yet.”
“You told Noah to transfer. You think I should?”
I considered it. “I don’t know what the heck I said, I’m not here to give any of you advice.” I needed to put a stop to this. “I’m not here for any of you at all. I don’t care about you.”
Her smile vanished, and she gave me a curt nod. “Right, I . . . I’ll be seeing you.”
“Hopefully not.”
I turned and walked away, and her words floated down to me.
“I hope they don’t see you either, Briar. Be careful. Remember what they’ve already gotten away with.”
I hesitated for one moment.
As if I could ever forget.