Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Maddy didn’t know exactly where she was going or what she was looking for, but if she knew Bunny Sterling, she’d know it when she saw it.
And sure enough, there it was—twenty yards off. A large slab of granite covered in dressings—flower vases, flower wreaths, framed photos, two candles in little hurricane jars, and a potted succulent. It had Bunny Sterling written all over it.
Maddy slowed as she approached, her heart going harder with every step. She made herself keep moving. Ten feet. Five. And then she was standing in front of it, and there was his name, engraved in the granite: JAMES STERLING.
“Hey, Dad.” She looked down at the headstone, hot tears stinging her eyes. “I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to come visit.”
A bird went off somewhere in the distance, and she pulled in a shaky breath. It was early enough that the marine layer hadn’t burned off yet and the only sounds were the sprinklers ticking somewhere off to her left.
She dug the gold medal out of her pocket, with its red-white-and-blue striped ribbon, and ran her thumb over the face of it.
“I won the Cup.” A wet laugh came up.
“You’d love what Mom’s done with it. It’s a full-scale, three-day production now.
She awarded herself an MVP trophy at the awards ceremony last night and didn’t even compete in the games.
Then she hosted a Championship Feast with a banner that said, and I quote, for victors, vanquished, and those who intend to contest the judges’ rulings in writing, which I’m pretty sure was mostly aimed at Glenda.
” She laughed and wiped the wetness from her eyes.
She shook her head, smiling at the medal, at the whole ridiculous production. It had been the most fun she’d had in fifteen years.
“I was on the same team as Aspen St. Claire, if you can believe it.” She huffed.
“We’re … well, I don’t really know what we are, but it’s been…
kind of amazing, actually.” She got quieter.
“She’s kind of amazing. I guess I just don’t know what to do with that.
I have to be back in LA in eight days, and…
our worlds are just so different. These past six weeks haven’t been real.
I mean, they’ve been real, but they just haven’t been my life.
Not really. Especially not with my new job.
Oh—yeah. I got a promotion. A big one. Co-Executive Producer of Marooned & Merciless. ”
She could practically hear him whooping with glee. “Aspen says you’d be proud of me.” Her voice went quiet again. “I know you would’ve been.”
Her vision blurred, and tears rolled down her cheeks.
“God, I wish you were here to tell me what to do.” It came out thick. “I like her, Dad. I like her a lot. I’ve never felt like this about anybody in my life, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with eight days.”
She wiped her face and stared at the framed photo near the base of the stone, some beach shot of him squinting into the sun, and let out a short, wet breath.
“Did you know? That she had feelings for me in high school?” She shook her head. “It feels like one of those things you would’ve noticed long before I did and patiently waited for me to catch up.”
She laughed again, and it cracked in the middle.
“I don’t know how I didn’t see it. I mean, I do—I was blinded by fury and determination and my relentless need to win.” Maddy huffed and shook her head at herself. “I just feel like I wasted so much time being angry.”
Her brows came down and she squinted at the granite through a fresh sheen of tears. Then she said the part she never thought she’d say out loud.
“I was angry at you, too, you know?” Her jaw went tight.
“Before. For always egging Mom on. For lighting up every time she stepped into the room, like she was the best part of every day. And after.” She closed her eyes briefly.
“God, after, I was so angry at you for dying. For not leaving work that day five minutes earlier. For running late the one time it truly mattered. For being on that road at all, because you were coming to watch me.”
Her breath broke apart, the tears coming freely now.
It had been fifteen years and twenty-five days since her father died on his way to Maddy’s graduation.
He had called that day to say he was stuck at the office and would meet them at the stadium. He promised he wouldn’t be late, and Maddy knew he wouldn’t be. He had never broken a promise to her.
When the ceremony began, Maddy kept peering over her shoulder at the empty seat next to Bunny.
Bunny had made a GO MADDY sign in glitter that she had been holding over her head since the moment she’d sat down.
At some point during the opening speeches, she’d set the sign down and picked up her phone instead.
The principal gave some opening remarks, and Aspen gave her salutatorian speech, and Maddy hadn’t heard a word of any of it.
She’d been watching the seat, the entrance, and Bunny’s expression as she stared at her phone.
Then she heard her name being called and realized it was her turn.
She walked up to the stage and put on a brave face to deliver the valedictorian speech she’d had memorized for four years. She’d gotten halfway through it when she heard the sirens.
She’d stood up at that podium in front of the whole graduating class and her voice had thinned out to nothing, and she’d found her mother’s face in the crowd, phone down now, giving Maddy a small helpless shrug across two hundred folding chairs. And Maddy had known something was wrong.
Aspen had caught her arm after she came down the steps from the stage and started up the aisle, asking if she was okay. Maddy had no memory of answering. She’d marched straight towards Bunny and asked if she’d heard from him.
She hadn’t. She said they’d drive to his office the second Maddy had her diploma in hand, take the same road he would have taken to get to the stadium. Maddy said no, they needed to go now. So they went.
Maddy had left the stadium without her diploma, and the second they saw the flashing lights ahead of them, her heart sank.
She had hoped he just got stuck on the other side of the accident that had closed down both lanes, and then she saw his car, or what was left of it, in front of an eighteen-wheeler.
The semi driver had fallen asleep at the wheel and plowed through a red light, slamming straight into the driver’s side of her dad’s car. He’d been killed instantly, the police had said.
“I couldn’t take it, Dad.” She said, her vision blurry, cheeks wet.
“Whe you died, I—I couldn’t take it. Any of it.
The casseroles, the looks, the hands on my shoulders, the line of people telling me what a wonderful man you were and how much you loved me, as if I didn’t know.
It was suffocating. I couldn’t breathe.”
She wiped her face with the heel of her hand.
“So I left. I called the school and asked to start the summer program early, and when they told me the deadline had passed, I told them my dad had just died. Which was true. And which got me in.” A short, ugly laugh.
“Only time I ever played that card, for the record.”
She hadn’t planned to ghost everyone. She really hadn’t.
But every time a name lit up her phone—Noa, Jake, Olly, anyone from the island—it felt like a gut punch, stealing the air from her lungs all over again.
So she’d blocked the numbers. Buried her grief under coursework and school clubs and student films and being somewhere that didn’t have him in it.
She never told a single soul in LA about her father.
“I never let myself miss you,” she said flatly, using her sleeve to wipe her nose.
“Not once in fifteen years. I got so good at not thinking about you that I almost forgot I was doing it. Until Mom faked a life-and-death emergency and dragged me back here and suddenly you were everywhere again. Every street. Every—” She gestured at nothing, at all of it, the whole island.
“And I couldn’t face it. Face you. It was too much.
So I just didn’t.” She looked down at the medal still in her hands.
“But then…the Cup happened. And Aspen happened. And she made me feel safe. And I talked about you for the first time since you’ve been gone.
And I realized it felt good to talk about you.
To remember you. It still hurt like hell, but I did it, and the world didn’t fall apart. I didn’t fall apart.”
She looked at his photo again and let herself remember him.
“I’m sorry.” Her throat closed around the words. She pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth and breathed through it. “I’m so sorry. You deserved better.”
She dropped her head back, face to the sky, eyes closed, and took a deep breath. When she exhaled, she opened her eyes and landed them back on her father’s name.
Her eyes drifted to the epitaph underneath.
The heart of our family, the soul of our community, the forever champion of our games.
Maddy let out a huff of air. It was such a Bunny thing to write on her husband’s tombstone.
She stood there for a while longer, not saying anything. Then finally, she slid the medal back into her pocket where she could feel the weight of it against her hip. She reached out and pressed two fingers to the cold top of the stone. “I love you, Dad.”
She turned and walked back across the lawn toward her car, feeling completely hollowed out and about a thousand pounds lighter.
* * *
Maddy drove home with the radio off and let the plan crystalize in her mind.
She was going to walk in that front door and demand answers. Her mother was dating her father’s best friend. And she deserved an explanation. No, her father deserved an explanation. And since he wasn’t around to get one for himself, Maddy would do it for him.
Maddy knew that a single visit after fifteen years didn’t exactly exonerate her own shitty behavior towards her father, and that maybe she was being slightly hypocritical. Slightly. But she didn’t care.