by Roni Loren
Liv sighed and shut the door—too emotionally exhausted to argue—and followed them into the kitchen.
“It was like watching two friends getting on a plane that you know doesn’t have enough fuel,” Kincaid said, setting her bag on the counter. “We couldn’t tell you to not take the trip, but we knew there’d be a crash landing at the end.”
Rebecca frowned as her attention skimmed over Liv’s bedraggled state—wrinkled clothes from yesterday, and her face was probably a puffy mess. Rebecca let out a huff. “So he left.”
Liv pressed her lips together, willing herself to hold it together, and nodded. But the tears wouldn’t be denied. Her eyes filled up again, even though she would’ve bet good money that she had none left after last night.
“Oh, Liv,” Taryn said, setting the coffee down and coming to her side. “Come here, girl.”
Taryn put her arm around her, and Liv fought her instincts to lock all of the emotions up tight, to ask them to leave, to hide. Instead, she let herself lean into Taryn and be led to a chair. Her friends surrounded her, offering her tissues for her tears, shoulders to lean on, and cake.
Because that was what friends did.
And somehow Liv now had some to call her own.
In between sniveling, Liv relayed the story. Not every detail but the basics. Love. Work. Fighting. Leaving. Gone.
When Liv had finally gotten it all out and regained some of her composure, the women took seats around the kitchen table with her.
Kincaid set the chocolate Bundt cake in the middle and pushed a cup of coffee and the bottle of Irish Cream Liv’s way. “So you told him you were fine with a summer-only romance, and then you freaked out when he told you he had to leave?”
“Basically,” Liv said miserably, taking the coffee to warm her chilled hands but ignoring the cake and alcohol. She hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before, but she didn’t have the stomach to handle food or liquor. “I totally reneged on the deal. I wasn’t fair.”
Kincaid shrugged and cut a slice of cake. “Nah, it sounds like a legit reaction to me. Those types of deals are null and void once someone says I love you. That’s in the fine print.”
“Agreed.” Rebecca poured a shot into her own coffee. “That breaks the contract.”
“But it doesn’t.” Liv ran her finger around the rim of her coffee cup. “I doubled down on the deal after the l-word. I was all I’m a badass woman who can totally handle this. It’s better to have loved and lost than blah-blah bullshit. What the hell was I thinking?”
Taryn gave her a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. “You were thinking, I’m in love, and we’ll figure something out.”
“Apparently figuring something out meant simultaneously asking me to marry him and announcing he was leaving.”
“Shit,” Kincaid said, forkful of cake stalling halfway to her mouth. “He asked you to marry him?”
Liv closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose, her headache turning into the icepick-to-the-temple variety. “Sort of. He said if he didn’t think it was selfish, he’d ask me to marry him and to wait for him to come home.”
“Damn.” Rebecca shook her head. “Maybe he was listening that night I talked to him.”
“That would be selfish, though,” Kincaid said. “That’s asking a lot.”
“But kind of crazy romantic, too,” Taryn said. Their attention all flicked her way, and she gave an apologetic shrug. “I mean, a little bit, right?”
“No.” Kincaid shook her head. “I’m all for romance, but waiting for a guy to come home from what’s basically war is only romantic in the movies. In real life, that has to be horrible. Always wondering if he’s okay, if he’s going to come back, never getting to talk to him the whole time he’s gone.”
“Yeah, that’s real stress,” Rebecca agreed.
“But what if someone’s worth the wait? What if that person is the person for you?” Taryn asked. “Like soul-mate stuff.”
Rebecca gave her a skeptical look. “Don’t tell me you believe there’s only one person out there for everyone.”
“I don’t know,” Taryn said, not backing down. “But what if there is? I mean, I can’t imagine how hard it would be to wait for someone you love in that situation, all that unknown, but I also get why Finn wished Liv would. He thinks Liv’s his one. He won’t ask her to make that sacrifice because he loves her so much. That is romantic.”
Liv’s muscles cinched tight and the words dug in, opening wounds.
For the first time, it hit her that Finn was going through this, too. She didn’t doubt he loved her. He was choosing work, but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel the loss of her. He was going into a dangerous situation one hundred percent alone again, with no one to come back to. Would he be reckless again? Go back to that angry, isolated man he’d been? Cut himself off from the world?
The loving, playful man who had emerged over the last two months would be lost, maybe for good. Images of Finn flickered through her mind. The two of them skipping rocks on the lake. Him tossing her over his shoulder and making her laugh. Finn smiling down at her in bed and telling her he loved her back.
A fist of anguish gripped her heart. She groaned and put her head in her hands, all out of tears but stocked to the rafters with self-pity. “Why couldn’t he just stay?”
Rebecca rubbed Liv’s back in gentle circles. “This part will get better. It’s fresh now, but I promise, it will get better.”
Liv shook her head, wishing she could believe it.
“She’s right,” Kincaid said, reaching out to take her hand across the table. “If nothing else, Long Acre taught us some things. We know we’ve survived worse. And we’re pros at saying goodbye.”
Liv lifted her gaze, finding Kincaid’s smile sad.
“That’s right,” Taryn said, adding her hand to the pile. “We are badass motherfucking survivors.”
Liv smiled at that.
“And you don’t have to go through this alone,” Rebecca added, placing her hand on top their stacked ones. “We’ve got this. Together.”
Liv glanced around the table, the determined and loving looks on her friends’ faces seeping into her like sunlight on her skin. These women were fierce and tough and brave. And for the first time in longer than she could remember, she realized she was one of them. Those words applied to her, too.
Finn had told her he hoped she got something out of this summer besides heartbreak. He meant the house. A new job.
But she’d gotten so much more than that.
She’d found these women.
Her tribe.
And maybe, just maybe, her way back home after all.
She took a deep breath and slipped her hand from beneath theirs. “I’ve got to go.”
“What?” Kincaid’s brows lifted. “Where?”
Liv pushed her chair back. “There’s something left in my letter that I haven’t done.”
chapter
TWENTY-SEVEN
Liv stared between the familiar buildings, her heartbeat a rapid staccato against her ribs. She swallowed past the tension in her throat and gripped the crinkled paper in her hand. No one would be here today. If she panicked, at least she could do it in private.
She let her gaze fall to the sidewalk. This part of the school had never been redone. When the concrete had been laid, the original class of 1982 had pressed shoe prints into it, initials carved beside each one. A small plaque had been embedded at the start of the walk. THE FIRST STEPS TO YOUR FUTURE START HERE.
The message was supposed to be hopeful, but Liv knew it offered no guarantee. Many people’s futures had started here. Many had ended.
It was a tradition as a freshman at Long Acre to see which shoe print fit yours best and then to try to guess via the initials which student of the original class was your match. Were you destined to be the next football s
tar if you matched 1982’s Michael John’s giant print? Were you going to be the class president if you matched Claire Connell’s? Liv took a few steps and found her match. V. M.—she’d known for sure who her match was without checking the graduation pic on the wall. Valerie Moreno. Her mamá. Liv lined her foot up with the print.
Back then, she wouldn’t have said she wanted to end up like her mother. A woman who’d gotten married young and who’d never left her small town. But after seeing what her mother had gone through, seeing her fight, how she kept her spirits and hope throughout, Liv knew she’d be lucky to have half the inner toughness her mother had. She squatted down and ran her fingers over the initials. Would her mom be proud of who Liv had become?
Liv thought she’d been doing right by her mom with her former job. Being practical. Staying out of trouble. But now she’d realized she’d been living in a protective shell the whole time. Her mom had probably been shaking her head. She could almost hear her voice in her ears. Life is short and precious, Oli. Do something with yours.
Liv stood, her eyes misty, and let her gaze travel down the rest of the walkway. The sunlight was streaming through the buildings, angling across the place she most feared. With a deep breath, she forced her legs forward, her sandals quiet as she crossed over the rest of the footprints.
The first steps to your future start here.
The sound of the small fountain that sat in the corner of the memorial courtyard hit her first. Her fingers tightened around the paper in her left hand. She straightened her spine, determined not to let the panic in, and took the last few steps. On the way to the documentary interview, she’d had to avoid this place. She would not look away this time.
The space was more beautiful than she’d expected. A garden of wildflowers lined the path, and there were benches of natural stone. The back wall had the names of the victims etched into it in a neat, square font. But what caught her eye was the wall adjacent to it. The entire wall was smooth concrete covered in blackboard paint. In the center, metal words had been embedded: LOVE NEVER ENDS. But it wasn’t those words that had her drawing closer and holding her breath. Instead, it was what surrounded them.
Endless messages written in chalk on every inch of the board. And as she got closer, she realized they were not messages to those who had died, which had probably been the original intent, but messages to current students from other students. Compliments, encouragement, congratulations, thank-you’s. Nice things about their classmates.
Jess Sands has the prettiest eyes.
No one rocks a spelling bee like Keisha Biggs.
Clay Rogers wears awesome T-shirts.
Love.
Messages of love in a high school environment where tearing each other down was the norm. In every way, it was a big, fat middle finger to the shooters who had walked these halls with guns and hate. They’d had a mission to go after the happy ones. Well, the happy ones were thriving here. Liv pressed her hand against the wall, her eyes watery but a swelling sense of pride inside her. This was her school, her town, her home. Not all had been lost that night.
Not all had been lost within her.
Her eyes went back to the message at the center. LOVE NEVER ENDS.
Vaguely, she remembered it was part of a Bible quote, but as she traced her fingers over the metal lettering, the truth of it settled into her.
She’d never stopped loving this place, her friends, or her mother just because they were gone from her life. And she’d never stop loving Finn.
Not back then. And not now.
Love just was.
She let her arm fall to her side and made her way farther down the path until she reached the wall of names. Panic tried to climb up her throat, but she swallowed past it. She was stronger than that instinct. She lowered herself onto the bench in front of the wall, and her eyes traveled over each name.
With each one, she tried to picture the person. Some were just glimpses, snapshots from passing people in the hallway or yearbook photos. Some she remembered clearly. Brenna Carlson who sat next to her in English and always read aloud under her breath instead of silently. Zoe Redmond who used to swap music magazines with Liv and introduced her to some of her favorite bands. Curtis Beacher who had asked Liv on her very first date, which had turned out to be playing video games followed by an awkward kiss that tasted like Twizzlers.
Tears tracked down her cheeks, but she smiled at the memories. If she had ended up on that wall, she wondered what people would remember of her. Crazy hair colors. Artsy. Shitty attitude.
Fortunately, she didn’t have to know. She’d been one of the lucky ones. And for the first time, the full weight of what that meant settled on her. She could still change her story. There was no ending on her pages yet. No name etched in stone.
She opened the letter that Finn had returned to her and ran her eyes over it again, her gaze lingering on the last line. I promise, Class of 2005, to live the life that scares me.
Time to really keep that promise, not just pay lip service to it.
She wiped away her tears, stood, and walked over to the fountain. Her rippled reflection stared back at her—changed but not as far from the girl who used to walk these halls as she thought. She smiled back at herself, ripped up the letter, and tossed the pieces into the water, watching as the ink bled along the paper and the old loose-leaf disintegrated in the bubbling water.
Love never ends. But fear could.
She pulled her phone out of her pocket and typed.
chapter
TWENTY-EIGHT
Finn shifted in the first-class airplane seat and tried not to bump Billings’s coffee out of his hand. The flight attendants had already closed the doors and were making the preflight announcements to make sure everyone’s electronic devices were off and seat belts were fastened, but Finn’s heart was pounding like he was a nervous flier. He couldn’t get the image out of his head of Liv by the lake, begging him to stay. He’d almost called her a hundred times since he’d walked out, but he didn’t know what to say to make this better. He had a duty. He’d made a promise.
He clenched his jaw, trying to force down that burning in his chest, and flipped through the file Billings had thrust into his hand for in-air reading. He needed distraction. Needed to remember why he was doing this.
The first few pages were write-ups of the crimes that had been committed with weapons traced back to this organization. He’d expected to see the standard list of gun-related crimes: robberies, street violence, domestic stuff. But instead the list had a distinct trend. Crimes committed by teens. The Long Acre shooting was one of the earliest ones. But others had followed. A fifteen-year-old in Kentucky who’d killed his family. A seventeen-year-old who’d shot his boss at the movie theater where he worked on weekends. Another school shooting in Florida.
Finn frowned. “These guys have a specific market.”
Billings grunted. “Yeah, kids with enough money and smarts to find what they need on the internet. We haven’t figured out the exact method, but somehow they find the kids using keywords and then offer to help. Of course, they do the actual deal and exchange offline. We haven’t figured out the logistics of that yet. That’s one of the things we need you for.”
Finn flipped through a few more pages. “Have we posed as a teen needing that kind of help online?”
He nodded. “We’ve tried. No bites. They haven’t been operating this without being exceptionally savvy. We suspect they know they’re on our radar. That’s what’s going to make it so tough to get you in. We need to be very precise about how we do that, and I need you one hundred percent focused. Any chink in your cover, and they’ll shoot first, ask questions later.”
“Great.” Finn ran a hand through his hair. There was nothing more dangerous than trying to infiltrate a group that already suspected someone was on to them. Normally, that wouldn’t faze him, but for the first time i
n longer than he could remember, a thread of unease curled up his spine.
He’d lived in dangerous situations for years. One slipup, one wrong move, and your cover was blown—and so were your chances of getting out alive. He’d thrived on that adrenaline, on knowing he could outsmart criminals. If he died trying, that was part of the deal. He’d accepted that a long time ago. But now the idea didn’t settle so easily in his head.
“Be honest, boss,” he said, looking Billings’s way. “Suicide mission?”
Lines appeared in Billings’s face, his gaze serious. “If you had asked me that a few months ago, I would’ve said yes. You were looking for a reason to go down in a blaze of glory. This mission will provide opportunity for that. You could have the hero’s death. Agent avenges his classmates in one last heroic face-off.”
The words made Finn’s stomach hollow out.
“But that’s why I forced you to take this break,” Billings said, voice gruff. “You’ve earned this opportunity to go after them, but I need you to do it with your head on straight and your priorities in check. And from what I saw and heard over the last few weeks, you found the secret weapon that will help get you through this alive.”
“Secret weapon?”
Billings patted Finn’s arm, and his lips lifted at the corners. “You reconnected with your family and friends. I saw those pictures with you, your mom, and your sister. You’re not going to want to break their hearts by going and getting yourself killed. You have people waiting for you to get back.”
Finn leaned back in his seat, snapshots of the summer drifting through his mind. His sister throwing her arms around him. His mother telling him about her new business idea. Of course, that was motivation enough. He didn’t want to hurt his family.
But his mind zeroed in on another part of that picture. The girl behind the camera in those photos.
Liv.
Smiling his way. Making him laugh. Curling up next to him at night.
A bone-deep ache settled into him. She wouldn’t be waiting for him when he got home. He didn’t blame her. It was too much to ask, especially when he didn’t know how long he’d be gone. Or if he’d make it back. She’d been through enough hurt, and he didn’t want to add to it.