“Ugh, just promise me you won’t go with the it-style of the moment. I think I’ve burned most of the pictures of my wedding. The bow-sash … the horror.” Penelope cringes next to me, and we all giggle at her.
I’m glad she’s part of this process, too. Who thinks, when they walk down the aisle and marry their forever man, that they’ll be a widow before they’re thirty? It’s a fate no one should ever have to face.
But I’m glad she’s smiling and joking … even if I do know how much of a cover-up it is to mask her emotions.
“No, I’m thinking strapless mermaid, with a bit of lace. I don’t work on these arms at my studio for nothing, I’m here to show these guns off on the big day.” Presley makes an impressive muscle.
“You deserve it.” I nod, agreeing with her. “Class the other day was like a spiritual revelation … you’re doing a great job.”
Presley blushes, her pale skin unable to hide any sort of reaction to a compliment. “Thanks, mama. Honestly, I owe it all to you. If you hadn’t pushed along and organized that first class in the park through the library …”
I wave her off. “Pushing people to do what I know will make them successful is part of the job description.”
She laughs and I join her. It’s true though; I love my job because it’s not just about books and rigid organization … although that side of being a librarian checks all my type A boxes. I truly do enjoy recommending reads to a person, whether it be for pleasure or, more likely, so that they can excel at something. A high school student researching for a paper, a mother who wants to learn a new dish, someone stuck in their career trying to find a new passion project … these are all things you can use books for. Basically, what I’m trying to say, is that books are magical.
“How do you feel about pink?” Penelope asks our bride.
“The same way you feel about spring break with all three of your kids at home.” Presley chuckles, taking a sip of her champagne.
Our resident mother warrior shudders. “Don’t even joke about that. It’s like surviving a nuclear fallout. There is cereal and poop and Legos everywhere.”
I have to laugh at this because I’ve babysat those boys and they sure are a handful. “But at the end of the day, you have three little faces loving up at you.”
Penelope nods. “That’s right. I popped three humans out of my vagina for built-in love. It’s not the worst plan … honestly, most mothers would be lying if they said that wasn’t an incentive of ruining said vagina.”
“Good lord.” I feel the blush steal over my face.
“Oh, come on, Lil … don’t act so innocent. You know you’d love some good attention south of the border.” Penelope waggles her eyebrows at me.
Instantly, my whole body is scarlet. “I … uh …”
“When is the last time you went on a date?” Presley slaps her magazine shut, and I wish this tangent hadn’t gotten us off topic.
“Not in a long time.” I smile.
“But the last guy she saw for a little … my God! He was like something out of nineteen fifties Hollywood.”
Thinking of Clive, I smile. “He was a good guy, but …”
Penelope snickers.
“What? What’s so funny?” Presley whips her head back and forth between us.
“What our conservative friend isn’t telling you is that gorgeous Clive had no idea how to find her clit. He couldn’t locate that thing with a flashlight and a search and rescue team at his disposal.”
I have to crack up at this, because sadly, for both him and I, it was true. “Oh my God … I don’t mean to be insensitive because he was so nice, but … not even Google Maps could save that man.”
“Lily! Who are you and what have you done with the senator’s daughter?” Presley howls.
Penelope starts waving her finger around in the air. “I don’t understand what’s so difficult about it. We have a button, right at the top, full of nerves. It literally sticks out just for them to find. Some men, I swear!”
We all dissolve into a fit of snorts and a cacophony of howling laughter, and it feels so good to belly laugh that I can forget all about what almost happened last night.
Presley gets her breathing back under control after laughing so hard she’s almost gasping for breath. “Back to wedding things and off the topic of everyone’s coochy. I think we have the dress style nailed down, and I have a photographer I’m meeting with in Lancaster next week. I think Keaton and I have decided … the reception has to be in Bloomsbury Park. He’s adamant about getting married in the church but gave me free rein for the party. There is just too much history between us not to do it there. By the lake, that cute little gazebo, the summer sun …”
I brush off the gazebo comment because I can’t even let those thoughts filter in or I’ll cry.
“Wait, the summer sun?” I eye her suspiciously.
A sheepish look steals over her expression. “So … we’re thinking we want to get married the last week of August.”
“This August?” Penelope chokes on the piece of chocolate-covered caramel she just popped in her mouth.
Presley giggles. “Yes … and don’t you two look at me like I’m crazy. We just don’t want to have a long engagement. It’s not like we’re throwing some huge soiree, it’s friends and family in the park and neither of us is too hung up on the whole wedding obsession.”
“What you’re saying is, you don’t care about wedding nonsense but are doing the traditional thing for Keaton. You’re such a good wife.” Penelope squeezes her hand.
And gosh, if that wasn’t the most romantic thing I’d ever heard.
I slapped my hand down on the stack of magazines.
“Well, I guess our timeline was just moved up. Time to make some decisions, and fast.”
8
Bowen
My body shakes as I rip myself from sleep.
It’s the only way to bring reality roaring back, the only way to remove myself from the nightmare poisoning my brain.
Even years later, I can still feel the piece of glass that embedded itself in my ribcage. About three inches down from my pec, a shard as long as a pencil and wide as a book jammed itself into my skin and missed piercing several internal organs by a fraction.
I rub the spot and can feel the raised scar where the doctor stitched me up with forty pinpricks. Not that I felt it at the time, I was so high. And the piece of glass would end up being the least damaging of any of my injuries. At the time of the crash, it was just the one I could visually see … that shard of my truck sticking out of my abdomen. The amount of blood, although from a superficial wound, was nauseating. It was the memory I held most clearly from that night.
The one of myself hanging upside down from the driver’s seat, blood pouring from my stomach.
Well, that, and looking out of the place where my windshield used to be and seeing Lily’s body splashed across the pavement.
You know how they talk about adrenaline rushes and the fact that they mask any pain? I will swear to this day that’s what happened. Something in me, when I saw Lily lying there, set aside all the pain in my body and put it on hold. Later, I’d learn that I had multiple breaks and fractures, plus the glass.
But at that moment, nothing else mattered but her. She’d been ejected from the car, and I’ll never scrub the memory of watching her fly through the front window.
We’d been driving home after a bonfire party shortly before high school baseball playoffs. This time was my swan song, the epitome of the glory days. I had the girl I loved, a future as bright and big as the lights in Yankees stadium, school was almost over, and living was easy. I was carefree in the way only teenage superstars can be before the world smacks them down with a swift dose of reality.
I hadn’t been drinking, no drugs were involved … I’d never cared for recreational substances and I made it a point not to have a beer if Lily was in the passenger seat. I was a good boyfriend, and I wanted to keep her safe.
None
of that mattered though, not when the deer jumped in front of my grill around a blind curve on a country road.
We flipped instantly, my old pickup caving in on us as the rain-slicked pavement sent my car skidding. The sound of glass crunching, the sickening thud of my head against so many surfaces, the whiplash, the burn of the airbag chemicals as they invaded my eyes.
Lily wasn’t in the car for most of it. And this is where I felt the most guilty.
She’d had two beers at the fire … enough to make her giggly and bold. I was in love with every side of her, but I knew when she got a little tipsy, she felt sexier. She’d told me as much. I’d never stop her from making her own choices, but I did want to get her home in a relatively sober state so that her father didn’t try to shoot me with one of his hunting rifles.
But the alcohol had made Lily flirty and adventurous. As we drove home, her hands had roamed my lap, and I was too in love with the girl and focused on my hardening dick to tell her to stop. She unbuckled to snuggle closer, her tongue doing dirty things to my neck. We’d been young and wild, so in love that we couldn’t see straight. When she went for my zipper, I groaned, tipping my head back against the seat as her warm hand had gripped me.
This is what the glory days were supposed to be like.
Two seconds later, we were spinning through the air. And when we landed, both of our lives were changed forever.
Somehow, I’d managed to get myself unbuckled, and dropped into the ceiling of my car, which was facedown on the ground. In the wreckage, I’d found Lily’s cell phone, which was bashed to all hell but still miraculously, could dial.
I punched 911 in, crawled out of the window and over to Lily, dragged us into an embankment, and passed out.
I was told later, by police and doctors, that we both would have died if I wasn’t able to make that call. That we would have died if I hadn’t gotten us off the road, that another driver probably would have hit us coming around the blind curve.
They told me I saved her life.
Now, I wonder, at what cost? It was my fault we got into that accident. My fault I didn’t anticipate, and my fault that I didn’t tell Lily to sit down when she sidled up with her wandering hands.
I almost killed her, and yet she didn’t stay away. Not even when she woke up from the coma she had been in for almost a month.
But by that point, I was already long gone.
By that point, the pact had been made, and I’d been sworn to secrecy.
The night of the crash haunts me in my dreams. It plagues my every waking moment and mocks the future I once had.
It’s the reality I can’t escape, and the other night, I almost blew the promise I made to my father.
To stay away from Lily Grantham.
9
Lily
The last thing I remember before everything goes black is the spray of a rainbow.
Even in the dark, with the rain falling in and the screech of metal on pavement, my eyes only caught on one thing.
Glass, scattering every which way, illuminated by the lights of our cell phones and the glow of the dashboard. A hundred colors, blending into one, glittering through transparent screens and sending color bouncing through my vision.
And then my head smashed into the glove compartment, and it all went blank.
They told me I was in a coma for twenty-eight days. Nearly a month. Of nothing. It’s like one day I was awake and alive and well, and then I lost a chunk of time and woke back up. To me, it was as if I’d gone to sleep and twelve hours later opened my eyes. But to those around me, it was hell. Worse than hell, from those who tell the story.
Penelope had been in the Outer Banks on the night of the accident, having just gotten married at the ripe old age of twenty. She and Travis, her deceased husband, had been on a short honeymoon before he shipped out. They’d had to come back, and she says she sat at my bedside every day for an hour.
Every single day, my family, my friends, and my doctors wondered if I’d ever wake up. Nearly twice, they’d almost lost me. I’ve been told that my lungs collapsed on one occasion, and on another, the bleed in my brain was so severe that I almost died on the operating table. Penelope cries when she tells that one, and I know it’s the most serious thing that’s ever happened in my life because my best friend does not shed a tear. Not even when The Notebook is on.
Miraculously, on a Tuesday in July, I woke up. It took me eight weeks to be able to speak normally again, and longer than that to finally be able to walk and run without my legs feeling like a ton of bricks.
And for all of it, my entire recovery … Bowen was nowhere to be found.
As Penelope tells it, my boyfriend was at the hospital every single day after the accident. He would open up the place and shut it down. Visiting hours didn’t apply to him, and he used to get so angry at my doctors that once they actually did throw him out.
I don’t remember any of it, obviously, but my best friend says that one day, about a week before I came out of the coma, Bowen didn’t show up. And then he didn’t show up the next day, or the next. Penny tried to call him a couple of times, but then I woke up and everything was a flurry of emotions and testing and rehabilitation.
He was the first person I asked for when I came to. I remember that much. I also remember the sting of his absence when my mother told me Bowen hadn’t been to see me in a week. How could the boy I love so much just leave me to, possibly, die? How could he not be there when I opened my eyes for the first time? Where had he gone?
I found out, about three weeks into my recovery and with a lot of cyber-sleuthing and town gossip help from Penny, that Bowen had left for technical school an hour and a half away. He’d left no letter, no voicemails … hadn’t even bothered to return the million texts I’d sent after I’d come out of the coma.
Bowen Nash had left without so much as a goodbye, and our relationship was left in limbo.
Our love had been destroyed in the car crash, and it was floating somewhere between the curve in the road, the place Bowen had swerved to avoid a deer, and the dashboard my head had slammed into. It was caught in slow-motion, unable to land, or break … because there was no closure.
We couldn’t end because Bowen had left, leaving us in this heartbreaking middle ground between sorrow and a glimmer of hope.
I wanted so badly to scream at him, to cry and stamp my foot and ask him why he left me? Still, to this day, I’ve never gotten the full story of the crash. Or my injuries. Or what happened to us.
Because he won’t say a word. I’ve cornered him, written letters. I even broke down one time and asked Keaton, who just shook his head and looked at me with such pity that I spent the next two days clutching my pillow and sobbing.
Why wouldn’t Bowen talk to me then, and why won’t he now?
The other night, in our gazebo, was the closest I’ve ever come to the truth, and I wasn’t even able to get a full set of questions out. He was about to kiss me; I know he was. After ten years of telling me, through silence, that he no longer loves me … he was going to kiss me in the spot that was only ever ours.
That wasn’t the action of a man who couldn’t stand to look at me. Or one who had nothing to tell, nothing to feel.
I’d waited long enough. It was time for answers.
And either they were going to be the kind that would reunite us …
Or they’d be the kind that helped me move on from the only man I’d ever loved.
10
Lily
Books have a smell impossible to duplicate.
The musk of an old story, of crisp paper and black ink. The leather scent of bindings and all the hidden traces mingled in there. The chocolate one reader swiped onto a page with her thumb because the romance novel was paired with a good box of truffles. The soda spilled onto the cover of a classic children’s novel. The scent of roses or lavender candles or a delicious pot of chili …
Yes, the stories inside were wonderful, but the scent of a physical book t
old so many tales too. It told the story of the reader who’d loved the journey of the characters, and what that person had been doing while they’d devoured it.
That was only part of the reason I loved spending my day among the stacks. Besides being born a bookworm, and feeling most comfortable surrounded by my favorite stories, I simply love the research aspect of my job.
Helping readers discover the book their heart is asking for, helping students find what non-fiction work would best support their essays, helping anyone decide which text was best for their project or next read … that was my happy place.
It was like being a matchmaker, but for books. And with books, no one ever got hurt. There was always love in the end, even if there wasn’t a happily ever after. Books never stopped calling, they didn’t act like a jerk, and they certainly were there in all times of need.
Yeah, I’d rather spend time with my favorite characters than people any day of the week.
“Miss Grantham, can you help me find … uhhh …”
An adorable little girl stands before me, her blond bangs falling in front of her eyes as she tries to read the list her teacher must have handed out. She can’t be more than eleven; I’ve gotten good at guessing ages in this job.
I smile, putting out my hand. “Here, let me see if I can’t take a look.”
The student looks up at me with gratitude and an innocence only afforded at that age. She’s not a teenager yet, there is no hint of an attitude and the girl looks more excited to read than annoyed at her school project. I love the children at this stage, because they’re genuinely happy to learn, instead of hostile when it comes to homework … like she’ll probably be in two or three years.
Forgiven: The Nash Brothers, Book Two Page 4