“Where are you kids headed?” A man with “Beach Patrol” spelled out across his chest stalked toward them and swung the beam of his flashlight directly into Summer’s eyes. For a moment, she was back on the side of the road in Half Moon Bay, watching her life unravel with each wobbly step.
“Home,” Bastian said. “We’re working on a school project.”
The patrolman swung the light back and forth between them a few times. “Do you have ID on you?”
Summer swallowed, ignoring her racing heart, and reached for her wallet while Bastian did the same.
A few more sweeps with the flashlight and the patrolman handed them back. “Stay off the rocks after dark. I don’t want you putting my guys at risk because one of you idiots needs to be pulled out.”
“Yes, sir.” Bastian practically saluted, yet managed to elicit nothing more than a nod from the patrolman as he tucked his flashlight back into his belt.
Summer stared at the retreating uniform and had to run to catch up to Bas. “How did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“I’m on probation. If I get busted for breaking curfew or something like that, all literal hell will break loose. He just let us go.”
Bastian shrugged. “We weren’t really doing anything wrong.”
“Except we’re not supposed to be on the beach right now. You knew that?”
“It’s not a big deal.”
Summer stopped and blew out her breath. “It’s a huge deal. Bas, I can’t get in trouble. I can’t have my mom pick me up from some police station. I almost ended up in juvie last spring and if I screw this up, that’s it.”
“Hey.” He folded his hands around her arms. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry. I would have left sooner if I knew it would bother you.”
She shook her head. “No. It’s . . . I just need to get home.”
“I’ll walk you back.”
But something in his eyes set off the panic again and she shook her head. “I think maybe I need to clear my head. And you probably should rest your knee. Right?”
“Sure.” He stepped back. “Of course.”
Summer walked across the beach, still shaking and keeping her movements controlled by sheer willpower. The city slipped away behind her until she reached Grandma’s street, and then Grandma’s driveway.
On the front steps, Mom sat with her arms resting on her knees and her jaw set.
“Do I even want to know where you were?” Mom said, the words stretched and slowed by fatigue.
“Working on a school project. With Bastian.” She stopped just before the first step and wrapped her arms around herself. Like that could protect her from whatever Mom was about to say.
“And you didn’t bother to let me know?”
“I thought . . .” She reached for her phone, but already knew she’d messed up. Big time. “I meant to text.”
“I came home from work an hour ago and had no idea where you were. I called your phone and it went straight to voice mail. It’s after dark and I haven’t heard a word from you all day. Didn’t we just go over this?”
“Bastian wanted to help me with this photography project for school.”
“You’ve been gone all day with a boy?”
“I have done way worse than that and you know it.” She lashed back with more venom than she meant. “Bas is a nice boy. Nice, Mom. And he likes me.”
“A nice boy?” Her disbelief sliced through all of Summer’s defenses.
She narrowed her eyes. “Because being with me automatically makes him a bad kid? The worst thing we did tonight was kiss.”
“You were out taking pictures with a nice boy? After everything you’ve put us through, how am I supposed to believe that?”
“I didn’t do anything wrong.” She clamped her teeth together, body rigid. “He taught me how to use the camera and take pictures. We watched the freaking sunset! No boy has ever treated me like this. Like I’m special.”
“Summer.” Mom’s voice softened into something like concern.
“No. I get it. I’m a screwup. I don’t deserve someone like Bas, but you’re my mother. You don’t have to assume the worst every single time I leave the house.”
“What am I supposed to think?”
“That I’ve changed! That I’m capable of change!”
“I gave you one rule,” Mom said. “Just one. Tell me where you are and what you’re doing. That’s it.”
“Tonight just happened. I got caught up in the moment. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry isn’t enough.” Mom stood. “Not this time.”
She disappeared inside, leaving Summer standing in front of a house that could never be home.
Chapter 18
“There you are,” Abby said, catching Summer just outside the cafeteria and drawing her to a stop. “I’ve been looking for you all morning.”
“I was late and had to go straight to class,” Summer lied, clutching her bag. That was easier than explaining she needed space to sort out her head.
“Have you seen Bas? I’m kind of worried about him.”
Summer shook her head. “Not since last night.”
“He looks worse again today. He’s not on one of his self-destructive benders, is he?”
“What do you mean?” She tightened her grip on her backpack straps. She knew all too well what self-destruction looked like.
“He gets into these moods where he either feels really good and forgets to be careful, or he has a bad spell and is purposely reckless because he’s frustrated. He just can’t get it through his head that he’ll never be completely normal, no matter how much he wants it.”
Summer’s stomach twisted, remembering the mischief in his eyes at the golf course and the way he’d leaped from rock to rock at the beach.
In those moments, his health had been the very last thing on her mind.
“What did I miss?” Bastian said, joining them outside the cafeteria. “You both look totally freaked out.”
“Where have you been?” Abby asked, jabbing his chest.
“Icing my knee. It was a little hot this morning.”
“Seriously?” Abby scowled at him. “You are such an idiot.”
“It’s nothing,” he said, rolling his eyes.
Summer touched his hand. “Promise?”
“Seriously.” He squeezed her fingers. “I’m fine. I need to go sit down, but stop worrying. I’ve taken care of myself for seventeen years.”
“You know I don’t believe you,” Abby said, crossing her arms.
He shrugged. “I don’t harass you about your allergies.”
Abby pressed her lips together, obviously holding back her words.
Bastian gave them a mock bow before heading backward toward a lunch table. “I’ll see you guys whenever you’re ready to eat.”
“He’s not fine,” Abby said, glaring after him. “He’s hurting. A lot.”
“I didn’t mean . . .” Summer trailed off, staring after him while her stomach churned. The bright lights in the cafeteria and the burnt-garlic-and-grease smell weren’t helping either.
“No.” Abby grabbed her arm. “No, no. This isn’t your fault. It’s just who he is.”
“He’s always so careful around me.”
“He tries. But then he gets tired and restless and goes and does something stupid like hike halfway across the city the day after a bleed.” Abby ran her hand through her hair. “Anyway. Maybe his mom will make him slow down. She usually keeps him on a tight leash.”
“Maybe he has a point,” Summer said, dropping her eyes to stare at the floor. Nine tiles pretending to not have a pattern. “Maybe if he had a little more freedom, he wouldn’t feel like he has to prove something all the time.”
Abby sighed. “I’m going to grab something from the lunch ladies. Just—” She paused. “Just make sure he’s careful, okay?”
“Right.” Summer started for the table where Bastian had staked his claim, but turned at the last second and slipped out a side
door into the courtyard instead.
The doors of the elevator opened to the children’s floor of the hospital, and Summer pushed her cart out with dread and anticipation fighting in her head.
The long hallway stretched out before her, seeming to expand as she stared down it. Most days, that last hour of her shift made every moment in the sterile, airless hospital worth the torture. With each hour she marked off, the routes, staff, and patients became more familiar, until her blood pressure no longer shot through the roof with every step.
The days that Bastian waited at the end of her shift turned her sentence into a prize.
Except she’d completely avoided him since she’d ditched him at lunch.
Because the reality was, she was still a criminal who destroyed everyone and everything she cared about and it was only a matter of time before she destroyed Bastian too.
She paused outside the playroom and took in a deep breath.
She could picture him, sitting in that ridiculously undersized red chair, amid his captive audience. Inevitably, he would sense her presence and a slow smile would spread across his lips. His storytelling would take on another dimension of silliness like he waited for her to bust out the best voices and most dramatic readings. Always, he pretended he didn’t know she was there, waiting until one of his listeners bounced up and acted surprised to see her waiting in the doorway.
“Summer.” Miss Rosie caught her arm and drew her aside, her usually stern features transformed by worry.
“Yes, ma’am?” Summer shrunk at least half an inch every time she faced her boss.
“I need you in the playroom, if you think you can handle it.”
“What happened to Bas?” She drew her brows together, mentally shuffling through the past week to remember if he’d said anything about missing story time.
Miss Rosie’s eyes darted away. “Our regular reader isn’t here and it’s upsetting the children. Can you do it or not?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The older woman harrumphed and snatched the cart away, leaving Summer, standing in the middle of the hallway in her ridiculous pink-and-white striped apron.
She felt for her phone in her pocket, peeking at it amid the folds of the apron, but no texts from Bastian popped up. He hadn’t texted when she’d skipped art and lunch either.
She read anger into the silence. After all, she’d run. She’d returned his kindness with hostility.
A circle of kids in various states of visible illness waited near the chair he always occupied. She stepped gingerly through the smattering of toys and took the book one of the kids offered her.
“Where’s Bas’ian?” a boy with chubby pink cheeks and an IV asked.
She pasted on a smile and smoothed down her apron. “He had something else to do today, but I’m his special friend, so I’m going to read for you.”
“Do you love him?” a dark-haired girl asked, raising her hand like they were in school or something.
“Are you going to marry him?” another girl asked in a squeak-box voice that whistled through the gap where her two front teeth should have been.
Heat rose in Summer’s cheeks and her heart ached, but she kept the smile on. “He’s my friend, and neither one of us is old enough to think about getting married.”
“But if you get married, you get to be a printhess,” the girl with the missing teeth said.
“But then you have to wear itchy clothes,” the boy said.
“I like pretty drethes.” The girl stuck out her lip and glared at him until he backed down.
“I thought you wanted a story,” Summer said, opening the cover of the book.
“Not that one.” The dark-haired girl snatched away the book. “The one Bastian always reads. I want to hear about the princess who rides a skateboard.”
A genuine smile took hold of Summer. “That sounds like my kind of princess.”
Her captive audience listened until way past the end of her scheduled shift, but it didn’t keep her mind away from the vague unease that slipped in whenever she remembered Bastian.
Not that she had any right to worry. He didn’t owe her a text every time he changed his plans. He didn’t owe her a text at all.
“Summer.” A nurse half whispered her name from the doorway and she finally left the kids.
“Hi, Nurse Laura.”
“You might want to check in on Room 112 on your way home.” The young woman’s eyebrows lifted meaningfully, and Summer nodded. “All right, then. See you Monday.”
Summer hurried to the elevator and tapped her foot inside the toe of her shoe, waiting for the doors to open while she checked her phone again.
In the ER, on her way to the patient rooms, she narrowly avoided someone throwing up on the floor and heard a middle-aged woman begging the nurses for pain meds. 112.
She stared at the door for a moment before knocking.
“It’s open,” Bastian called back, his familiar deep voice calming her nerves and tripping her heart up at the same time.
“Hey, stranger,” she said, stepping around the curtain into a room barely big enough to hold a single bed. The murky blue walls and harsh lights clashed with Bastian’s warm, comfortable presence.
He smiled softly from his bed. “Hey, you.”
“What happened?” She settled on a chair and reached for his hand, only realizing she’d done it when his fingers tightened around hers.
“Turns out repeatedly walking in sand with a bleed is a terrible idea.” He pointed to his leg, wrapped in a splint and covered with ice packs.
“Oh no!” She jumped up, but he tugged her back down. “I didn’t think. I should have—”
“Summer.” A sharp tone undercut his voice. “I smashed my knee up helping my mom move patio furniture and it aggravated an old bleed. You had nothing to do with me ending up here.”
“But if you’d rested . . .”
“I would have missed out on two of the best nights of my life.”
She kept her eyes on his long fingers encircling her wrist. “Was it worth this?”
“Yes.” His answer came so swift and so certain that she snapped her head up to meet his unflinching gaze.
She held it for a moment, waiting for her head and heart to reconcile something. For the guilt and shame she felt to either overcome or give in to joy and relief. But nothing won. She felt everything at once.
“Are you okay?” she said at last, studying his face, searching for something more obvious than his words to stop the worry gnawing at her stomach.
“There’s some pretty spectacular swelling and pain, but they gave me the good meds. Now I’m really just hungry. I sent Mom to get me something better than crap hospital food. She feels horrible.”
“Your poor mother.”
“You said it.” He leaned back against the raised bed, and then glanced sideways at her. “You want to meet her?
She withdrew her hand. “I thought . . .”
“She’ll be right back.”
“I’m not . . .” Her heart skipped into overdrive, panic pumping through her body in a never-ending alarm. “Bas, you don’t want me to meet your mom.”
“What’s the worst that could happen?”
She swallowed, but held his eyes. His dark, steady, stunning eyes.
The worst that could happen? The worst would be if Bas and his mother actually liked her and then they found out who she really was and hated her.
He took her hand again and brushed his thumb over the back of it.
“I don’t know,” Summer said, staring at their linked hands. She couldn’t remember the last boy who’d held her hand. They’d always wanted to skip to fooling around and she’d let them because it didn’t matter. But holding Bastian’s hand, she was painfully aware of just how much she’d missed by doing more.
“You okay?” Bas asked.
She laughed. “See, I’m already freaking you out and you’re already in the hospital, so you obviously do not need to be freaked out.”
>
He shook his head and squeezed her hand. “I’m fine. If you don’t want to meet my mom, it’s totally cool.”
He sat there, holding her hand like a prize, heart wide open and his eyes almost sad. He sat, waiting. For her.
“God, I don’t deserve you,” she said.
“Well, the universe owes me something to make up for this hemo thing. I choose you.”
She leaned toward him, still gripping his hand. “I’ve done a lot of really terrible, stupid things. That’s why I’m here with my mom. That’s why I freaked out about the cop last night. Because I got kicked out of my last school and this is my one shot to get my life together.”
He kept his eyes trained on her face. “I live with a disorder that will affect me the rest of my life. I don’t have the luxury of second-guessing. I like you. I like being with you. I want you to be part of my life and that includes meeting my family.”
She blinked once or twice to clear away the post-confession haze. “Okay.”
“Seriously? I don’t want to push you.”
“No. It’s fine. It’s good.”
“Okay.” And the grin that lit up his face almost made it worth it.
“She just better get back before I change my mind.” She tried to pass it off as a joke, ending with a laugh, but he just squeezed her hand again.
“She just texted to say she parked and is walking through the ER. Because obviously I need to know her every move.”
“They were out of hot salsa,” a woman said, sweeping into the room. “I gave them a piece of my . . . oh. You have a friend here.”
“Friend” didn’t sound particularly friendly.
“This is Summer,” Bastian said, like his mom would recognize her name. “Summer, this is my mom.”
She withdrew her hand from his. “Hello, Mrs. Vega.”
Her eyes raked over Summer, dissecting every aspect of her appearance.
Summer gazed back. Bastian’s Mongolian heritage came through beautifully in his mother too. Dark haired and striking, Mrs. Vega wore tight white jeans, gold jewelry, and an oversize pair of sunglasses that all made Summer feel even more washed out and exposed than usual.
“I wasn’t expecting company,” Mrs. Vega said, pushing her way between them to arrange Bastian’s food on a rolling tray. “Or I would have brought more food.”
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