by Jenna Mills
“It’s going to be okay,” I promised, pulling up the keypad and pressing 9-1-1—
Coach Grimes moved so fast I had no time to prepare, vaulting across the foyer and grabbing my arm, yanking it back from my body. “Give me that.”
“No—”
He twisted it from my hands.
I froze, looking up at him, this man I’d known more than half my life, and realized I had no idea who he was. “He needs help—”
His eyes turned dead flat. “No one made you come here,” he said, his voice now dead quiet. “You were confused, thought you were supposed to watch the girls.”
The dream-like haze kept drifting around me, but through the swirl I realized it, what Coach Grimes had already realized. Calling an ambulance meant calling the authorities. The police. They’d come, too. There’d be questions.
People would find out.
It was inevitable.
Coach Grimes would never make that call.
“We were only talking,” he said, robot-like, his voice as stripped of emotion as his face. “You spilled your drink on your shirt—”
“Talking,” I repeated, buying time. His whole life, everything he’d worked toward, his career, his kids, his reputation…they all hung in the balance. There was no law against us being together, but that was only a technicality. Jillian would know. The school. “Spilled my drink.”
Mistake. It was all a mistake. A stupid, crazy, horrible mistake. I should never have gone to him. He should never have let me inside. But now…
The magnitude of it all closed in on me.
I was no longer a student, but the damage to his reputation would be severe. He would lose everything.
“Then Josh showed up,” he said. “Talking crazy…out of control…”
Coaching me, I knew. He was coaching me, like so many times before. Even without the authorities, Josh had seen too much…
Mechanically, I twisted back to him, lying still against the stark white marble.
“Upset,” I played along, sliding the hair back from Josh’s face. His breathing was slow, labored. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “So sorry.”
“He attacked me,” Coach Grimes said. No. Instructed. He was instructing me.
I kneeled there, frozen in the twisted wreckage of my life, the wreckage I’d created, because of all those broken pieces inside of me, the ones I’d wanted so badly to cram back together. The ones I’d tried to cram back together.
But instead shattered into a thousand more jagged little pieces.
“I was only trying to get him off of me.”
Through the window, lights cut the darkness.
“It was an accident,” Coach Grimes said. I felt him step toward me. “Right? Nothing else was going on here.”
“An accident—” I whispered as the partially open door swung wide, and Detective L.T. Cooper strode in. Behind him, Zoe gasped.
The ambulance—and the patrol car—arrived five minutes later.
Epilogue
I ALWAYS WONDERED how far I’d go, which lines I’d cross, which ones I’d carve deeper. Now I knew.
“I was so wrong,” I said, staring at the stark, hypnotic beauty of the Flatirons jutting against the soft blue sky. One week. Seven days. That’s all that had passed since the last time I sat in the chair that was supposed to be comfortable, in dim lighting that was supposed to be soothing, staring out the wood-framed window.
One. Week.
“About what?” Dr. Rivers asked.
Everything.
Lying, I realized now. I’d been lying. To everyone. My family. My friends. To Dr. Rivers. To Josh. Myself.
Especially myself.
“I thought I was moving forward, but I was only running.” Pretending. “Pretending to want something I didn’t—to be someone I wasn’t.”
One mistake. One stupid, reckless decision. So many lives in pieces.
I’d known. I’d known Coach Grimes wanted me. I’d known that for a long time. And I’d used that. Used him. To try and move on. To be someone I wasn’t.
Now it all kept playing, over and over and over, a nightmare that wouldn’t end. The final moments. Josh unconscious on the floor. Coach Grimes wild-eyed. Detective Cooper and the paramedics rushing in. The questions. The explanations. The reporters. The pictures they’d found, of me, on Coach Grimes’s phone. Dating back three years.
Pictures I never knew he’d taken.
The stories in the news.
CRASH SURVIVOR FENDS OFF PREDATOR COACH
HISTORY OF SEXUAL INAPPROPRIATENESS UNCOVERED
POPULAR COACH EMBROILED IN SEX SCANDAL
DISGRACED COACH FIRED
“I…didn’t want to hurt anymore,” I whispered, but the words sounded as lame as they were. “I thought if I could just move on—”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Lexi said, “Will you stop it already?”
I twisted toward the sofa.
“Everything worked out, didn’t it?” she asked, twirling her long, thick hair around a finger. “You got exactly what you wanted.” Making a face, she laughed. “…even if you’re such a head-case you had no idea what it really was.”
I looked at her lounging there, in her micro shorts and tank top, model-beautiful in minimal make-up, like we were talking about a shopping trip.
It was the first time I’d seen her since she’d given me the little pills…to fix everything.
“No,” I said slowly, carefully, more sure by the minute. “You’re wrong. I didn’t want this. I never wanted anyone to get hurt.”
But people had. Josh, Jillian Grimes. Her little girls.
They’d all been hurt.
Lexi laughed. “You’re so pathetic. I set it all up for you, exactly like you said you wanted. I helped you find someone else. I helped move you away from Josh and toward someone a lot more exciting.”
Helped.
Move.
Away…
From Josh.
I sat there frozen, as all the pieces, the pieces I’d been unable to fit together, slid quietly into place.
“Omigod, it was you,” I realized. Not Josh. Not Coach Grimes. “The flowers.”
Because Lexi knew. Everything.
Because I’d told her, here in therapy, at the coffee shop…
I’d told her about the hospital, the anonymous bouquet.
She knew.
She knew what the lilies meant.
She knew who I thought sent them.
“You sent those, didn’t you?” I said, as Zoe gasped. “You knew I would think it was Josh, that he was stalking me like some sociopath. But it was you all along.”
Lexi rolled her eyes. “I wasn’t stalking you.”
Disbelief slammed into me—she wasn’t even denying it. “I wonder what Detective Cooper would say about that,” I muttered, wanting nothing more than to wipe that self-satisfied, untouchable smile from her face. “I wonder what he would say about a lot of things.”
Finally she moved, sitting a little taller as her eyes narrowed. “Are you threatening me?”
The moment of victory felt good—I’d told her secrets, but she’d told me a few, as well. And we both knew it. “Just thinking out loud.”
“You got what you wanted,” she snapped. “You got your life back.”
“But it wasn’t your place. It was my—”
“Fantasy,” she blurted. “And I was making it come true.”
Except I didn’t need that, didn’t need her. “Life,” I corrected. “It’s my life—but to you it was nothing more than a game. ”
“Life is a game, Emily. You figure out what you want, then you figure out how to make it happen.”
But this game had not been mine, I realized.
This game had been hers.
“Do you even hear yourself?” I asked. “Do you have any idea how messed up you are?”
Again, she laughed. “Blame me if it makes you feel better, but we both know no one made you go to Coach Grimes’s house. No o
ne made you take that pill. You. You played—and you won. You got exactly what you wanted—your future back.”
The truth of her words stopped me cold: In trying to push Josh away, I realized that wasn’t what I wanted.
And a lot of people got hurt.
“Is that what you told yourself after the bathtub?” I asked. “That everything was okay, as long as you got what you wanted?”
Her eyes narrowed.
“And what was it anyway?” I shot back, venturing into forbidden territory. “What was it you wanted when you took those pills?”
“Emily—”
“Don’t,” I snapped at Dr. Rivers. “Don’t try to moderate.” I stood. “Don’t try to smooth this over.”
“Why don’t you sit down—”
“Because I’m done. I won’t sit down because I’m done—with this, and with her.” And with that, I turned and walked out the door.
Beyond, outside, I saw him, saw Josh, waiting for me. And for the first time since before the accident-since last summer, when we went to the cabin to say goodbye—everything inside me didn’t twist. There was only a whisper, no longer dark and dangerous, but soft and welcome.
And with the warm breeze swirling around me, I started toward him.
We all tell stories. Every day. We tell them to our family and our friends. Sometimes to anyone who will listen. But most of all, we tell them to ourselves. They are the narrative through which we navigate life. They are how we process. How we cope. How we survive.
Sometimes they are true.
Many times, they are not.
Everything changed for me that night on the mountain, when my car ran off the road. Even my story. In the story I’d been telling myself ever since, becoming a different person would make the pain go away. Making different decisions, steering my life in a different direction. Abandoning the old me.
But I was wrong. That story was wrong. It was a lie. A lie I was telling myself to simplify what had gone wrong and dull the pain, a lie that would magically make everything better.
They say almost dying changes you. But not really. Not deep down. Not on the inside. Not who you are. Living does that. Living transforms you, peeling back the layers one at a time, until you’re left naked with yourself. And then you know.
Moving on with your life means letting go of the past, but not of yourself, and not of the people who matter most.
Because, finally, at last, you know who you are, and what you want.
And I did. I knew. My story was the same as it had always been. I was the same. I was Emily. And I loved Josh.
Almost dying didn’t change that.
The DAMAGED Series
THEY SHOULDN’T BE friends, and maybe they aren’t. They have little in common. They move in different circles, want different things. Emily the girl next door, Zoe from the wrong side of the tracks, and Lexi the spoiled heiress. But once a week they come together and share their darkest secrets—what they’re afraid of, what they dream…what they want. Their shrink calls them survivors. He says they’re strong, courageous, doing what it takes to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives. But not everything is at it seems, and somewhere between the secrets and the lies, a dangerous game has begun. All too quickly they realize there are no rules, and there’s more to surviving than simply being alive.
vol 2: The Best Lie
~coming July 10, 2019~
Everywhere she goes, people stare at her. And whisper. Because they know. They know all the sordid details. That she’s the girl who almost killed her mother’s lover—after he snuck into her bedroom. Now Zoe Langley wants nothing more than to get away from it all, and be left alone. But then she turns around one day and finds him. The seemingly perfect guy—watching her. She knows better than to allow herself into his orbit, and yet she finds herself unable to stay away. All too quickly, Zoe discovers the seductive power of deception, and that the danger surrounding her may not be exclusively in the past.
vol 3: The Wrong Guy
~coming August 10, 2019~
Alexis Abbott is over it. She’s over the whispers, the judging. Okay, yes. She overdosed. She almost died. But that’s her business, no one else’s. And she’s sick of it. The way people look at her, what they think. Especially the one guy she should be able to count on. Instead, the memory of his piercing blue eyes haunts her. So maybe it’s time for a lesson. Maybe it’s time for him to learn he’s not so much better than her. That he’s human, too. That even a man of the law can make mistakes. Her plan seems harmless enough at first, exciting even, hot, but without warning, her rules crumble, leaving her unsure who’s playing whom. Nothing prepares her for the truth—or the dark reality that some games are fun, while others destroy…everything.
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