by Lexi Ryan
Mom’s eyes meet mine, and she gives a soft smile. Her hair is swept off her shoulders and tied at the back of her neck. Standing there in her yellow tank top and frayed jeans, it’s as if she never left.
To this day, she’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met, and despite all the anger and resentment I’ve directed her way in the last six years, there’s no one I’d rather see right now.
“It’s fine,” I tell Bailey. “I’ll talk to her.”
Bailey frowns, grumbles something under her breath about masochism, and reaches across me to open my door. “I’ll be at Mom’s trailer if you need me, okay?”
I nod. “Love you, Bail.”
“Love you, Mee,” she whispers.
I close the car door and head for my mother.
Mom tucks her hands in her pockets as I walk forward. “Hi, Princess Mia,” she says. She comes down the steps and worries her bottom lip between her teeth just like I know I do when I’m nervous.
I don’t reply in any way but to wrap my arms around her and hug her tight. Because sometimes a girl needs her mom. “I missed you.”
I know it’s a silly thing to say when she was here in January for Nic’s funeral. It’s probably a little weird that in all the times I’ve seen or talked with her since she left when I was fifteen, this is the first time I’ve said it. Maybe it’s not a fair thing to say when she tried to convince me to come back to Arizona with her and I refused, but after what I’ve been through in the months since the accident, I just need her to know.
“I miss you every day,” she says, stroking my hair. “Your father tells me you’re going to BHU next fall. He said you’re the smartest girl in town.”
I chuckle against her shoulder. That’s my father. Everything in hyperbole. I pull back so I can look at her. “Why are you here?”
“Your father called me.” Her smile falls away. “He told me he has a drinking problem, and he wanted a loan to check himself into an in-patient rehabilitation program. He said he wanted to do it for you.”
“I could have given him the money,” I say, looking over her shoulder to the dark and quiet trailer. Is he already gone?
“It was the least I could do, Mia.” She swallows hard. “How long has he been like this? I suspected when I saw him at Nic’s funeral, but we were all a mess and I . . .” She shakes her head. “Why didn’t you tell me he was drinking? I would have come home.”
“Nic and I thought we could handle it.” It didn’t seem like a secret at the time, just something she didn’t need to know. Or maybe part of me felt like I was punishing her by not sharing the details of our lives and keeping her in the dark about the hardest parts. I didn’t want to need her after she left us so easily, and neither did Nic. “You didn’t want to be here, so we didn’t tell you anything that would make you feel like you needed to come back.”
Her face crumples like tissue paper. “Baby . . .” She closes her eyes and composes herself.
I wait until she opens her eyes before I speak again. “I know about your affair with Uriah Woodison.”
She folds her arms, and I recognize the defensive stance. I’m just like her. “I didn’t want you to know.” She drops her gaze to the ground and digs the toe of her white sneaker in the dirt.
“I needed you.” I’m surprised to hear myself admit it and more surprised to hear my voice crack on the admission. It’s been years, and I made it. I survived my teen years without my mom to wipe away my tears and hold my hand. It shouldn’t matter anymore. But it does. “Why did you leave?”
She lifts her head and studies me. “I wanted you to be better than I was. Uriah, he wanted me to stay in town. He said he’d take care of us if I left your father, but he was still a married man, and you know what people would say.” She drops her arms from around her waist and turns her palms up in a shrug. “I was ashamed and thought the best penance was to leave. You wouldn’t have to be the daughter of the whore. You were always so smart. I didn’t want my mistakes to follow you.”
They did. Even when she was gone, they were here, haunting me. They were the reason I didn’t give Arrow a chance that first day we met. They were the reason I got back together with Brogan when it should have been over. The reason I couldn’t admit to myself that I loved Arrow. But I don’t tell her any of that, because I know it will hurt her, and sometimes love means keeping secrets.
I guess I’m a lot like her after all.
“Dad?” I ask, nodding toward the trailer.
“I checked him into the clinic this morning. He said he wanted to be sober and gainfully employed next time he saw you. I told him you would be proud of him.”
I stare at her—at the eyes so like the ones I see every time I look in the mirror, at the freckles she tells me are from her German grandmother—and I feel another piece of my safety net lock into place beneath me. After months of walking this tightrope of my life vulnerable and blindfolded, it’s a relief. “Thank you for taking care of that.”
She smiles and points to the trailer. “I made some cookies. Would you like to come in and have a couple? I’d love to talk more.” She shifts and wrings her hands in front of her. “I’d really, really like to know about your life. More than you tell me in a ten-minute phone call.”
My heart squeezes and I take a step forward, knowing it’ll be okay if I fall. “Cookies sound great.”
Arrow
It’s hours later before they release me from the little room at the back of the station. There were questions and more questions. There were lectures and guilt trips. The police asked me about what I remember from that night so many times that I’ll probably be reciting it in my sleep.
They made Mia and Bailey go home. I’m told that at one point, Chris and Mason showed up to give statements of their own about that night, but they were gone before I finished.
Dad came with his lawyer, and they got filled in on everything. The look on his face when he realized I hadn’t been driving, that I wasn’t about to face years in prison . . . it was good for me to see. He has trouble talking through his feelings, but his expression in that moment told me everything I need to know.
“Can I go home now?” I ask on my way back up front.
The officer who’s spent most of his day with me nods. “If you want. But if you’re willing, Mr. Wright has asked to have a few words with you.”
I stop in the middle of the hallway.
“He’s in there,” the officer says, pointing to another room.
All this time, I’d valued Coach more than my own damn father. But today I learned which of the two really puts me first. “No thanks,” I say. “If that’s okay, I’d rather not talk to him right now.”
“Not a problem,” the officer says. “It’s understandable.”
“Thank you.”
I leave the station, climb into my car, and drive home.
It’s surreal, driving home when you thought you’d be spending the night in jail, and as betrayed as I feel over what Coach did to me, that’s nothing compared to the weight that’s been lifted from my shoulders. My albatross thrown into the sea.
When I pull into the drive, Chris’s car is parked up front beside Mason’s. For almost five months, I’ve prepared myself to lose my friends if the truth ever came out. Today, even when Trish confessed and explained I wasn’t at fault, I still wasn’t sure how they’d feel. But here they are, letting me know before I can even worry about it that they’ve got my back.
I find the two of them in the living room huddled in front of the television.
Mason grabs the remote and turns up the volume. “Coach is about to give a press conference.”
Dad walks into the room from the kitchen. He looks to the screen and then to me before coming to stand by my side.
It’s a live feed from in front of the courthouse, and Coach Wright steps in front of the microphone.
“Today,” Coach says into the microphone, “I’m officially resigning from my position as the head coach of the Blackhawk
Hills University football team. It’s a position I’ve been proud to hold and a group of young men I’ve been blessed to lead, but I’m no longer fit to be their guide.” He unfolds a piece of paper and smooths it flat on the podium. “On New Year’s Eve, I got the phone call every father fears. My daughter had been in a terrible accident.” He swallows hard. “But the difference between my call and the one Mr. Mendez and Mr. and Mrs. Barrett were getting around the same time was that my daughter was okay. She was physically unharmed. And she was home—calling me from the front yard where she’d parked my SUV.”
Dad puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes, and I’m so damn grateful to have him here by my side. I take a deep breath and listen to what the coach has to say.
“She was in a panic because she’d hit two boys on Deadman’s Curve. Every father wants to believe he’ll do the right thing faced with a moment like that one. And I told myself, as I went outside and pulled her out of the car, that I was doing the right thing.”
“Like hell you were,” Chris mutters from the couch.
“She’d been drinking,” Coach continues. “She shouldn’t have been driving. But I knew what she’d face if she turned herself in.
“Her friend Arrow Woodison was passed out in the passenger seat. In a misplaced sense of fatherly duty, I decided I’d cover up what my daughter had done, but I had a choice to make about Arrow. To further remove my daughter from the crime, I pulled him into the driver’s seat and let him stay there for almost two hours before I woke him and told him he’d driven there. I proceeded to take a series of steps to cover up my daughter’s crime. I shot a deer and smeared its blood on the damaged front end of my car, then called the police to file a report that I hit the animal to explain the damage to my Cherokee.” He draws in a long, slow, ragged breath and lifts his tired and tormented eyes to the camera. “And when Arrow woke up, I told him he’d been driving the car that hit those boys.”
A barrage of questions surge from the audience and his pause is filled with the click click click of cameras.
Mason looks over his shoulder at me and my dad. “I can’t believe he’s saying all this in a press conference.”
“I’m sure his lawyer is shitting himself,” Dad says.
“Why not just say he’s stepping down and be done with it?” Mason asks.
Drawing in a long breath, Chris looks at Mason, then steadies his gaze on me. “Maybe he needed to be heard. I think it’s brave.”
Coach starts speaking again, and we return our attention to the television. “I committed a horrible crime when I covered up what my daughter did. And I knew I’d have to live with that. What I wasn’t prepared for was to live with the guilt of two young people who’d have each done the right thing had I not been there steering them in the wrong direction. I watched my daughter turn into an alcoholic, a cutter, a young woman who’d rather experiment with drugs than live in the moral hell I’d trapped her in.”
“Jesus,” Mason whispers. “I didn’t know she’d gotten that bad.”
“We didn’t want to see what we didn’t understand,” Chris says. He shifts his gaze to me and grimaces. “And that goes beyond Trish.”
Coach takes a long, deep breath. He looks like he might disintegrate into tears at any moment. “I watched Arrow Woodison, a man who was like a son to me, take up drinking and drugs and throw away his football career while he tried to punish himself for a crime he didn’t commit.” He wipes the tears off his cheeks. “When you make a decision like that as a father,” Coach says, “you tell yourself you’re acting out of love. The truth was, I was acting out of fear. I was afraid for my daughter, and I was afraid for myself and how lonely my life would be if I lost her. If I’d truly been acting out of love, when she called me and said, ‘Daddy, I’ve been in an accident. I think I need to call the police,’ I’d have listened to what happened and agreed. Then I’d have stood by her side while she told the truth and did what was right. But I’ve let fear lead my whole life for the last four months. I can’t apologize enough for what that did to my daughter and what it did to Arrow, who was innocent in all of this.”
Dad’s hand tightens on my shoulder, and I realize he too has tears streaming down his cheeks. I wonder if he’s half as overwhelmed as I am. I’m swamped in relief—the final shackle of this hell being unlocked.
“I know an apology will never be enough,” Coach says. “But I want to give it anyway. So that when this community sees my daughter in court or sees Arrow in the streets, they can understand the part I had to play in all of it.” Clearing his throat, he folds his paper and tucks it back into his pocket. “That’s all. Thank you.”
Dad squeezes my shoulder one last time before excusing himself, and Chris and Mason turn to me.
“We should have known there was something more going on with you,” Mason says, his voice thick.
“What can we do?” Chris asks.
I shake my head and gesture to where they’re sitting on the couch. “You’re already doing it.” The front door opens and I look over my shoulder to see Dad stepping outside. “I should go talk to him.”
“We’ll be here,” Chris says.
Mason offers his fist and I bump mine against it. “Thank you, you two. You have no idea what this means to me.”
I find Dad sitting on the front porch smoking a cigar. I close the door behind me and he nods to the chair beside him. I take it but shake my head when he offers me a cigar.
“You’ve had quite a day,” he murmurs.
“I’m sorry about everything, Dad.” I lean forward, propping my elbows on my knees. “It never even crossed my mind that Coach would have lied to me like that.”
“I’m glad the truth came out.” He releases a mouthful of smoke. “It has a way of doing that.”
“I guess it does. Eventually.”
“Gwen left today.” He says it as if he’s telling me there’s leftover spaghetti in the fridge. “Don’t look at me like that. She wasn’t happy, and everyone knew it. She thought she wanted the grumpy old man for his money, but it turns out I’m not worth it. She tried to forbid me to go to the station to help you, and you can imagine how well I handled it.” He sighs heavily. “Anyway, she took Katie and went to her mom’s.”
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
He shrugs. “Me too, but I’m not sorry she left. Just sorry we weren’t right together.” He takes another puff and leans back in his chair. “I miss your mother.”
I swallow hard. Other than our anomaly of a conversation yesterday morning, Dad and I don’t have talks like this, and we definitely don’t talk about Mom. “You do?”
“She was my heart.” He swallows hard. “Love like that is rare, but assholes like me fuck it up anyway.”
“I don’t want to fuck it up with Mia,” I say, studying my hands. “I love her.”
“Then be with her.” There’s something comforting in how simple he makes it sound.
“I keep pushing her away. I don’t know if I get another chance at this point.”
Dad stamps out his cigar, stands, and pats me on the back. “Then you should go to her and beg for one. That’s what your mom would tell you. Life’s too short.”
I yank on the pant leg of my jeans to show him my ankle monitor. “House arrest.”
“I think you can figure this out, son.”
I swallow hard, both hopeful and terrified at the prospect of holding Mia in my arms again as soon as today.
He opens the front door and then stops. “Ask if she’d be interested in coming back. Katie will be with me half the week, and I’ll need help around here.”
And I need her. “You have to give her a raise.”
“Already done.”
“And have her sit with us at family meals, and hire someone else to cater your parties. No treating her like the help.”
“Understood.”
I nod. “I’ll ask her, then.”
Dad goes into the house, and I pull my phone from my pocket and dial my probation off
icer.
Mia
I am wrung dry and I am filled up.
I am confident and I am terrified.
I am lost but I know exactly where I am.
Bailey lies beside me in the grass across from Dad’s trailer. From under the big maple, we stare up at the sky, watching the stars twinkle through the leaves.
“You have room for one more?” a deep voice asks from our feet.
My heart skids to a halt and then accelerates again all before I can take a breath. Arrow.
“Holy shit,” Bailey mutters. She props herself on her elbows. “Aren’t you on house arrest?”
“I told my probation officer what happened today and that I owed some apologies.” He looks at his watch. “I have an hour.”
Bailey hops up and brushes her hands on the back of her jeans. “I’ll just get out of your way, then.” As I sit up, she winks at me and then strolls away.
Arrow takes a step toward me, but before he’s close enough to touch, he stops and shoves his hands into his pockets. “Gwen left Dad.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He looks over his shoulder toward the house. “You know, I think it’s okay. I think he was sick of falling short on making her happy.”
I shake my head. “That’s where they went wrong. It’s not his job to make her happy. It’s hers.”
He gives a sad smile. “Yeah, someone told me something like that once.”
I lean back on my elbows and study the starlight through the broad branches of the old maple tree. “She was wise.” I swallow hard.
“Do you remember when you told me about your mom? About the fire and the sun?”
My stomach twists. I tried so hard to justify ignoring my feelings for Arrow. “It was just a metaphor.” It was a false binary that didn’t work in a world where two guys who were best friends were both so important to me.
“I like metaphors,” he says, sinking to sit in the grass beside me. “But that one’s never worked for the way I feel about you. I don’t want to be your fire or your sunshine.”