“Ah, one of my favorites,” he said with a laugh, and slipped the pen into his pocket.
“Gotta love those SSRIs,” Jessica agreed. Something caught her eye over my shoulder. “Oh my god. Travis?”
My stomach dropped. Travis Johnson. My high school crush. The one that got away—if the one that got away was really a thing for high schoolers.
He walked up to us with a gorgeous brunette on his arm. Her long hair hung straight down her back, and she wore a simple black wrap dress and cute strappy heels. He smiled at us and said, “Hey, Jessica, long time no see. And…Sophie, right?”
A high-pitched giggle erupted from me. He remembered my name! “Yeah, S-Sophie. It’s Sophie. And you’re Travis.”
Neil gave me a strange look.
Travis had been the star athlete of our school. Basketball, football, hockey, if it was a sport, he’d excelled at it. And he still had the wide shoulders and narrow waist he’d had back then, but more manly. His jaw was squarer, too, and his dark hair wasn’t as shaggy. He looked like Prince god damn Eric from The Little Mermaid. Who, incidentally, he’d gone as for Halloween one year with his then-girlfriend, Brianna. She’d been forced by school administration to put on a T-shirt over her seashell Ariel bra. It had been a huge scandal.
He smiled his dazzling Disney smile. “Hey, you remembered.”
“I couldn’t forget,” I blurted.
“This is my wife, Sunny,” he said, then corrected himself, “Susan, sorry.”
She waved him off with an embarrassed roll of her eyes. “Sunny is a stupid family nickname.”
Something about Susan struck me as familiar, though I couldn’t put my finger on it. Neil gave me a subtle nudge of the elbow, prompting me to introduce him. “This is Neil, my husband.”
“Neil.” Travis shook his hand. I noticed from the slight surprise on Travis’s face that Neil had squeezed perhaps a bit harder than necessary.
Men were ridiculous.
“So, what are you doing these days?” Jessica asked Travis.
“Working for Dad.” He looked down at the pint glass in his hand. “You know how it is. After the cancer, he’s just not getting back on his feet.”
“Oh, dear,” Neil said with genuine sympathy. “I had a spot of that, myself. Dreadful disease.”
“Sorry to hear that. But you look like you’re doing well, now,” Travis said, taking a swallow of his beer.
“Your dad owns the construction company?” Jessica asked.
“Still going strong,” Travis confirmed. “The business, anyway.” He nodded to Neil, seeking out the only man in the conversation, the way men infuriatingly tended to do. “What about you, Neil? What do you do for a living?”
“I’m retired,” he said, just as Jessica blurted, “He’s a billionaire.”
Travis choked on his drink.
“Neil owns two multi-media conglomerates,” I explained sheepishly. “And I run a fashion magazine.”
Susan suddenly looked like she’d swallowed something unpleasant. Her eyes fell to my nametag, and the color drained from her face. “Excuse me a moment.”
She stepped away, and I felt inexplicably like I’d done something wrong. Oh, god, I’d sounded stuck up, hadn’t I? But I wasn’t the one who brought up the billionaire thing. A quick glance at Neil confirmed that he was as uncomfortable as I was.
“Is she okay?” Jessica asked Travis, nodding in the direction Susan had gone.
He turned slightly, then back to us, his smile reassuring, but his eyes grim. “Yeah. She just hasn’t been feeling well today.”
“She looks so familiar.” I searched my memory for underclassmen, but I couldn’t remember every face, and the ones I did hadn’t looked like her. “She didn’t go to school with us, did she?”
“No, she grew up in Iron Mountain.” He drained the rest of his glass. “Neil, can I buy you a beer?”
He declined with a shake of his head. “No, but thank you for the offer. I don’t drink.”
I was still stuck on Susan. “I’m sure I’ve met her before.”
Travis shrugged. “You ran cross country, didn’t you? Maybe that’s how you met her? But she was a few years behind us.”
Oh, man, I could have gone all night without someone mentioning cross country. The sport that had made me notorious after a badly timed bout of diarrhea had caused the single worst day of my high school life.
He added, “Her maiden name was Tangen.”
The floor went out from beneath me. My throat was suddenly dryer than it had ever been in my life. “Is her dad Joey Tangen?”
“Yeah,” he confirmed. “So, you must know her, then.”
Neil’s hand went to the small of my back, and it was reassuring to know it was there, because the possibility that I might pass out was very, very real.
No, I didn’t know Susan Tangen.
But she was my sister.
****
Using a sudden migraine as an excuse—I didn’t suffer from migraines, but nobody there knew that—I hightailed it out of the restaurant and straight to the car. Neil steered me; my brain was so foggy and my legs so numb, I might have just tried to walk back to the cabin on autopilot.