She’d been faking it for so long that it didn’t still hurt that she couldn’t get any words out. It’s where she’d first learned. Denial. Push it away. Don’t talk about it. Make it look easy, better, perfect so her younger siblings wouldn’t be scared, they wouldn’t ask why Mom was crying all the time, and they’d stop asking when Daddy was coming home. Never didn’t seem fathomable to them. It seemed kinder to just pretend everything was fine, and so she did.
And she’d never stopped.
Not since that day.
Not since that moment.
She was so lost in that memory that she could still feel the wool thread of Weston’s sweater bunched in her fist when she held him back before he could run after their mom. It was the soft cotton of Will’s T-shirt against her cheek that pulled her back. How he’d made it around the semicircular booth and ended up with her in his arms, she had no clue. All she knew was that feeling the solid thump-thump of his heart against her cheek was exactly what she needed.
“Adalyn was too young to really remember what it had been like before our dad killed himself or what it was like after it happened and before our mom married Gabe,” she said, remembering how small her sister had been, with her always lopsided ponytails and her gap-toothed smile.
Will tightened his hold on her and brushed his lips across the top of her head. “I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.” The stock answer, the one that came out without her even thinking about it, following her motto to minimize, deflect, and move on before the pain became too real again.
“But it never goes away,” he said, his voice as scratchy as Weston’s wool sweater had been.
That’s when it hit her. Here she was, talking to him as if he didn’t know what it was like, but he was a double member of the dead parent club. The newspapers in Harbor City loved to bring up references to his parents’ tragic car accident when the twins had still been in grade school.
She sat up so she could pivot enough to look him in the face as he sat next to her and confirm what she suspected. It only took a glance to spot it, that understanding look of having been there, too. He knew, and even though they’d still be enemies in an hour, right now they were both in the same shitty club that almost no one ever wanted to be a member of.
“No, it doesn’t,” she said, taking hi
s hand in hers, entwining her fingers with his. “I used to pretend he was just out there, somewhere, and that he’d find his way back to us. Like he was lost or wandering the Black Hills or something.” She shook her head and sighed as some of the pain eased in the telling, like a load made lighter because she wasn’t carrying it by herself. “Even now, I’ll catch myself going an extra block or two when I’m behind someone who has the same walk as he had or wears the same cologne. It never really goes away, that loss, the sense of betrayal, the wondering why when there really is no answer, and the guilt for still being mad and sad and everything in between. It just sits there, waiting, patient as a spider to trap me in its web whenever I least expect it. So I picture that image of me I want people to have and fake it until I make it true.”
Will didn’t say anything, didn’t burst in with questions, didn’t shush her like she had to herself. Growing up like he had, being under the tabloid microscope, must have given him more understanding of how invasive that could be. Instead, he squeezed her hand, turning enough so they were face-to-face, alone but together.
“My job was to keep Adalyn happy so she wouldn’t ask questions,” Hadley went on, telling the man she’d always thought of as Evil Twin again what she’d never told anyone else. “No one gave me that job; I just assigned it to myself to make everything seem perfect so she wouldn’t be sad—and it worked. So I guess I kept doing it, sharing only the shiny, happy parts and never the jagged, ugly parts.” And the fact that everything in her life in Harbor City was starting to feel like a comb with most of its teeth broken into sharp spikes meant she really wasn’t sharing anything. Instead she was a ghost with her own family, dodging their calls and texts, leaving her more isolated than she already was in the big city. “I guess I never stopped.”
She let out the breath that she’d been holding since they’d found her dad and gathered herself up again, her gaze falling to her fingers intertwined with Will’s. His hands were big, steady, as if he never worried about anything.
“We all have our coping mechanisms,” he said, his voice soft. “The things that help us through a tough time. It’s just that sometimes they stick with us past when we actually need them.”
“You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”
For a minute, she didn’t think he’d say anything. Tilting her head up so she could watch his face, she could practically see the war going on in his head by the way his jaw was clenched and the vein at his temple pulsed.
“Our parents died in a freak car accident,” he said finally, after letting out a long sigh. “No other drivers, no dangerous conditions, no explanation really. All the reports state is that there were brake marks, but it obviously was too late. They slammed into a tree hard enough that we had to have a closed-caskets double funeral.” He paused, looking past Hadley’s shoulder as if he could see his parents behind her if he just stared hard enough. “Web and I woke up one morning, went down to eat breakfast, gave our parents hugs before they left for the day, and never saw them again. It was like they just disappeared—well, except for the news coverage. Even at nine, we couldn’t avoid seeing all that.”
She squeezed his hand. “That must have been awful.”
“It was.” He shrugged. “But you figure out ways of making things work.”
His admission was like a light bulb going on in a dark room, it explained so much. “All the assumptions…”
“I like to think of it as thinking ahead. You can’t be surprised if you’re already prepped.”
“Does it always have to be thinking that people’s motives are bad?”
“It’s not always like that—only when it involves someone or something that really matters,” he said, his voice rough around the edges.
“Like Web,” she said, glancing back down at her hand in his because she didn’t want him to see the yearning in her eyes.
“And others.”
He didn’t say her name, and maybe it was some wayward hope on her part that he meant her, but when she looked back up at him, something shifted. Her sadness that was always just under the surface gave way to a need to reconfirm that life wasn’t just about hiding the broken parts or anticipating the worst of people. That there could be—was—more. That she could be happy just as she was without having to pretend at all.
It was almost guaranteed that she’d regret this later, but for right now, it was the only thing that mattered. She needed to blast away everything else and let that part take over. There was only one way she knew how to do that without faking it and only one person she wanted to do it with.