“I’m not going home, I’m staying at the restaurant tonight.” He shakes that sentence off like he shouldn’t have said anything. “It’s a long story, and I need to get back. I’ll catch you up on everything tomorrow.”
I want to invite him in and make him give me all thedetails right now, but I feel like he’d offer them up if he were in the mood. I’m certainly not in the mood to talk about what happened with Ryle, so I’m not going to force him to talk about whatever put a damper onhisnight. I just wish there was a way I could make it better.
I perk up when I think of something that might do the trick. “Do you need more reading material?”
His eyes glint with a twinge of excitement. “I do, actually.”
“Wait here.” I head to my bedroom and look in my box of things, searching for the next journal. When I find it, I take it back to him. “This one is a little more graphic,” I tease.
Atlas takes the journal with one hand and then slides his other arm around my lower back and tugs me against him. Then, quickly, he steals a peck. It’s so soft and fast, it doesn’t even fully register that he kissed me until it’s over.
“Goodnight, Lily.”
“Goodnight, Atlas.”
Neither of us moves. It feels like it might hurt if we separate. Atlas pulls me even tighter against him and then he lowers his lips to the spot near my collarbone where my tattoo is hidden beneath my shirt. The tattoo he doesn’t even know is there. He kisses it unknowingly, and then, sadly, he leaves.
I close the door and press my forehead against it. I feel all the familiar feelings of a crush, but this time those feelings are accompanied by worry and hesitation, even though it’s Atlas, and Atlas is one of the good ones.
I blame Ryle for that. He took what little trust I had left in men thanks to my father, and he stripped me of it.
But I think this crush is a sign that Atlas might be able to give back what my father and Ryle took from me. My stomach moves from the flutters Atlas left me with to what feels like a six-foot drop on that thought, because I know how that would make Ryle feel.
The more joy I get from my interactions with Atlas, the more dread I feel about having to break the news to Ryle.
Chapter FifteenAtlas
When I was in the military, I was stationed with a friend who had family from Boston. His aunt and uncle were getting ready to retire and wanted to sell their restaurant. It was called Milla’s, and when I visited it on leave one year, I absolutely fell in love with the place. I can say it was the food, or the fact that it was located in Boston, but the truth is, I fell in love with it because of the preserved tree growing in the center of the main dining room.
The tree reminded me of Lily.
If anything is going to remind someone of their first love, trees are probably the last thing you want as a reminder. They’re everywhere. Which is probably why I’ve thought about Lily every day since I was eighteen, but that could also be because I still, to this day, feel like I owe her my life.
I’m not sure if it was the tree, or the fact that the restaurant came almost fully stocked and staffed, but I felt a pull to buy it when it became available. It wasn’t my goal to own a restaurant right out of the military. I had planned to work as a chef to gain experience, but when this opportunity presented itself, I couldn’t walk away from the prospect. I used the money I saved up from my time as a Marine, and Isecured a business loan, bought the restaurant, changed the name, and created a whole new menu.
Sometimes I feel guilty for the success Bib’s has had—like I haven’t paid my dues. I didn’t just inherit the staff, who already knew what they were doing, but I inherited customers as well. I didn’t build it from the ground up, which is why I feel a heavy amount of imposter syndrome when people congratulate me on the success of Bib’s.
That’s why I opened Corrigan’s. I don’t know that I was trying to prove anything to anyone other than myself, but I wanted to know that I could do it. I wanted the challenge of creating something from nothing and watching it flourish and grow. Like what Lily wrote in her journal about why she liked growing things in her garden when we were teenagers.
Maybe that’s why I feel more protective of Corrigan’s than I do over Bib’s, because I created it from nothing. That might also be the reason I put more effort into protecting it. Corrigan’s has a working security system and is a hell of a lot harder to break into than Bib’s.
Which is why I chose to spend tonight at Bib’s, even though Corrigan’s is due to be broken into if we’re going by the rotating schedule this kid has developed. The first night was Bib’s, the second night was Corrigan’s, he took a few days off, and then the third and fourth incidents were at Bib’s. I may be wrong, but I have a feeling he’ll show up here again before going back to Corrigan’s, simply because he’s had more success getting into the less secure of the two places. I just hope tonight isn’t one of the nights he decides not to show up.
He’ll definitely show up here if he’s hungry. Bib’s is hisbetter bet for food, which is why I’m hiding on the far side of the dumpster, waiting. I pulled over one of the tattered chairs the smokers use on their breaks, and I’ve been passing time by reading. Lily’s words have kept me company. A little too well, because there have been several times I’ve been so engrossed in this journal, I forget that I’m supposed to be on alert.
I don’t know for certain if the kid who has been vandalizing my restaurants is the same kid who shares a mother with me, but the timing makes sense. And the targeted insults that he’s been spray painting make sense if they’re coming from a kid who despises me. I can’t think of anyone else who would have a good reason to be angry with me more than a little boy who feels abandoned by his older brother.
It’s almost two in the morning. I check the security app on my phone for Corrigan’s, but there’s nothing new happening over there, either.
I go back to reading the journal, even though the last couple of entries have been painful to read. I didn’t realize how much my leaving for Boston impacted Lily when she was younger. In my mind at that age, I felt like an inconvenience in her life. I had no idea how much she felt Ibroughtto her life. Reading the letters she wrote back then has been a lot more difficult than I expected it to be. I thought it would be fun to read her thoughts, but when I started reading them, I remembered how cruel our childhoods were to us. I don’t think about it much anymore because I’m so far removed from the life I lived back then, but I’m being thrown back into those moments from every angle this week, it seems. The information in the journal entries, my mother, findingout I have a brother—it all feels like everything I’ve tried running from has formed a slow leak that’s threatening to sink me.
But then there’s Lily and her impeccable timing being back in my life. She always seems to show up when I need a lifeline.
I flip through the rest of the journal and see that I’m already halfway through the last entry she made. I have very little recollection of that night because of the dreadful way it ended. Part of me doesn’t even want to experience it from her point of view, but I can’t not know how I left her feeling for all those years.
I open the last entry and pick up where I left off.
He took my hands in his and told me he was leaving sooner than he planned for the military, but that he couldn’t leave without telling me thank you. He told me he’d be gone for four years and that the last thing he wanted for me was to be a sixteen-year-old girl not living my life because of a boyfriend I never got to see or hear from.