Page 101 of Veil of Lies

When I received a text notification of a mail delivery, I didn’t pay much attention. It was likely a mistake. Or an anonymous death threat from a deranged stalker. That seemed more like the kind of thing I’d receive these days. Given how popular I was.

It was two days before I bothered to check.

“Where are the mailboxes?” I asked Harley over breakfast.

He sipped coffee and inhaled a stack of toast. It baffled me how one guy could eat so much for breakfast. If I ate that much, I’d need a long post-breakfast nap. Most days, I skipped breakfast and loaded up on caffeine instead, much to Quinn’s disgust.

“In the corridor just down from the dean’s secretary’s office.”

I decided to go pick up whatever it was before my first class. If it was junk, I could toss it in the trash on the way there.

“You ready?” asked Brax. The boys were still escorting me everywhere, but sharing most of my classes with Brax meant he was with me more than the other two.

He never seemed exactly thrilled about it and most of the time, I barely got more than a grunt from him. But we’d settled into a low-key friendship whereby he kept people away from me and I trailed around after him like a lost puppy.

He’d even stopped flirting with all the girls while I was around, which I confess made me a lot happier. The only one who hadn’t got the message was Rowena, who still tried to get his attention at least once a day. Not that he noticed.

This morning, we had microeconomics with Professor Starling, who looked and sounded exactly like her name when she twittered and fluttered around the class.

Despite her eclectic mannerisms, I rather enjoyed her classes. She had a quirky way of delivering mostly dry information, which made it easier to remember.

Her classes were far more enjoyable than some I had to take. There were a few that had me questioning my decision to study business.

Harley’s sports therapy classes seemed a lot more interesting. But it was a bit late to change my major, so business it was.

At least I got to suffer alongside Brax; always a bonus.

Brax led the way as we headed to collect my mail. There were a few students picking up Amazon branded parcels from large lockers, but none gave me a second glance.

My mailbox was right at the end of the corridor. I scanned my QR code and the door popped open.

Inside was a white envelope. The outside was stamped with the address for MCC and an identification number.

This was the first time my father had written to me since he’d been incarcerated. I wondered if he’d heard about the shooting. I assumed Michael had told him, but who knew?

I wasn’t sure what Michael told him, if anything, during his weekly visits.

“Everything OK?” Brax asked when he saw my face. I nodded and quickly shoved the envelope into my backpack. I didn’t have time to read it now.

“Yeah. Just a letter from Dad.”

Brax eyed me for a moment like he wasn’t sure if I was hiding something, then turned to walk to class. I closed my locker and followed him, wondering what the hell Dad had felt the need to put in a letter he knew would be read by the prison authorities.

???

It was late afternoon before I had a chance to read Dad’s letter. I headed back to the apartment after a quick chat with Tessa, who was eager to fill me in on her new friends-with-benefits arrangement with a guy called Toby, who apparently had muscles to die for and a dick he knew how to use.

I was happy for her. She deserved a guy like that. I had two of them. It was the gift that kept on giving.

Our apartment - I still couldn’t quite get used to calling it that - was empty. Brax had gone to the gym after making sure I was OK and the other two were in class. Harley had messaged me five thousand times since this morning, so I knew he’d be back in about an hour.

For a self-declared fuckboy, Harley was doing a bang-up job of acting like we were in a committed relationship.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I knew he hadn’t treated girls particularly well in the past, but he was very different with me.

He never went to parties anymore. He didn’t flirt with other girls, and if they so much as looked at him, he shut it down real quick.

But I wasn’t in the mood to psychoanalyze my relationship, so I sat down on the sectional and pulled out the letter from Dad.

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