Page 79 of The Summer I Destroyed You

And I wish his final act as my dad didn’t involve using me to get away.

He ruined every good memory I have of him with that last one.

* * *

We’ve barely been asleep for two hours when Frank wakes me up. I don’t know how Liam stands it.

“I’m going to kill that fucking rooster.”

There’s a rumbly laugh into the pillow beside mine. “No, you’re not.”

“I am. Watch me.”

He rolls to face me, his face dim in the early morning light. “Have you ever killed anything before?”

“I hit a squirrel once with my car.”

He smiles. “You’d have a hard time hitting Frank with your car. The Willoughbys have a really tall fence.”

“I don’t need the car. Do you have a gun? You seem like the kind of guy who’d have a gun.”

“And you seem like the kind of woman I wouldn’t trust with my gun, if I had one.”

I shrug. I wouldn’t trust me with a gun either. “Fine. I won’t shoot the rooster. I’ll stab it to death.”

“Just to be clear, your plan is to scale the Willoughbys’ ten-foot fence with a knife in your hand—”

“Don’t be an idiot…I can’t scale a fence one-handed. I’d carry the knife in my teeth.”

He grins wide. “Fine, you’d scale a ten-foot fence with a knife between your teeth, chase and somehow capture Frank, and stab him to death.”

“That about sums it up.”

He smooths my hair back from my face. “Ignoring the unbelievable amount of noise that would make, what would you do with the body if you got away with it? Bury it? Make it look like a suicide?”

“Of course not. I’d put its head on a spike as a warning like Henry the Eighth did to traitors. That way, they’d know not to buy a new rooster.”

“It’s truly astonishing that no man has tried to lock you down yet,” he says, pulling me closer. But there’s a smile in his voice, as if he doesn’t actually mean it.

38

LIAM

I’ve been to a fair number of funerals in my life, but Mac’s is sad in a way none of the others were. His parents and brothers are devastated, while Cassie is in shock still, pale, and absent.

“The doctor gave her something,” Brenda says when we reach Mac’s parents’ house. “Her mom says she’s been like this for days.”

I blow out a breath. “It’s got to be rough. I don’t think she ever even dated anyone else.”

Brenda looks around and leans in, her voice lowering. “You know, not now, obviously, but in a few months, you should ask her out. She’s exactly what you always said you wanted—she’s sweet, she’s cute, she’s dying to have kids.”

I stare at Brenda for a long moment. First, because I can’t believe she’s brought this up an hour after Mac’s funeral. Second, because…did I say that? I guess it’s possible. But it was sort of like choosing a favorite country before I’d visited many of them. It’s as if I’d said, “I want a tropical island” and continued visiting only tropical islands, though I was bored by the view and immediately sick of the heat every single time.

Now I know exactly what I’m looking for. And it’s not at all what I’d thought. “I don’t think so, Brenda.”

She smiles. “Ah, JP mentioned you’ve got a crush.”

I allow her to think it, though what I want to say is it’s so much more.

---