Page 92 of The Summer I Destroyed You

“Because she was my best friend!” she cries, but already…I’m seeing the wheels spin. She’s beginning to consider the similarities between them, things they’d assumed were coincidence: their eye color, something about the way they smile, their height.

Maybe even the extremes they’ll go to in seeking revenge.

“You don’t really believe this, right?” she asks. “Someone would have told me. She would have told me. She’d have told someone, and eventually it would have made its way to me.”

I squeeze her hand. “I don’t know. It’s nuts, but the more I think about it…the more I can’t imagine it’s not true. And if she believed you’d known and hidden it from her all this time, it wouldn’t justify what she did, but it might help it make a little sense.”

She leans back and closes her eyes. “This is ridiculous. It’s impossible. Someone would have told me. And who the hell would I even ask? It’s not like my mom’s going to admit it even if she does know.”

“Right,” I conclude. “Which is why your best bet is Bradley and her mother.”

44

EMMY

Beverly and Bradley Grimm no longer own the small house they had back when she and I were friends. They moved into an apartment above the store shortly after my dad left, and suddenly, the timing of that seems suspicious.

Suddenly everything seems suspicious: The fact that Bradley wasn’t allowed in my home, that we had to keep Bradley’s attendance on those weekend outings secret.

Or the way my father would sometimes wrap an arm around us both and refer to us as “his” girls. All that time I’d assumed he was just being nice to Bradley because he pitied her, but maybe he wasn’t being nice at all. Maybe he was doing the absolute bare minimum he could as a father.

My finger is poised over the intercom buzzer for their apartment. Liam—who’s with me for moral support—nods, and I push it. A few moments later, a woman’s voice comes on, irritated and fatigued. “Yes?” she asks with a deep sigh.

“This is Emerson Hughes. Can I speak to you for a moment?”

There is a long moment of silence. “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

“It’s about my father.”

There’s another moment of silence. “Fine, but make it snappy. I don’t want Bradley seeing you if she gets home.”

Bradley, the ultimate bully of my childhood, wouldn’t want to see me. That’s rich. I narrowly refrain from saying it aloud.

Beverly buzzes us in and we climb a dank, narrow staircase. The smell of fried food hangs heavily in the hall, accompanied by the sour stink of a very old, very dirty building. I’d never have guessed that Bradley, with all her judgment and condescension, was living here.

We knock on the door, and Beverly answers. I’d always thought Bradley looked exactly like her pretty mom, and now I see all the ways she doesn’t…Bradley’s eyes are a paler blue, like mine, and her full lips didn’t come from Beverly either. Aside from the pale hair, they really don’t look much alike at all.

Beverly begrudgingly ushers us inside. The apartment consists of a tiny studio kitchen and a combined living and dining area that is smaller than my mother’s family room. The walls are stacked high with boxes from food distributors—she’s using her tiny apartment as a storage area too. There’s a pillow and blankets folded on the floor beside the couch as if someone has been sleeping out here.

Jesus. Is it Bradley? Has she been sleeping on a pull-out bed in the family room for the last seventeen years?

My first impulse, of course, is to be angry. She talked so much shit about my weight and my hair and my clothes and my shoes while she was living like this?

Sympathy comes a moment later. Maybe part of the reason she talked so much shit was because she lived like this. If Liam’s right, and we had the same dad, but only one of us benefitted from it…I can see why she’d be a little ticked off.

“I’m not sure what you think I’d have to tell you about your father,” Beverly says, lips pressed tight as we take a seat on the couch. She waves to the room around her. “He left us high and dry decades ago, clearly.”

I inhale in surprise. She’s already answered my question before I could even pose it, I think. “So he’s Bradley’s father too?”

She rolls her eyes. “Do you really expect me to believe you didn’t know that?”

I sink into the couch, shocked. Yes, I’d been…coming around to it. But the confirmation is something else. Something far worse.

Liam’s hand squeezes mine. “She didn’t have a clue, Bev,” he tells her quietly. “When I suggested it to her after I saw Bradley yesterday, she laughed in my face.”

God. I’m twenty-eight. How could I possibly be learning this now? Did my father know all along? My mother? Bradley? The whole goddamned town?

I just don’t understand how information of this magnitude never made its way to me.

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