Page 26 of His Greatest Treasure

Ary starts ushering Nova up to the steps, and I furrow my brows, trying to dissect the look on her face. Annoyed and nervous. A weird mix.

Nova stares at me the entire time up the porch steps, almost daring me to be the one to break the staring contest first.

“No. My mormor lives in Sweden. So did my mom,” she explains.

That tingle grows and grows, becoming impossible to ignore. My eyes bulge when a fragment of a memory slips loose.

“No way she gives you even a double look, Olliepop. She’s way out of your league,” Maddox says with a deep laugh.

We’re sitting on the hood of Cooper’s car, the moon high and sky clear of clouds. It’s summer break for me, but Maddox and Cooper have already graduated high school. At least they still hang out with me, even if I am only sixteen and they’re twenty and twenty-two.

“Not to mention, you’re not even eighteen yet. She’s dating men, Oliver, not teenage boys,” Cooper adds.

I shrug off their concern. “I’m a man. Don’t patronize me. I’ve got big plans for my life. Impressive ones that she won’t be able to dismiss.”

“Damn right you’ve got big plans. That’s fucking great, man. But she’s twenty. Not to mention, her father would beat you to a bloody pulp if you got involved with his daughter,” Maddox says.

Their doubt was expected. They’ve known about my crush on Avery since I first started having one the last time she visited Vancouver. She was eighteen, and I was fourteen. I’d kept it to myself then, not daring to tell her about it. But now, I’m sixteen. I’ve grown a lot these past two years. I’m ready for her to know that I want her now. Plus, her father’s already threatened to beat me up for looking at her too much, so I have nothing to lose now.

Two years is a long time to not see her even once face to face. But she lives in Sweden, and her family has visited less and less over the past few years. Now might be my last chance to tell her how I feel. I can only stalk her social media accounts and send boring texts so many times without being considered a creep.

Cooper pats my back and hands me a bottle of Coke. The two of them still won’t let me drink. Pricks.

“Well, my dad said they get here tomorrow. Are you going to do it right away?”

I nod. “The sooner, the better.”

“It’s your funeral,” Maddox says.

I remember that night and the next as clear as day. Avery and her family showed up at Cooper’s father’s house with her Swedish boyfriend in tow. His presence was a very unwelcome one. It only took one look at him for my crush on Avery to shrivel and die.

It was easy enough to block her on social media and pretend she didn’t exist after she went back to Sweden and, as far as I knew, stayed there for good. Nobody brought her whereabouts up, knowing I didn’t want to hear a word about anything involving her, and I never asked, content on not knowing.

Obviously, I missed something very crucial, considering she’s now standing right in front of me, no longer the quiet girl with box-dyed black hair and too much eyeliner that used to make the blue in her eyes bright enough to blind. She doesn’t have the bull ring in her nose or the ball piercing at the end of hertongue. Her face has slimmed out as she’s aged, along with her entire figure.

I feel like an outright idiot to have bought the name she fed me and not caught the small birthmark on her left eyelid. She’s grown up, matured in a way that’s halted my ability to recognize her.

“Are you going to be sick?” Nova asks, poking me hard in the stomach.

Avery—notAry—ushers her daughter toward the door, sweeping her gaze over me, a hint of sadness there and gone in a flash. “If he is, we best get a move on so we aren’t in the splash zone.”

“Yeah, that would be gross.”

I stare at the daughter I never knew Avery had as something hot and unforgiving flares in my chest. Regret is a brutal bastard that makes me feel like the world’s biggest douchebag for not recognizing one of my childhood friends on sight. Or at all.

This family dinner just got a lot more awkward.

10

AVERY

It’s about damn time.

Watching the colour leach from Oliver’s cheeks as he finally realized who I am was just as satisfying as I hoped it would be. Selfishly, I hoped it would happen in front of more people, but a win is a win.

Turns out that he was the only one who didn’t remember me, a fact that made my heart grow a half dozen sizes while simultaneously shrivelling up. From the moment Nova and I walked inside the house, it was a flurry of hugs and tears as I was tossed around from family to family.

Nova hasn’t stopped smiling since Ava Hutton ushered her into the kitchen and poured her the biggest glass of pink lemonade with a matching pink swirly straw.

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