Page 71 of Deceiving Grier

“Paisley said your arm was bothering you. Is it all right?” Concern softened her features for the first time since I’d arrived.

“It wasn’t bad. I was mostly just tired.”

“Will your arm impact your scholarship at all?”

I shook my head. “The season was pretty much over, and I’m in my final year. The athletic department assured me I was fine.”

“That’s good. I would hate for all your hard work to have amounted to nothing,” she said.

She hadn’t really supported the idea of me going away to college, believing that community college would be enough—it was good enough for both my sisters, after all—and my father would be able to train me in anything I needed to know. But when I got the scholarship, my father thought a business degree could only benefit the company.

She patted my good arm. “We should probably go out. People will be arriving soon.”

“I’ll be right behind. I just want to…” I gestured to Dad’s ashes.

“Of course,” she said, smiling sadly, then turned and left me alone with my father and photos of our shared past.

A stranger would look at these photos and see a perfect family. Smiling children and proud parents. No one would have guessed that moments before the photo of me standing with my parents at my graduation, my father had been telling me how disappointed he’d been that I hadn’t been able to push my World Geography grade into the nineties, settling for an eighty-seven percent. Or the picture of me, I was probably about thirteen, holding up a medal after winning a soccer tournament, my father standing proudly next to me, his arm slung over my shoulders. No one could have guessed that minutes before we posed for this picture, he’d been lecturing me about two missed opportunities for me to score.

For most of my childhood, all of my teen years and into my early twenties until now, I had always felt as though I was letting my father down, that I was never enough, and that if I just worked harder, did more, I could finally be enough for him. But as I looked at those pictures, remembering the things he’d said, how he’d made me feel, I knew that day would never come. For everything I achieved, I could never meet his expectations. No matter how hard I worked, I would have always let him down somehow.

I had no idea why he was so hard on me. Maybe he’d believed he could push me into being more, but he’d been wrong, and in the end, I’d avoided him, distancing myself a little more every day.

I rested my hand on the box. “I wish you could have just accepted me.”

If only there could have been more of a resolution between us, but sometimes things don’t work out the way you hoped.

People started arriving about twenty minutes before the service. My mother, sisters, me, and even Marty had formed a reception line, thanking people for coming while they told us how sorry they were for our loss. My father’s business employed a good chunk of the town, and our family had lived here for generations. He was well-known and well-liked, and the lineup of people waiting to pay their respects seemed never-ending. I knew most of them, my dad’s employees, family friends, distant cousins, aunts and uncles who we really only saw at funerals and weddings, and even friends from school. The experience was both humbling and exhausting.

I glanced back over my shoulder at Sawyer standing with Ethan just a few feet away so we could exchange looks and he could shoot me another encouraging smile as he had already a few times so far. Instead, he grinned and nodded at the line of people. I turned to see who he was motioning at, and my jaw nearly hit the floor.

Alistair and Finn were standing amongst the mourners, and Jett was with them.

“Oh, my god!” I said, stepping out of the reception line and closing the short distance between me and Alistair.

“You’re here,” I said, still unable to truly grasp that they were really standing there in front of me. And not just them. Bailey and Lana were with them too.

Alistair pulled me into a hug. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “How are you holding up?”

“I can’t believe you guys came all this way,” I said.

“Of course we did,” Jett said, throwing his arms around both me and Alistair. “We’re family.”

Jett was right. They were my family, my best friends, as close to me as brothers. My eyes stung, and my throat ached. Alistair let me go and stepped back so Finn could move into his space. He gripped my good shoulder and gently squeezed.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Grier,” he said, solemnly.

I swallowed hard and croaked, “Thanks.”

When he moved back, Bailey pulled me into a tight hug.

“If there’s anything we can do,” Lana said.

They’d just flown halfway across the country to be here for me. What more could I have asked?

“Thank you, guys,” I said. “You don’t know what it means to me that you’re here.”

“Of course, we’re here,” Bailey said, as if it was the dumbest thing I could have said. “Jett’s right. We’re family.”

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