Page 65 of Not Made to Last

“Who doesn’t these days?” she murmurs, focused on removing the sticky residue from a can. “Crafting is cheaper than therapy, so there’s that.”

“You know the school has a therapist—Miss Turner. She’s great.”

She nods. “She must be amazing, considering she was the first thing Oscar showed me on his tour of the school.”

“Speaking of school,” I edge, and I don’t know if now’s the right time to bring this up, but I don’t know if there ever will be. “I have questions.”

“I figured you might.”

I take a moment to find the right words. The last thing I want to do is dig up horrible memories. “After your grandparents died, did you just drop out of school altogether?”

“Yep,” she says, as if it’s no big deal. “I was enrolled in a fast-track program that isn’t offered at a lot of schools, so the best option for me was to stay in Wilmington for my senior year while they all moved up here for Dominic’s scholarship.”

“He couldn’t wait a year until you graduated?”

She doesn’t respond, just gives me a pointed look as if I should know the answer and, unfortunately, I do. Scholarship placements to schools like Philips are one in a million, even for players as good as her brother. “It’s not a big deal,” Liv says. “We’d planned that I live with my best friend’s family for that year, which at the time, felt like the greatest thing in the world. I’d be living with my best friend who had a brother, and her brother had a friend who also happened to be my boyfriend?—”

“I hate him,” I cut in. Then shake my head at myself. It may not be a lie, but it’s an incredibly inappropriate time to be exposing my jealousy like this.

Liv watches me a moment, brow dipped in confusion, and I stare back… glue gun in one hand, tin can in the other, not knowing how to react to my childish outburst. “Anyway…” she says, and I release the breath I’d been holding. “After they died, Dominic wasn’t sure what his immediate future looked like, and Philips was eager to keep him, so they offered me a scholarship, too. But with Max and everything else going on, it just wasn’t the right time. They let us defer and use it for Max, and thank God, because Max is thriving there.”

“So how did you end up at St. Luke’s?”

“Anonymous scholarship,” she says. “I guess whoever it is found out about what happened and wanted to help. They had ties with St. Luke’s, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to look a gifthorse in the mouth—” She stops to think a moment. “Is that the phrase?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool.” She unwinds some twine, before adding, “St. Luke’s name alone reads great on my transcripts—if I ever want to go the college route—which is important considering there’s a three-year gap filled with literallynothing.”

I nod, trying to wrap my mind around it all, and I’m sure I had more questions, but I can’t seem to come up with one. Besides, Liv’s watching me now, her eyes almost as wide as her smile. “How cute was Max’s reaction?”

“Oh my God.” I drop everything in my hands. “I’ve watched it a thousand times, and I still can’t get enough. Thank you for recording it and sending it to me. You made my fucking life!”

“You’re adorable,” she says through a giggle, getting up on her knees to kiss me. Just once. “And you’re welcome.”

I return the kiss threefold, then wait until she’s seated again before bringing up something I’ve wanted to for a while. “I feel like I need to tell you something, but I don’t know if I should because I don’t know if I’m betraying his trust, or if?—”

“Max?” she cuts in.

“Yeah.”

“What happened?”

I lean back on my outstretched arms and ready myself. “This one time, you were picking up a delivery and Max and I were in the car alone, and he mentioned that…” I sigh, discomfort crawling up my spine. “He said he thought he was a curse.”

Liv lowers her gaze, her shoulders dropping, chest caving in. “He said that?”

“I’m sorry,” I say, and I don’t really know what I’m sorry for. That I’m telling her he mentioned it or that he feels like that in the first place?

She lifts her eyes again, red and raw from her withheld emotions. “You care about him a lot, don’t you?

I shrug, tell her the truth. “I feel a connection with him, and I can’t really explain why.”

“You don’t need to,” she says through a half-hearted smile. “He has that effect on people.”

I nod, agreeing, but don’t say anything more. I just watch her—watch the myriad of emotions that flash through her eyes. “The night of the accident… I was coming up to visit for the weekend. I didn’t drive, so my boyfriend offered to take me. I was navigating us, and so I had his phone in my hand. We were about twenty minutes out when a text came through from this girl. It was a picture of them together from the night before. I was so… I don’t even know how I felt. I just knew that I couldn’t sit in the car with him for the next twenty minutes, so… I asked him to let me out. He refused at first, but I was…” She clears her throat, clears the tears from her eyes with the heels of her palms. “I was in this blackout rage, and I don’t even remember what I said or did. I just know that at one point, he finally conceded and pulled over. It was pouring rain, but I didn’t care. I got out and watched him peel away, never looking back. I was soaking wet, on a winding road, with nothing but trees around me, and so I called my grandparents to pick me up. They were already on the way to a meet and greet that Dom was at with the team and their families, but… they turned around… forme…”

My eyes drift shut, while my heart plummets to my stomach. “You can’t blame yourself,” I tell her, at the same time she sniffs, says, “I’m always trying to convince myself that it wasn’t my fault, but they wouldn’t even have been on that road if I hadn’t asked them to. And the worst part is that I could’ve just sucked it up for twenty more minutes, just dealt with it. But I forced myself into a situation where I felt unsafe, stranded on the side of the road, in the pouring rain, with no real clue of where I was.My grandpa was tracking my location on my phone, but every second that went by, the more scared and anxious I got, and my grandma was on the phone trying to calm me down when—” She breaks off on a sob that wretches through her entire body, and I go to her, sit behind her, lift her onto my lap. I hold her while she cries. While she relays the memory with no filters. “Thesoundof it, Rhys… it was so loud, and then it was silent, and then…” Her eyes widen, and she chokes on a breath.

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