Page 41 of Once Upon a Boyband
However he found me, I think I underestimated how important this concert is to him. For him to show up on my doorstep all this time just to ask me in person? That says something.
The truth is, I wouldn’t want anything to do with a friendwho ghosted me as badly as I did Freddie—and the others, too.
When I saw him, when he pulled me in for an embrace, I forgot about all of it. I forgot that I shut him out. Ignored his calls, his texts. I forgot that I walked away from the life he was a part of and promised myself I would never go back.
I still have no clue how I’m going to navigate a conversation with him. How I’m going to say no to his face when he came all this way.
But I do know that, despite everything, I’m actually glad he’s here. Even if he did make things complicated with Laney.
She’s still waiting for me, sitting on the bench with her back straight, eyes focused somewhere in the darkness beyond the house.
I lower myself down beside her, and she offers me a hesitant smile.
“You okay?” I ask.
“Adam Deacon Driscoll,” she says slowly, enunciating each part of my name with careful specificity. “I can’t believe I didn’t figure it out.”
I lean forward, propping my elbows on my knees. “If it matters, it’s been a very long time since anyone has recognized me. I would have been surprised if youhadfigured it out.”
She glances over at me, but her gaze doesn’t hold. Like she’s afraid to make eye contact. “Did you…what happened? Where did…” She waves her hand up and down my body, scrunching her face up in a way that makes her nose wrinkle. “All of this come from?”
I chuckle. “I grew three inches the year I turned nineteen. And gained about thirty pounds over the next three.”
“Guys can do that? I stopped growing when I was fourteen.”
“Some guys do,” I say. “I did. But you have to admit, when I was eighteen, I could have told people I was fifteen and they would have believed it.”
“That’s true,” she says. “You always looked younger than the other guys.” She falls back into silence, her eyes shifting this way and that, like she can’t quite keep up with all the thoughts running through her brain.
I wait, giving her the chance to process, to take this conversation at her own pace.
“I was in your house,” she says, but it feels more like she’s talking to herself than to me. “I was looking at your record collection, which makes so much more sense now. That Elvis album alone is worth…and this house! And the farm. Of course you can fund Hope Acres. I wondered if you’d won the lottery. Or had family money.” She looks over at me one more time, and this time her gaze locks in. “You said you had some investments do well.”
“Technically, that’s still true. It just so happens that the money for those investments came from Midnight Rush.”
She furrows her brow like she’s considering a new piece of evidence and isn’t sure how or where to sort it in her brain. I can’t blame her for the struggle. I’m basically asking her to rewrite everything she thinks she knows about me, to insert a whole new past into her mind view.
“So I was looking at your records,” she finally says, restarting her story, “and then Freddie was on the front porch, and he greeted me by name.” She lets out a disbelieving laugh. “And then he said that I must be Deke’s fiancée. I didn’t just open the door and come face to face with Freddie Ridgefield, I listened to him tell me I wasengaged to Deke Driscoll. Thatyouwere Deke Driscoll. I couldn’t make up a more improbable scenario if I tried.”
“I’m sure it felt like a lot,” I say.
“It felt like an ambush,” she says. “At least an emotional one.”
I resist the urge to reach over and put an arm around her, to offer her physical comfort in some way. I want to, but I don’t want to spook her.
“Should I explain about the engagement part first?”
It takes her a moment, but she eventually nods, so I walk her through my phone call with Kevin. Her eyes widen to saucers when I mention the reunion concert, then she frowns when I tell her why I felt compelled to lie about having a fiancée in the first place. Her expressions tell a thousand stories, her emotions playing over her face like she’s an open book, words written in twenty-four point font.
“But why me?” she asks when I finally finish. “Why did you choose me to be your fake fiancée?”
It’s not a question I expect her to ask, because in my mind, it’s more likeof course, you.“Because I like you,” I say simply. “And you’d just come out to the farm for the first time the night Kevin called, so you were on my mind. But also, I thought that would be the end of it. That Kevin would tell everyone I said no, and that would be that.”
“But then Kevin told Freddie,” she says as she pieces the story together. “And Freddie decided to come see you in person because…”
I sigh. “Because he knows ifheasks me to do the concert, I’m more likely to cave and say yes.”
“Why Freddie?” she asks.
