Page 7 of Shy Girl
Grady was the oldest of our group by about three months and usually the voice of reason, ifanyreason entered our stupid situations. He lived in Texas now with his almost-wife and we hadn’t seen him since our last get together in the winter. He'd been moonstruck and distracted the whole time, refusing to attempt taking a snowmobile off a jump Vik and I had painstakingly constructed over months of work and testing.
“Too dangerous,” he said.
And we teased him mercilessly for the next four days.
“Marriage, Jay,” Vikram muttered and brought me back to the present before I could respond. “Grady is breaking the pact.”
I rolled my eyes. “He is not.”
“Might as well be. After this, we can never go back to the way things used to be. He’s going to stop coming with us, you know?”
I shook my head in a silent display of frustration. Grady's attention on crazy outdoor stunts had been dwindling for a while as his career gobbled up his life. Helene, his fiancée, was just a matter of inevitability on Grady’s normal-life trajectory. That had always been Grady, though. He found a path and never deviated. Not even when his fellow Merry Idiots tried to talk him out of it by scheduling a skydive in Maui.
“He hasn’t really been coming for a while, Vik. His heart isn’t in it, and you know it.”
“But he came enough that it clearly still meant . . .something. Helene is going to hold him back. She’s going to make him live small and safe in their white-picket-fence world.”
“He's making that choice.”
“She's encouraging it!”
“Vik, that’s not your business.”
“He’s my best friend. Blood brothers. Itismy business.”
My fingers curled around a familiar scar on my palm. Cheesy, elementary school kids set loose with a dull knife led to all of us slashing our palms and clasping them together in an oath of friendship. As Hollywood as it sounded, something had certainly bonded us that night, because we’d always been together afterward. All four of us crashed through mountain life. Our idiotic stunts are what pushed me into law enforcement in the first place, because I certainly had enough run-ins with deputies. Most of them said to me what I told teenagers now.
“Don’t be stupid. Your life isn’t worth it.”
Only now, I understood what they meant. At the time, I ignored their warnings. Despite my level-headed approach compared to Vikram, part of me felt his same frustration.
Change got us all.
“It’s just . . . it sucks.” Vik made a raspberry sound, and I could picture him running a hand through his dark, wild hair. “Bastian hasn’t said a word about it.”
“He's on a fire.”
“I talked to him before he went out.”
“He liked Helene.”
Vik snorted. “He never said that.”
“He neversaysthat he likes anyone. It’s implied if he’s giving support. Don’t be a hater, Vik,” I leaned back in the seat. Sun hammered the roof of the cruiser, warming my face while I turned on the air conditioning. “We always knew Grady would go first. Besides, Helene is lovely.”
Vikram grunted under his breath, and I thought I heard a flippantwhatever. “You’re going, right?” he asked.
“I’m going.”
“Even with Victoria there?”
Something clutched in my chest, and it felt a lot like stress. Regret. Determination. Idiocy. Victoria was a whole jumble of the lot of them. Grady was my first best friend. He'd bailed me out of so many bad situations, I’d lost track. Grady, to whom I couldn’t saynoand face again without guilt. Grady was as close to a brother as I’d ever get. My single mother had never married after my father died in a car accident at twenty-two-years-old, a month before my birth. My cousins had been my siblings. So had my friends. My sworn-in-blood brothers. It’s why I saidyeswhen he asked me to be his Best Man.
Yet Victoria, the annihilistic man-eater of a woman that I'd once chased hard, would be at his wedding.
As the Maid of Honor.
Rock, meet hard place.
