Page 68 of The Luck of Finding You
“I’ll be on the next plane,” I promise her. I take the next exit so I can look up flights and grab some food. The quickest flight leaves from Salt Lake in six hours. I book it and drive straight to the airport.
* * *
I’m soanxious the entire flight that I don’t sleep a wink, even though I’m exhausted. I’ve lost Nora, and I don’t know what to do so I don’t lose Tally too.
As I take a cab to Sam’s apartment, where Annie texted me she was staying at, I try to clear my head. I need to be able to focus on helping Annie, at least for the next twenty-four hours, then I can figure out how I’m going to fix everything that I messed up with Tally.
I’m grateful that Sam left Annie a key to his apartment, even though he’s in Europe for the next five months.
I let myself into the apartment and find Annie asleep on the couch.
“Hey, Annie,” I say, gently nudging her. She opens her eyes sleepily. It’s dark, but I can still see a bruise on her left cheek. I’m going find Mitch and murder him if he’s the one who gave it to her.
I might murder him anyway.
“Noah,” Annie says, wincing as she gets up off the couch and falls into my arms. “Thank you for coming. I’d really like to go get my stuff as soon as we can. Mitch is at the office today, so we have until about seven if you want to sleep first.”
I just hold my sister. I’m so full of anger. The emotion feels foreign to me. I was such an angry kid after Dad left until Mom got me into therapy. Anger isn’t something I feel very often these days. But now? Someone hurt one of the people I love most in the world, and I don’t know what to do with this rage.
“He…” Annie starts.
“You don’t have to say anything,” I tell her. “He was garbage. We didn’t see it—it’s not your fault.”
I don’t think she believes me, so I hug her tighter.
“He slept with one of the new line cooks,” she says, and somehow I know that’s not the worst of it.
“Trash,” I say through clenched teeth. Mitch always rubbed me the wrong way, but now I really hate the guy. I force myself to push my anger down because Annie is already hurting. She doesn’t need to see how mad I am about this.
Annie weeps in my arms, and I hold her until she’s nearly asleep. I help her lie back down on the couch and cover her with a comforter I recognize from Sam’s high school days. Once Annie is asleep, exhaustion hits. The sun is already high in the sky, but I need at least an hour of sleep if I’m going to help Annie move her stuff out of the apartment later. I go into Sam’s room, where he hasn’t slept in months, and I’m out as soon as my head hits the pillow.
25
TALLY
Gran is up and waiting for me when I get home. It’s past midnight and I’m completely exhausted from the past twenty-four hours.
“It’s going to be okay, sweetheart,” she whispers again and again as she runs her fingers through my hair, and I cry like I haven’t since Mom died. I managed to hold it together in the Uber. If I thought the tears at Simone’s event were a lot, this is a waterfall.
Everything that happened seems so out of character for the person I thought Mo was, for who he was online. But I guess you really can’t know someone as well as you think you do when the only words you exchange are on a screen.
“Everything’s a mess.” I look up at Gran when the tears finally stop, her fingers going through my hair. I’m lying across the couch, my head in her lap. I don’t think I could move even if I wanted to.
Gran’s fingers pause. “What happened?”
“I waited and waited and waited,” I tell her, the humiliation of it all filling me up again. “I messaged him and he never responded. I went into the event right as it was starting to try and find Noah, but I couldn’t see him because there were too many people, and it was all too much so I went back to the hotel. Which is where I saw Noah’s phone on his bed, so that’s why he hadn’t told me where he was, but still. It was all too much. I just couldn’t deal, so instead of waiting for him to come back, I just called you and packed up, and now here I am.”
Gran runs her fingers through my hair again in a way that reminds me so much of Mom that I start to cry again. She pulls me into her, giving me a big awkward hug since she’s sitting above me. “I know that tonight was really hard,” she starts. “We don’t have to worry about Mo or Noah until the morning—well, later this morning.”
Gran helps me up and leads me down the stairs. She braids my hair, just like she used to do when I was younger and I slept over here. She kisses my cheek softly and tells me to get some rest.
Before I fall asleep, I look at my phone one last time, willing there to be a message from Mo, even though I told him I don’t think we should talk again, but there’s nothing. If I had any tears left, they would fall now. I might have told him not to talk to me and unfollowed him, but that’s not actually what I want. I got my hopes up tonight, and in the end, I lost my closest friend.
* * *
I sleep until noon.My phone fell off my bed at some point in the night, but my growling stomach forces me to go straight upstairs before looking for it.
“Morning,” Gran says with a smile as she slides a pancake onto the plate sitting at the counter that I assume is for me.
