Page 43 of My Best Friend Is Broken
We stand there holding each other in the quiet of the morning, two broken people trying to figure out how to be whole together. It’s not the beginning I would have chosen for us, and it’s certainly not the love story either of us dreamed of when we were eighteen and thought we had all the time in the world.
But it’s ours. Messy and complicated and real and ours.
And maybe that’s enough to build on.
Chapter fourteen
Liam
I’m laughing. Actually laughing, not the careful, polite sounds I’ve been making for weeks, but real, helpless laughter that bubbles up from somewhere deep in my chest, a laugh I thought had died in prison.
Nicky is grinning at me across the small table in the coffee shop, his eyes bright with something I haven’t seen since we were teenagers, pure, uncomplicated joy. He’s just told me a ridiculous story about his friend Carlo trying to impress a woman by cooking dinner and nearly burning down his entire kitchen, complete with dramatic reenactment using sugar packets as props.
“And then,” Nicky continues, barely able to get the words out through his own laughter, “he calls me at two in the morning, absolutely panicked, asking if I know how to get smoke stains off the ceiling because he had another woman coming over the next day.”
“What did you tell him?” I manage between giggles.
“Paint over it and pray.” He takes a sip of his cappuccino, still smiling. “Though I’m not sure prayer works for people in our line of work.”
The casual reference to his job should probably kill my mood, but it doesn’t. Nothing can, right now. For the first time in five years, I feel light. Almost normal. Like maybe the boy who used to laugh until his sides hurt isn’t completely gone after all.
“I can’t believe you convinced me to come here,” I say, gesturing around the busy coffee shop. It’s packed with the morning rush, business people grabbing takeaway cups, students with laptops, mothers with pushchairs negotiating narrow spaces between tables. People fortifying themselves for Christmas shopping.
A month ago, the crowd would have sent me into a panic attack. Now it just feels... alive. Human.
“Best coffee in the West End,” Nicky says proudly. “Had to share it with you eventually.”
“Even if your reputation suffers from being seen in a place that charges eleven pounds for a latte?”
“My reputation can handle a bit of middle-class coffee snobbery.” He reaches across the table and brushes his fingers against mine, such a small touch, but it sends warmth racing up my arm. “Besides, seeing you smile is worth any amount of mockery from the lads.”
The sincerity in his voice makes my chest tight with something that isn’t quite happiness but isn’t sadness either. It’s bigger than both, encompassing everything I thought I’d lost and everything I’m slowly learning to believe I might still have.
“I love you,” I say suddenly, the words slipping out before I can second-guess them.
His face transforms, that careful hope he’s been carrying for days blooming into something radiant. “I love you too.”
It’s been three days since the first time we said it with full meaning. Since then, it has been said with looks and small gestures. With the comfortable way we sit next to each other on the sofa.
Hearing the actual words again is profound. Reaffirming. Acknowledgment I didn’t dream up the first time.
It should be terrifying, this moment of perfect vulnerability in a crowded coffee shop. But instead, it feels like coming home. Like finding a piece of myself I didn’t realize was missing.
I’m reaching for my cup, still smiling, when my eyes drift across the room and land on a woman sitting alone at a corner table.
The world stops.
She shouldn’t be here. She belongs in the shitty neighborhood I grew up in. Not so many miles away, but an entire world away from fancy coffee shops in the West End.
She’s older than I remember, her dark hair now streaked with silver, lines around her eyes that weren’t there five years ago. But I’d recognize that face anywhere. The same sharp cheekbones as her daughter, the same green eyes that used to light up when Olivia brought friends home from school.
Mrs. Patterson. Olivia’s mother.
She’s staring at me with an expression I know I’ll see in my nightmares for the rest of my life. Recognition dawning slowly, then horror, then something darker. Disgust. Rage. The look of a mother confronted with the person who destroyed her world.
My blood turns to ice in my veins. The laughter dies in my throat, replaced by something sharp and metallic that tastes like panic and guilt and five years of buried shame.
She knows. Of course she knows. She was at every day of the trial, sitting in the front row with Olivia’s father, both of them watching as I was sentenced for their daughter’s death. Watching as I was led away in handcuffs while they were left with nothing but memories of a funeral for a girl who should have had decades of life ahead of her.
