Page 66 of Gravity of Love
“Yes. They are all staying at my house, and Frankie hasn’t told her mom that she and Tristan are broken up. So, our parents don’t know. No one can know until after the wedding.”
Poppy blinked. Her mouth opened, then closed, then opened, then closed again. She finally sighed. “Whoa. That’s—” She appeared to be searching to find the right word and failing to do so. Finally, she shrugged. “That’s a lot.”
His chin dipped in a sharp nod. The thought of Tristan and Frankie in bed together every night in the guest room above his bedroom was like two separate tourniquets twisting his heart and gut into knots, tightening both to almost unbearable pain. Even if he’d had the opportunity to sleep over the past couple days, he doubted he’d have been able to. Every time he closed his eyes, that’s all he saw. The two of them, beside each other, under the covers. And today, as he walked around fully awake, he kept having flashes of them showering together in the en-suite bath water pouring down their naked bodies from his rainfall showerhead. He knew there was a very slim possibility that had happened, but it seemed his imagination wanted to torment him.
“Are you going to the wedding?” Poppy asked.
“I’m in the wedding. All the kids are.” It was strange referring to himself, Tristan, Niko, AJ, and Frankie as ‘the kids,’ but that’s what his dad and Cora called them.
“Oh, I thought…but you and your dad…that’s…” Poppy couldn’t look more confused if Liam had told her that a lizard named Debbie was going to be his date and he was in love with her. In fact, she might have found that more believable.
“Cora was like a second mom to me,” he explained.
It was more than that. When his dad was busy saving other people and his mom was dying, Cora was there caring for his mom. She never left her side. He didn’t feel like sharing that much.
Poppy exhaled audibly. “You’re a bigger person than me. I’d have faked a work emergency, faked being sick, or fled the state.”
Interesting, he noted that she threwfaking being sickin there.
Liam’s phone vibrated. He pulled it out and saw he was getting paged down to intake. Which meant someone he knew was at the emergency room. Was it Frankie? Cora? Yaya? This was the first time since he’d been at the hospital he’d been genuinely concerned when he got paged.
“I have to go.” He turned and was halfway down the hall when he heard his sister call out.
“Wait, can I be your plus one?”
He glanced over his shoulder as he stepped onto the elevator. “Youhateweddings.”
Poppy had been a bridesmaid twelve times and been to forty-two weddings in the past six years, which is an average of seven weddings per year. Nineteen of those had been destination weddings. Liam knew those statistics because he’d had to listen to her complain about it. A lot.
Poppy snorted. “This isn’t just a wedding, it’s like a Greek tragedy, but with cake.”
“And hopefully less murder.”
She pressed the palms of her hands together as if she was pleading with a prayer. “Is that a yes?”
Normally, his goal was to keep any social gathering to the absolute least amount of people possible, but at this point, what was one more? Also, he wanted to keep an eye on his sister. Something was going on, and he didn’t like that he had no clue what it was.
“Sure,” he agreed as the doors closed.
Poppy’s eyes lit up like the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Plaza as she clapped.
He shot a quick text to Cora, letting her know he was going to have a plus one, and then a text to Frankie. He just needed to know that she was okay. They’d been exchanging texts all day, every day. As much as he enjoyed their covert correspondence, he missed her. He hated that whatever they’d started had gotten a pretty serious pause button.
Within seconds of pressing send, bubbles appeared. A text came through with a photo attached. Frankie, Yaya, Cora, and Lucy were on the floor of the great room with pieces of paper strewn out in front of them. Only Frankie was looking at the camera, Yaya and Cora seemed to be intently studying the papers. She captioned the photo “seating chart hell”with a folding chair emoji and a flame emoji.
A smile spread across his face as the doors opened. She did that to him. Anytime he heard from her, whatever she said, he ended up grinning like an idiot. He walked up to the desk, his lips still curled at the edges, as he leaned over to ask Sheryl who was there for him when she tilted her head, motioning over his shoulder.
“Can we talk?”
The moment Liam heard the familiar voice behind him he froze bent over the desk, phone still in his hand, mind racing. His dad—Dr. Edward Sterling III, the man who had both made and unmade his life in a thousand small but significant ways—wanted to talk to him after nearly twelve years of no communication.
Without looking back or acknowledging his father, he told Sheryl he’d be unavailable for a few minutes. She nodded, clearly not missing the tension radiating off him in palpable waves. He took a deep breath and then turned and led the man who raisedhim, lied to him, who let his mother die, down the hallway, past the mural of a bright mosaic of healthcare workers, and out the double doors toward the only quiet room to afford them privacy Liam could think of.
The hospital solarium had always struck Liam as a strange luxury. The rest of the building was all fluorescent light and sterilized surfaces, everything built to resist entropy and infection and human error, but the solarium was a glass box, a greenhouse for people instead of plants, with a few wooden benches where bacteria thrived. An anonymous donation last year had it rebranded as The Zen Garden. It now had a wooden plaque at the entrance touting health benefits such as reduced depression and anxiety, faster recovery time, regulation of circadian rhythm, pain relief, and improved morale for both patients and staff alike. To Liam it was just a place where the hospital’s overworked landscaping crew fought to keep a patch of grass, moss, bamboo, a Japanese maple, a few ferns, some wisteria, geraniums, and two anemic rosebushes alive against the onslaught of the mountain winters and humid summers during which the germ box would overheat. The windows beaded with condensation year-round, and the air was always stuffy, not exactly the fresh reinvigoration experience the sign promised.
He pushed open the heavy glass door and his father stepped inside. Liam followed as the door automatically swung closed shut with a click behind them. His father surveyed the room, hands buried in his pockets, posture not as rod-straight as usual. He looked smaller suddenly, as if the glass walls and the wet green air had shrunk him. Liam didn’t offer him a seat on one of the benches and he didn’t take one. The men stood facing each other. Neither spoke for several heavy seconds.
When his father finally broke the silence, it was with a practiced casualness that Liam recognized from decades of pre-surgical pep talks and post-mortem debriefs. “So. Are you going to tell me?” he asked. “Or do I have to keep guessing?”
