Page 75 of Things We Left Behind
I shook my head. “You know, sometimes I think I imagined it all.”
He put down the framed photo of me and my parents at the ribbon cutting for the library and fixed those assessing gray eyes on me.
“Imagined what?”
“You. Me. The cherry tree. I thought we were friends.”
“We were. Once.”
He layered blame on top of that one syllable until it was all I heard.
“I don’t get you. I didn’t get you as a high school senior, and I don’t get you as a business mogul. And I sure as hell don’t get what happened yesterday.”
His eyes changed. It was an almost imperceptible shift, but I’d spent a lifetime studying him and didn’t miss the glint of silver.
“Let’s add yesterday to the long list of mistakes better left in the past,” he suggested.
“I’ve already forgotten it,” I boasted.
“Which is why you were the one to bring it up five seconds ago,” he pointed out.
I’d forgotten how deftly he played his enemies. He and my father had spent countless hours with a chessboard between them.
“I may have brought it up, but we both know it’s no coincidence that yesterday happened and now here you are, paying me a visit in a place you’ve never once set foot in.”
The air in the room was electric. I could practically see the sparks flying between us. But they weren’t the romantic, will-they-won’t-they sparks. These were the kind that burnedthings to the ground. The kind that destroyed everything in their wake.
Through my window, the late afternoon sun bathed his face in golden glow and shadows.
“How’s your mother?” he asked before turning back to the next piece of me that caught his eye.
“She’s fine.”
His expression shifted to irritated patience.
“She’s okay,” I amended. “I helped her go through some of Dad’s things yesterday after dress shopping and it was…” What? Excruciating? Heartbreaking? Even though we each set aside favorite pieces, boxing up his clothes added another layer of pain to our goodbye. “Difficult,” I decided.
“I was thinking the other day about Simon’s gardening T-shirt,” Lucian said. “From the one and only 5K he ever completed.”
I was relieved he was looking away from me because I had to bring my fingers to my mouth to keep the unexpected sob inside.
“Knockemout Runs for Breast Cancer,” I said when I’d regained my composure.
It was a hot-pink, double extra-large freebie T-shirt with cartoon breasts emblazoned across the chest. My father’s medium frame swam in it. But he’d been so proud of his accomplishment and the money he’d raised that he turned it into his gardening shirt, knotting it on his hip like he was a teenage girl. I’d spent years in agonized humiliation because of that shirt. It was the only item of his clothing I’d kept.
“The first time I saw him in it, he was attacking that bush in your backyard—the one with the red berries—with electric hedge trimmers and telling your mother that he was Simon Scissorhands.”
My laugh, watery though it was, surprised us both.
His lips curved, and for a moment, it felt like there was no desk between us, no ugly history. He used to make me laugh, and I used to make him smile.
“I don’t know how to react when you’re nice to me,” I announced.
“If you didn’t make it so difficult, I’d be civil more often,” he said dryly.
“It’s probably better this way. You might sprain something pretending to be human.”
The ghost of a smile remained on his mouth.
