Page 11 of Loving Lies (Granton University 3)

Bailey shook her head and muttered to herself, “There is so much wrong with everything she just said, I don’t even know where to start.” Then speaking directly to Tess, she lifted her voice. “And you don’t think he’ll be pissed about the fact that you’ve been lying to him once his memory returns?”

Swallowing down her dread over that very possibility, Tess shrugged. “He might be. Or he might be grateful I was there to befriend him. That’s just a chance I’m willing to take.”

“Oh, brother,” Bailey grumbled again. She paused at another stoplight and glanced across the car. “He’s going to ask questions, you know. Questions you can’t answer.”

Tess groaned and sank lower in her seat. “He already has.”

“And?” Bailey cocked an eyebrow.

“And I only made him more frustrated by evading the answers. He ended up concocting some idea that we’d broken up before the shooting and he somehow did something really bad to upset me. That’s why he thinks I’m so…standoffish, or whatever, toward him.”

“Well, actually that might work.” When the light turned green, Bailey tore through the intersection. “Wow, the amnesiac came up with a good backstory lie for you already. Right on.” She lifted her hand for a congratulatory fist bump, but Tess scowled at her.

“This isn’t funny.”

Bailey rolled her eyes and dropped her hand back to the steering wheel. “Then maybe you should tell him the truth.”

“No.” Tess shook her head and turned away. “I have a better idea. I’m going to find his family and friends and, once they go to him, he’ll see someone he actually recognizes, get his memory back, and end up thanking me for helping him. Or at the very least, he’ll be so happy to be back in the arms of people who do care for him, he’ll forget all about me.”

“Except you’re overlooking one detail.”

Tess frowned and glanced over. “What’s that?”

“There’s a very real possibility no one cares.” When Tess opened her mouth to argue, Bailey spoke over her. “No one’s come to see him yet.”

“I’ll find someone,” Tess said, her jaw firm with more confidence than she felt. “Someone has to care about him. That’s all there is to it.”

Determined to find someone who cared about Jonah Abbott, Tess Googled his name as soon as she and Bailey made it back to their dorm room. When over eighty-one thousand results popped up, she winced. Glancing briefly over the few pictures at the top of the search engine, her shoulders slumped when she didn’t immediately spot his face.

Revising her search, she typed in his name along with Granton University and hit pay dirt.

“He’s a football player,” she said aloud, clicking on the first link, only to lift her eyebrows. “A really good one. Wow, he’s already broken university and state records.”

“Really?” Bailey plopped down beside her on the bed, gnawing on a Twizzler stick, to read the screen over Tess’s shoulder. “A football player, huh? Which position?”

Tess arched a brow and glanced at her. “As if it matters. You don’t know the difference.”

“What?” Bailey shrugged. “I was just being polite.”

Snorting out a laugh, Tess shook her head. “You would be polite if you were asking him. But you’re asking me, who doesn’t know the difference either, so it’s a moot point.”

“Ahh. A tight end,” Bailey said with a smug sniff as she motioned toward the words near the top of an article.

Tess clinked on the link. It was a small-town newspaper piece from the city of Bristol and had been written three years before, talking about one of their seniors—Jonah—receiving a football scholarship to Granton.

“He’s from Bristol,” she murmured, growing more excited by the second. In self-congratulations, she ripped the Twizzler out of Bailey’s hand, tore off of a piece with her teeth, and handed it back. “I honestly didn’t think it’d be so easy to find information about him. But Bristol. That’s, what, less than an hour from here, right?”

“An hour and fifteen minutes,” Bailey, Miss Numbers herself, corrected, polishing off the rope of candy.

“Whatever.” Tess rolled her eyes and typed in a search for his name, adding the word Bristol. When she came across a five-year-old obituary for a Paul Marsch, she discovered Jonah had been one of Marsch’s surviving grandsons. “The only other survivors for this guy who lived in Bristol were his daughter and son-in-law, Ted and Phyllis Abbott. That must be Jonah’s parents. Don’t you think?”

Letting out a squeal of excitement, Tess almost expected to be led to a link with their address, phone number, and map of how to get to their house when she searched for Ted and Phyllis Abbott of Bristol. But she encountered a snag when Paul Marsch’s obit ended up being the only t

hing tied to them online.

“Have you tried the school directory yet?” Bailey asked, pushing from Tess’s bed to wander across the room and flop down on her own mattress so she could hunt up another Twizzler stick. Her voice was bored as she took a bite, picked up a fashion magazine, and flipped through the pages.

“That’s a good idea.” Leaving her search engine, Tess logged onto the university’s Web site. When she saw a link for the Granton massacre’s memorial page, she paused. She’d visited this page before, but now it felt different. Each deceased victim of the shooting had been named with their picture and a small eulogy of their accomplishments attached to it.

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