Page 45 of Cruel Elite (Princes of Ravenlake Academy 3)

She hired a nurse to take care of him and a driver to take him to and from his chemo and radiation appointments.

I’ve always resented that I didn’t get to know my dad until he was sick.

When he was healthy, I was busy being social and he was busy working.

But when he got sick, he sat at home in his wide chair in the living room for hours at a time, napping on and off.

We began to talk.

He told me about growing up in the seventies and eighties, sneaking into rock concerts and stealing t-shirts from the merch table.

When his own parents tried to put the clamp on his partying, he just started sneaking out right under their noses.

“I don’t know if you’re supposed to tell your daughter things like this,” I whispered one day towards the end after he told me the story of getting high in a bathroom with a Playboy Bunny.

“Who else am I going to tell?” he asked. “I’m dying, and someone should know who I really am.”

Two days later, he was gone.

* * *

Three Years Earlier

I stand back from the door, slightly confused.

I’m not sure if I’m really here.

If I really just knocked on the door.

There seems to be a haze between me and the rest of the world, a kind of veil I can’t lift.

Then, Noah opens the door, and the veil shreds to pieces.

The reality of my day—the tragedy of my life—comes into stark focus, and I practically collapse at his feet.

“Penny?”

Noah catches me and hauls me inside the entryway. I’m too upset to care if his parents are home.

He’s still wearing the same black pants and sweater he had on at the funeral, and he smells so good. I bury my face in his shoulder, not carrying if I get makeup on his clothes, and grab a fistful of his shirt.

“I was at the wake,” he says, smoothing a shaking hand down my back. “I came to see you, but I couldn’t find you. Where were you?”

I saw Noah walk in my front door, dressed head to toe in black, and immediately tears sprang to my eyes.

I didn’t want to cry.

Not today.

Not in front of all these people.

Not in front of him.

But when I was with Noah, it was so easy to forget my dad was wasting away at home.

Easy to forget he was slipping away, day by day.

Being with Noah was the only respite I had. It was the only time I wasn’t depressed looking at my dad or angry looking at how little my mom cared. At how much she loathed me.

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