“We’re your brothers, Luke,” Leo says. “We’re here for you.”
In a sprint, every millisecond counts. In the holding cell, those milliseconds feel like eons. Every single time I close my eyes I see those eyes, those tears, and they haunt me.
I sit with my back against the wall, my knees up, my head between them and I cry silent tears and live in silent thoughts and then Logan says, “This is my fault.”
I lift my gaze, look over at him, but he’s staring ahead, his eyes glazed.
“I was outside drinking with Dumb Name, and we saw Lane and Cooper walk out. We hid in the fucking bushes like idiots so we could spy. We thought they were screwing around behind your back, and we wanted proof. But he was just begging her to take him back, and he kept apologizing. Something was seriously wrong with him. It was like he was possessed.” He wipes his eyes on his forearm, his shoulders shaking. I try to breathe, but I can’t.
“She told him she was done, that she wanted nothing to do with him and she started to go back in, but then he yelled ‘Don’t walk away from me!’” Logan falls apart, his words as broken as himself. “And then he lifted the gun… Luke…” He faces me, sob after sob wrecking him. “I didn’t know what to do and I got so scared and I just ran away. I didn’t even check on her. I’m so fucking sorry.”
I hold his face in my hands and lock my eyes on his. “This is not your fault.”
He shakes his head, his tears falling. “I’ll send the video to Misty. I’ll do whatever I can to help.”
“What video?”
“I told you,” he says. “I wanted proof.”
Five hours and forty-six minutes after Misty left, she returns, along with my dad. My brothers and I stand, greet them at the bars. Dad says, “She’s out of surgery.”
“She’s going to be okay, right?”
“Eventually.”
Every muscle in my body seems to ease, and I grip the bars in desperation. “Can I get out now? Can I see her?”
I see the remorse in their eyes when they look away, just for a moment. Misty says, “The bail hearing is set for Monday, Lucas. I’ve requested that you stay here until then. That way you’re close to me, close to family.”
I stay in the stupid cell, alone, the eons ticking by one after the other. Dad returns to give me my emergency glasses I requested because contacts don’t do well with tears, with pain and agony. I tell him not to come back, that I don’t want to see him until the bail hearing.
When Monday morning comes, I change into a clean suit Dad brought me and breathe in fresh air for the first time in what feels like forever. I sit in the only courtroom in town, in front of the only judge in town, next to a lawyer I’d never met before. Dad has a lawyer for the business, but this one specializes in crime. Because that’s what I am now. A criminal. All I want is for them to announce bail, for Dad to hopefully pay it, and for me to spend the rest of the day, the rest of my life, next to Laney.
Judge Nelson, a woman who should’ve retired years ago, reads a sheet of paper out loud explaining my assault charges, and I look over at Dad and Misty sitting behind me and for a second, just one, I’m scared for me. I didn’t assault just anybody. I wanted to kill Cooper Kennedy, whose family has more than enough Fuck You money to get exactly what they want. I’m going to prison for a long time, too long to ask Laney to wait for me.
Judge Nelson sets bail and gives me the conditions of my release: A restraining order has been granted from the Kennedys, meaning I can’t be within a hundred yards of him. Fine, I think, until I hear Dad murmuring to Misty behind me. Misty stands. “If I may, Your Honor.”
Judge Nelson smiles at her. “Misty, I’ve known you since before you could walk.” Small towns. “Why so formal?”
Misty clears her throat, squares her shoulders. “I’d like to request a temporary lift on the RO, limited to the hospital, with police supervision.”
Judge Nelson’s gray eyebrows bunch, and she switches her gaze from Misty to me and back again. She calls for a ten-minute recess and requests both myself and Misty to her “chambers.” My head spins. I know nothing of what the fuck is happening, and I thought I was getting out. I need to get out. I need to see Laney.
Misty and I don’t have time to discuss anything before we’re sitting in leather chairs inside a room with Judge Nelson. It smells like old lady perfume, Band-Aids and hotel room Bibles.
“You want to tell me what’s going on?” Judge Nelson asks, sitting down opposite us.
Misty doesn’t skip a beat. “Cooper Kennedy is sitting in a hospital room four doors down from Lois Sanders.”
And all of a sudden I go from knowing nothing to knowing too much.
Misty adds, “With the restraining order in place, Lucas—I mean Mr. Preston—can’t visit her. I’m simply requesting—”
Judge Nelson cuts in. “You have a personal relationship with Miss Sanders, correct?”
“She’s my boyfriend’s daughter.”
“And you think she deserves special privileges?”
“Your Honor.” I don’t recognize my own voice. “May I speak?”
Judge Nelson nods. “If it’s quick. I have to be back in session soon.”
My heart pounds, my breaths uneven. I push through. “Laney—I mean Lois—we’ve been best friends since we were eleven, and I’ve loved her every day since then. Right now…” A sob forces its way up my throat, out my mouth. “Right now, I’m lost. I have no idea what’s going to happen to me. I just know that I need to see her. And if I’m feeling this, I can’t even imagine how she’s feeling. We’ve been side by side through everything, ma’am. And I understand that you have to do your job, that you have to abide by the laws set to protect, but no one was protecting her when Cooper decided to unload four bullets into her body.”
Misty’s hand lands on my shoulder and I hear her cries, louder than mine.
“You asked if we think Laney deserves special privileges as if there’s a logical answer to that question. She fell in love with the wrong guy in the wrong way, and I let her down. I let him lead her away from me, and I was supposed to protect her. To save her.” To be her Wonderwall. “And I need to see her so she knows she’s loved, that she didn’t deserve this, and selfishly, I need to tell her I’m sorry so she can forgive me. Because I need her forgiveness, ma’am. More than I need my next breath.”
Judge Nelson cancels her sessions for the rest of the day, parking fines and petty disputes, and we ride to the hospital in a police cruiser while Dad follows in his car. The judge asks me about Laney, about the type of person she is, and about our relationship. I answer each one as best I can, but my mind is both numb and frantic, and there are too many words, words, words racing through my head, so many different ways to say I’m sorry.
My steps falter and my gut twists when we enter the hospital, walk down the halls, and I see a police officer guarding Cooper’s room as if he’s the one who needs the protection. But Judge Nelson raises her hand, says, “He’s with me.” And the officer sits back down, reads his paper.
It takes fifteen steps to pass three rooms until I’m standing in front of Laney’s door, lost. I look to Misty, look to Dad. “Go on,” Dad says. “You need each other.” He didn’t say that I need her or that she needs me. We need each other. Like air in our lungs. Like life in our blood.
There are no words to describe the slaughtering of my heart when I see Laney in the bed, her right leg bandaged, elevated, tubes and machines hooked up to her body. “She’s out,” Brian says, sitting in the dark corner of the room. He looks like I feel and I force myself forward, step after step, until I’m standing next to her, looking down, and I’ve never missed those eyes as much as I miss them now, hidden behind her closed lids.
Dad pulls up a chair, sets it behind me as if he knows I’m struggling to stand, to see. I sit down, take her hand in mine.
Brian says, “I’m not sure if she’s sleeping or if the pain meds…” He sighs. So tired. So broken. “Talk to her, Luk
e. She’s been asking for you.”
It’s hard to pull words from your heart when there are four other people standing in the room, watching, waiting. “Hey, baby. It’s Lucas.” Stupid. “I’m sorry I haven’t been able to come see you. I’ve been… don’t worry where I’ve been. I just…” I drop my head on her hand and I forget the words, the need for her forgiveness, and I cry. You’d think that I’d be done with crying but seeing her, touching her, it’s everything I wanted and needed, and I thought it would fix everything but it doesn’t. Dad grasps my shoulder, his huge frame like a giant boulder when he squats down next to me. “It’s okay,” he says.
But it’s not.
I’m crying harder, tears and snot and drool and bandages and hospitals and court dates and criminal charges and all I’ve ever wanted was coconuts, lime and Laney.
“It’s not okay, Dad!” I shout, and he nods. He knows. “It’s not okay. We were meant to have the rest of our lives, and it wasn’t supposed to start like this. We were supposed to go to college together and get married and have kids and we’re eighteen and this shouldn’t be happening! I’m going to prison and she’s never going to heal from this and what am I supposed to do, Dad? Tell me!” I plead. “Tell me what I’m supposed to do?”
“Lucas,” he says, the same time Lane’s hand twitches in mine and I stand quickly, look down at her, at those eyes.
“Luke,” she whispers, her eyes fighting to stay open.
I wipe at my cheeks, try to hide my pain.
A single tear falls from her eyes, down her temple and into her hair. “I hurt, Luke.”
I scan her body. No crimson red. No blood everywhere. “Where, baby? Where do you hurt?”
Her eyes drift shut again. “I hurt everywhere.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
LUCAS
Laney falls asleep.
Judge Nelson says she has some paperwork to get back to in her office. She also tells me she’s “quite fond” of me. I tell her I “appreciate” her.
We leave.
I go home, pretend like I don’t care that everyone is fussing over me.
Lucy offers not to cook dinner, and I tell her I appreciate her, too.
I do my one minute with Lachlan and he wraps his arms around my head, tells me he loves me, that he’s glad I wasn’t the one shot by the bad man.
I fall asleep in his bed and wake the next morning to a phone call from Judge Nelson. There are detectives asking questions, and she wants to meet me at her new “headquarters.” I tell her I can’t right now, that I need to see Laney. She says her new “headquarters” is Laney’s room at the hospital. I tell her I appreciate her, again, and that I’ll be there soon.
It’s a media circus around the hospital. The Kennedys are rich and powerful and their son is in a hospital bed “fighting for his life.” Fuck the media.
According to what Lucy’s told me, the Kennedys have been very tight-lipped about it all. They refuse to speak, to answer questions, they just hope justice will be served. They want me locked up, and right now, that’s their priority. They don’t care about their son, about what might happen to him because he tried to fucking kill someone. Or that that someone actually did fight for her life. No. They care about fucking justice.
Judge Nelson’s waiting for Dad and me just outside the hospital doors. She says she lifted the restraining order on the condition that she be with me. I ask her why she’s so invested in this. She says she’s not invested in “this” so much as she’s invested in “us”… Laney and me. She being the only judge in town, she’ll be working both cases, Lane’s case against Cooper and his case against me. I guess that’s one good thing about small towns, everything is personal. And for the first time in days, I feel a win on my side. Because there are some things the Kennedys’ Fuck You money can’t buy, and Judge Nelson has them: common sense and common decency.
Lane’s awake and half sitting up when I enter her room. She smiles weakly when she sees me and I can’t help it, I smile back, race over to her.
“Hi,” she whispers.
I rest my forehead against hers, unable to hold back my cries. “Are you okay?”
She grasps my wrist, chokes on a sob. “I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you, too, baby. And I love you. So much.”
She pulls back, her tear-filled eyes ripping my heart in two. “What’s going to happen to us?”
“Nothing,” I assure. “I won’t let anything happen to us.”
“We’re going to get through this, right?”
“Of course.”
“I’m sorry, Luke. I shouldn’t have left with him,” she says, her cries hitching her words.
I kiss her lips, taste her tears. “Stop it. This isn’t your fault. I love you. You love me. That’s all that matters.”
She chews on her lip and presses a button on the remote that moves the top half of the bed back down to laying position. Then she scoots over, just slightly, and pats the bed. “One minute?”
I don’t care that there are other people in the room, the judge, my dad, her dad, our lawyers, two random detectives. Fuck, the media could be in here and it still wouldn’t stop me from getting in the bed with her and cupping her face and kissing her eyes and her cheeks and her forehead and her nose and her lips and all the things I love about her.
“Lucas,” she whispers, and I pull back. She pouts. “You went to jail?”
“No, baby.” I shake my head. “I was in a holding cell. That’s all.”
“Are you going to jail?” She’s so sad, so naive, so innocent. So Laney.
I don’t answer. Instead, I close my eyes, rub my nose along hers.
“If you do,” she says, struggling to breathe through her pain. “I’m going with you.”
I kiss her again.
Tell her I’ve missed her. Again.
Tell her I love her. Again.
“I heard you,” she says. “What you said in the ambulance, I heard it all. You were number four, Lucas Preston. I stopped counting at four.”
I smile. “It’s my new favorite number.”
“Your favorite number to go with my favorite person.”
“We’re so lame,” I tell her, my smile widening.
She laughs, reality shifts, and our reality is what she says next: “We’re not lame. We’re just in love.” It’s true. We are. And nothing and no one can take that love from us. Even the detective who clears his throat and introduces himself as Detective Keels and his partner as Detective Mayfield.
The questions start off easy and get harder from there until I’m sitting up in the bed, my hand linked with Lane’s, and I replay the moment in my mind: Was Cooper Kennedy in possession of the weapon when you began your assault?
The truth is simple. “Yes.”
“At what point was he no longer in possession?” Keels asks the questions, Mayfield takes the notes.
“Um… I guess when I lunged at him and brought him down.”
“Do you know where the weapon landed?” I hate that he’s calling it a weapon as if it’s somehow less deadly. It’s a fucking gun. I wish he’d just say it.
“Under a car.”
“How far was the car, Lucas?”
I look at my dad. I look at my lawyer. “I can’t be sure, sir.”
Mayfield pauses on taking notes and looks up, speaks for the first time. “You run track, right?”
I nod. “Yes, sir.”
Then he gets cocky, obnoxious. “So you have to have some idea of distance. Give me a ballpark, something to work with.”
“I don’t know. Like, ten, maybe fifteen feet.”
Mayfield goes back to taking notes. Keels says, “So not within reaching distance?”
“I guess not.”
“And you continued your assault on Mr. Kennedy even after the weapon had left his possession and was thrown under a car, out of reach. Correct?”
My heart thumps, my mind shuts down. “I—”
My lawyer sighs. “I g
uess self-defense is out of the question now.”
Fuck.
Keels ends my questions there, for now, and moves on to Laney. Same standard questions with her.
What was her relationship with Cooper Kennedy?
How long have they known each other?
Were they intimate? (Like it fucking matters.)
And I start to wonder if maybe these fucking detectives are on the Kennedys’ Fuck You payroll. Then they ask something that has Laney sitting up, joining me. Where was she the first week of May? She was in Charlotte, in a hotel. But she’s taking too long to answer, and her eyes are everywhere at once. She won’t make eye contact with Keels and she won’t look at me, even when I squeeze her hand. I whisper, “You were in Charlotte, remember? In a hotel. You needed to get away for a while.”
Her throat bobs with her swallow, but she still doesn’t speak.
Mayfield flips his notepad, page after page, as if we have all the time in the fucking world. I wish they’d leave. I wish we could go back to fifteen minutes ago when one minute was the greatest thing in the world.
Mayfield finds what he’s looking for among his notes. “So you weren’t in the hospital… Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte? Is that what you’re saying?”
Her eyes go wide like they did when I asked her about her glasses, deer meet headlights, and nothing makes sense.
Mayfield continues, “It says here you were complaining about stomach pains. Two broken ribs, swelling around your jaw, large bruise on your back? That doesn’t sound like stomach pains to me.”
Brian sits higher. Two deer in headlights. “Lois. What is he saying?”
Lane shakes her head. “What do you want me to say?” she whispers.