When You Come Back to Me (Lost Boys #2) - Emma Scott Page 0,118

Bowl game was on the flat screen.

“Dad, we have to talk.” I turned the chair beside his recliner to face him.

“Sure, son,” he said, his eyes on the TV. “What can I do ya for?”

“It’s Amelia. She’s ditching again. The cops picked her up at the mall.”

Dad sat up, his eyebrows rising. “The police?”

“I don’t know what to do with her anymore. I’ve tried everything. I need you to…” Do something. Anything… “Talk to her. Please. She needs you, Dad.”

I needed him too, to come back from wherever he went to escape the grief.

“I will,” he said. “She’s gone too far if the police are involved.” But his eyes were already drifting back to the game. “Look at Brady’s pass.” He shook his head, marveling. “That could be you, you know. It’s not too late.”

I clenched my jaw. “Dad…”

“I know, I know. It’s too dangerous.”

I started to tell him—again—the car accident had nothing to do with why I quit football but didn’t bother. He rarely spoke about the accident and he never mentioned Holden or my non-existent love-life. Out of sight, out of mind.

“Dad, when are you going to talk to Amelia?”

“Soon. Tonight.”

I sighed. Amelia had passed her midterm by the skin of her teeth after we’d spent two solid weeks going over the material. I thought things were improving, but now she was slipping again, and nothing I said or did was propping her up.

“River,” Dad said. “I will talk to her. I promise.”

I nodded and started to go. I was at the door when he said, “Oh, a big delivery came for you today. I had them leave it in the entry—it’s too damn heavy for me to carry to your room.”

“That’s for me?”

“Yep. All the way from Paris.”

Every part of me froze except for my heart that took off, racing around my ribs. I practically ran to the foyer and knelt beside the trunk I should’ve recognized immediately.

“His life’s work,” I murmured, running my hand over the surface.

I took hold of the side handles and hefted it. It was heavy as hell; my left shoulder ached as I struggled to carry it upstairs.

In my room, I kicked the door shut behind me and dumped the trunk on my bed. Its dark red surface was scuffed, customs notices from Paris and New York affixed to the front, and a shipping address from the Le Bristol Hotel. The lock had been taped over by thick industrial tape that took me several minutes to cut through.

My heart in my throat, I opened the trunk to Holden’s journals. Maybe a hundred of them; he’d told me they dated all the way back to when he was a kid. I took one out and held it in my hands. A newer one, less worn than the others. My fingers itched to open it, to read his words and reclaim a piece of him I’d gone so long without.

I can’t. It’s too private.

But he’d sent them to me. He’d meant for me to have them, didn’t he?

Slowly, I opened the journal and flipped to a random page dated November of last year.

The conversion therapy’s cruelest lesson wasn’t taught in the hardest moments—the night marches, the beatings, or even the lake. The cruelty was in the words fed to us, a steady diet of self-hate. A mainline of loathing and unworthiness injected directly into our bloodstream every day. Long after the bruises have faded, the poison lingers, circulating through every part of me and rotting everything I touch.

When River tells me he loves me, the poison whispers that he’s lying.

When I want to say it back, the poison tells me my words aren’t worth the breath it takes to utter them.

The poison commanded me to run away, and I did, even though I’d have given anything to stay.

I took the words like a deserved punch to the gut and flipped through other pages, scanning quickly. But the same theme rose to the surface every time—what was done to Holden in Alaska went deeper than I could ever know, even after witnessing his alcohol benders, his shivering in seventy-degree heat, his march into the ocean that black night. He covered it up with elegant clothes, a fuck-the-world attitude, and a sense of humor that reassured everyone he was fine. But underneath…

I shut the journal, my heart breaking all over again and guilt filling in the cracks. Holden was in constant pain and this trunk was filled with his cries for help. Page after page, thousands