heart against her cheek was exactly what she needed.
“Adalyn was too young to really remember what it had been like before our dad killed himself or what it was like after it happened and before our mom married Gabe,” she said, remembering how small her sister had been, with her always lopsided ponytails and her gap-toothed smile.
Will tightened his hold on her and brushed his lips across the top of her head. “I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.” The stock answer, the one that came out without her even thinking about it, following her motto to minimize, deflect, and move on before the pain became too real again.
“But it never goes away,” he said, his voice as scratchy as Weston’s wool sweater had been.
That’s when it hit her. Here she was, talking to him as if he didn’t know what it was like, but he was a double member of the dead parent club. The newspapers in Harbor City loved to bring up references to his parents’ tragic car accident when the twins had still been in grade school.
She sat up so she could pivot enough to look him in the face as he sat next to her and confirm what she suspected. It only took a glance to spot it, that understanding look of having been there, too. He knew, and even though they’d still be enemies in an hour, right now they were both in the same shitty club that almost no one ever wanted to be a member of.
“No, it doesn’t,” she said, taking his hand in hers, entwining her fingers with his. “I used to pretend he was just out there, somewhere, and that he’d find his way back to us. Like he was lost or wandering the Black Hills or something.” She shook her head and sighed as some of the pain eased in the telling, like a load made lighter because she wasn’t carrying it by herself. “Even now, I’ll catch myself going an extra block or two when I’m behind someone who has the same walk as he had or wears the same cologne. It never really goes away, that loss, the sense of betrayal, the wondering why when there really is no answer, and the guilt for still being mad and sad and everything in between. It just sits there, waiting, patient as a spider to trap me in its web whenever I least expect it. So I picture that image of me I want people to have and fake it until I make it true.”
Will didn’t say anything, didn’t burst in with questions, didn’t shush her like she had to herself. Growing up like he had, being under the tabloid microscope, must have given him more understanding of how invasive that could be. Instead, he squeezed her hand, turning enough so they were face-to-face, alone but together.
“My job was to keep Adalyn happy so she wouldn’t ask questions,” Hadley went on, telling the man she’d always thought of as Evil Twin again what she’d never told anyone else. “No one gave me that job; I just assigned it to myself to make everything seem perfect so she wouldn’t be sad—and it worked. So I guess I kept doing it, sharing only the shiny, happy parts and never the jagged, ugly parts.” And the fact that everything in her life in Harbor City was starting to feel like a comb with most of its teeth broken into sharp spikes meant she really wasn’t sharing anything. Instead she was a ghost with her own family, dodging their calls and texts, leaving her more isolated than she already was in the big city. “I guess I never stopped.”
She let out the breath that she’d been holding since they’d found her dad and gathered herself up again, her gaze falling to her fingers intertwined with Will’s. His hands were big, steady, as if he never worried about anything.
“We all have our coping mechanisms,” he said, his voice soft. “The things that help us through a tough time. It’s just that sometimes they stick with us past when we actually need them.”
“You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”
For a minute, she didn’t think he’d say anything. Tilting her head up so she could watch his face, she could practically see the war going on in his head by the way his jaw was clenched and the vein at his temple pulsed.
“Our parents died in a freak car accident,” he said finally, after letting out a