Brothers of Paradise Series

Lily shakes her head so vigorously that her hair flies. “No. If we’re doing this, we have to do it question by question. I have… I have waited a very long time to ask you some things, Hay. You can’t deny me that.”

I knew this was coming, and still, unease and guilt settle like a stone into my stomach. There’s no way to explain it to her so that she’ll understand. I’ve always known that. As much as she feels like the only one for me, we come from different worlds.

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“Why the Navy? You never told me you were interested in enlisting before you left.”

Am I imagining the trace of betrayal in her voice?

“It was a good option for me. I spoke about it with the college counselor at Paradise, actually, the year before graduation. The Navy and the Army have programs for kids like I was. There was no tuition to pay, a career path laid out for me.” I shrug. “I had no money for college.”

Lily is quiet, her arms wrapped around her torso. “I see,” she says. “I figured. It was a good option. You’re right about that. I just didn’t know you were… well, interested in it.”

Ah, Lily.

Interest doesn’t matter when you’re poor and running from your mistakes.

“It’s given me a home and a purpose. I might not have been ecstatic when I started, but I have nothing but gratitude now. It’s my profession,” I say, and I mean it. The military taught me what it was to be a man-to have discipline and responsibility. To pick up a load and to bear it, and bear it well. It was something my parents had never managed. I’d seen it in Gary, but I hadn’t understood it myself until it was placed on my own two shoulders.

She’s quiet. There are a million things I want to ask her. I want to know what happened after I left. I want to know about Yale, about New York. If she still paints.

I want to know if she thought about me, like I did about her.

If her heart still aches too.

Lily stops, turning to me completely. A tear glistens on her cheek. The sight stops me cold in my tracks. If seeing her limp hurts me, her sadness and anger shames me.

“How could you leave without saying goodbye, Hayden? I loved you, you know. And you just left. How could you?”

I swallow at her anger. It’s well-deserved. “I had to,” I say. “I hate goodbyes. The thought of telling you bye, knowing you’d try to convince me to stay… It was more than I could handle. I’m not sure I would do the same today. It was a coward’s way out, and I’m sorry.”

It’s the truth. If she would have asked me to stay, begged me, I don’t know if I would’ve been strong enough to leave anyway.

And we would have had to live with the consequences of me staying, and I’m sure that would have been so much worse. There’s more I want her to know. About my crushing guilt, about conversations in the dark, about one-way tickets and her father’s voice. It’s time for you to leave, son.

But there’s no way I can make her see-there’s no way to ask for her forgiveness. I know I don’t deserve it.

Lily wipes away a tear. I can see it, the way she puts steel in her spine and straightens her shoulders. She doesn’t want my excuses.

Her voice is furious when she speaks. “All right, then. Thanks for your wonderful explanation. I always wondered.”

“I can imagine,” I murmur. Because I can. Because I would have gone out of my mind if she had suddenly left me.

Her eyes are still angry, and her tone is too, despite the overly kind words. “It wouldn’t be fair for a teenage crush to hold you back from a great opportunity, of course. You clearly made the right decision, Hayden.”

The angry description slices through me. Teenage crush. I don’t know what hurts the most-that she sees me that way, or that she thinks I saw her like that.

“All right,” I say. “Thanks.”

Her eyes narrow. The tears, brief and heartbreaking, have stopped. She’s the steely girl I remember, turned into a strong-willed young woman. “How could you not have left anything as an explanation? A text. A letter. Something.

I frown. “I wrote you a letter, Lils. I left it in the mailbox.”

“No, you didn’t. There was nothing.”

“I did,” I say quietly, remembering the scribbled words I’d penned, right before heading to the bus stop. It had felt like cutting out my own heart.

“I didn’t get a letter,” Lily says. Her voice is less forceful now-more uncertain. I can see it in her eyes as she thinks back, running through the events of a decade ago.

“Damn. I’m sorry. I thought you’d… I always thought you read it.” I run my hand through my hair and watch as Lily wraps her sweater tighter around herself. She looks as miserable as I feel.

I want to hold her-to warm her against my chest, to smooth my fingers down her back and tell her everything’s going to be all right.

That I’m sorry and I’m back now and that I have never, not for one second, stopped caring about her.

But she doesn’t want me to. She knows me better than anyone else, and still, the three feet between us might as well be worlds apart.

“Someone must have taken it,” she says. “The letter. And I’m pretty sure I know who.”

“Who? Lily, I… I’m sorry. What can I do? I know I’ve been gone for a long time, and I have no right to ask for your friendship back. But I have to ask anyway. You know I do.”

Lily starts to back away from me. There’s urgency in her body now, the kind I remember well. She’s about to start running.

I take a step to follow, but she shakes her head.

“Friends. I’ll think about it, Hayden. But for now… I have to find out what happened to that letter.”

I watch as she takes off at a run down the beach. She disappears on the boardwalk up to the road, back to her house, the girl I’ve loved and lost and maybe, just maybe, found again.

She never got my letter. Had never known I’d written one.

It doesn’t excuse anything, of course. But for a moment, the relief I feel is so heady, it makes me lightheaded.

I might still stand a chance.

11

Lily

Lily, 17

Jamie grins at me from her seat in my reading nook. “You’re really going all out.”

I smooth a hand over the miniskirt. “Yeah. Is it too much?”

“Not at all! It’s not every day you get invited to a senior party.” She puts on another coat of lip gloss. “Are you sure we’re invited, though?”

“Of course.” Truth is, I’m not sure at all. I’d only met Turner when he came by to hang out with Parker, and we weren’t exactly friends. But he wouldn’t turn away his best friend’s little sister, would he?