“Long time no see, Sawyer Taft.” Walker greeted me the same way he had every time I’d seen him exiting Lily’s room for the past nine days.
Somehow, I’d found myself living in a strange alternate universe where Lily’s boyfriend was allowed to be in her bedroom with the door shut, and I wasn’t allowed in her room at all—the former by my grandmother’s edict and the latter by Lily’s. If Lily could have kicked me out of the house, she would have. Lillian was blaming it on the head injury, but she hadn’t seen the look on Lily’s face when she’d seen me standing there with her father’s mistress’s hand on my face.
“How is she today?” I asked Walker.
I wasn’t asking about the stitches or the concussion, and he knew it.
“She’s angry,” Walker said. “It’s a better look for her than sad.”
Lily didn’t, as a rule, let herself get truly angry. She didn’t lose her temper. Anything she could repress, she did. But this wasn’t the old Lily we were dealing with here. This Lily’s father had moved out. Her mother was insisting on pretending that he was just being considerate, and once the gossip blew over, everything would go back to normal.
I knew, the same as Lily did, that there was no normal now. And while she’d had Walker to lean on, I’d been left out in the cold. She wasn’t talking to me. Nick hadn’t returned any of my
texts.
“You know what the doctors said,” Walker told me.
“They said she might be irritable.” I parroted the interpretation Lillian had been trying to sell me. “They said she might behave in uncharacteristic ways.”
They’d said it was temporary—but they didn’t know what Lily had seen in the woods.
“If you ask me, it’s good that she’s feeling things this strongly,” Walker said. “You’re taking this personally, Sawyer, but it’s not you. It’s everyone and everything.”
“Except for you,” I replied.
Whatever problems Walker and Lily had been having, whatever issues and emotions he’d been dealing with since his father had been arrested—those had been put on hold. Now that Lily needed him, he was there.
“Give it time, Taft.” Walker looked like he was on the verge of saying something else, but then his phone rang. He looked down at caller ID and then dismissed the call.
“Campbell?” I asked. She’d been calling me almost every day. “Or your mama?”
“Neither,” Walker replied. “I should go before traffic hits.”
This time, my phone was the one that went off—not a call. A text. On the other side of Lily’s door, I heard her phone buzz as well. I expected the message to be from Sadie-Grace, who’d taken to sending both Lily and me random pictures of puppies four or five times a day, but as I went to check the message, three others arrived, back-to-back.
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Tonight.
Stay tuned.