Then

I’ve barely left Avery’s side, except to talk to the doctors. So many doctors. My head is spinning—though that might be the fact that I haven’t really been eating, which is why Nash just forced me to go to the cafeteria.

He promised he’d watch Avery while I was gone.

Coming back down the hall toward Avery’s room, I can hear Nash’s low, steady voice—far more familiar than it should be—talking to my sister.

“Far be it from me to issue threats here, kid, but if you think for even a second that you’re gonna stop fightin’? You’ve got another thing coming.” Nash is using the same tone I’ve heard him use to pull rank on his brothers. “You don’t get to give up, Avery Grambs.”

I step into the room to see the cowboy holding my sister’s hand in his.

“That’s the thing about being loved, kid. It ties you to people.” Nash sees me then, but he doesn’t let go of Avery’s hand. “And once you’re tied to one of us, you’re tied to all of us. And the thing about Hawthornes is…”

I sit down next to him, take her hand with him.

“Hawthornes never,” Nash Hawthorne tells my comatose sister, “let go.”

There’s a person that Nash hasn’t let go of—not completely. She was his fiancée once. They grew up together. She is everything I am not, and I just found out that she’s playing games with Avery’s life, the kind of games that involved smuggling my comatose sister out of the hospital while I was asleep in the room.

“Have you lost your pantsuit-loving mind?” I am yelling—really yelling.

“Calm down,” Alisa Ortega says, all business.

“You don’t get to tell me to calm down!” I have never bellowed in my life before, but I sure as hell am now. We’re back at Hawthorne House, which has always felt like Alisa’s home turf far more than mine, but I’m not about to back down. “Avery’s in critical condition, and you had her moved.”

I am shaking. Literally shaking. Legally, Alisa Ortega shouldn’t have been able to do a damn thing. I’m Avery’s guardian. Not her. Me. And I know she hates that. I know that she has looked at me and, from day one, seen a liability.

“I did what needed to be done.” There’s emotion in Alisa’s tone now, more of it than makes sense—until I realize that Nash just walked into the hall.

“For the money.” Nash Hawthorne walks toward us—toward her—step after slowly considered step. “You did what needed to be done for the money.”

If Avery had stayed at the hospital any longer, she would have lost her inheritance. That’s why Alisa brought her back to Hawthorne House, why the lawyer risked my sister’s life to make it so.

“She’s fine.” Alisa raises her chin. She’s looking at Nash and only Nash, and I’m struck by all the ways they fit and don’t fit. He’s dirt and warm wind. She’s boardrooms and heels clicking onto tile. But there’s history there, something between them that’s not cool or warm.

Something that burned hot once.

“Avery,” Alisa says, the slightest catch in her voice, “is going to thank me.”

“If it were up to me…” Nash never raises his voice. “You’d never step foot near the kid again.”

For all her poise, the great Alisa Ortega looks like he just knocked the wind from her lungs. “Nash.”

Just from the way she says his name, I feel like I shouldn’t be here—not watching the two of them and not with him, either.

“You don’t mean that,” Alisa continues, every inch the lawyer laying out her conditions and terms.

“You don’t get to tell me what I mean, Lee-Lee.” Nash turns away from her then. “You never did.”

Before he can say a single thing to me, I flee.

That night, Nash comes to Avery’s room. It’s right across from mine, but I haven’t even so much as laid down on my own bed.

My sister is going to wake up.

She is going to be fine.

She is going to kiss Jameson Hawthorne, who comes to see her every day. I am going to have to keep an eye on those two when she wakes up, which she is going to do, because everything will be fine.

“I brought you something.” Nash sits down beside me, next to Avery’s bed.

“It had better not be a cowboy hat,” I say. I can’t quite bring myself to look at Nash—not after being the third wheel in his fight with Alisa. “Is it soup?”

“It’s not soup.” Nash sets a plastic bag at my feet.

I lean down to inspect the contents, and my heart jumps into my throat. “What’s this?”

I’m not asking what it actually is, because I have eyes, and I can see that’s he bought me a veritable rainbow of hair dyes. Bright colors, all of them.

“Your sister needs you,” Nash tells me, and then his hands find their way to my face—again. I can’t help remembering the other times, can’t help remembering Cartago. “She needs you, Lib.”

The real me. That’s what he’s saying. I am dyed-neon hair and dark nails and way too much kohl rimming my eyes. I’m thigh-high boots and black velvet chokers. I’m not normal. I’m not special.

I’m me. “I can’t, Nash,” I whisper.

Jameson appears in the doorway, and I vacate the spot beside Avery’s bed so he can take it. I make my way out into the hall, and Nash does the same.

“I can’t,” I tell him again. I don’t know if I’m talking about the hair dye or him or us or the fact that I can’t keep doing nothing when my sister is in a medically induced coma, when she might never wake up.

Nash takes the bag of dyes from my hand. “I can,” he says. “If you let me.”