The distance in her voice reflected every one of the miles between them, and then some. Sitting on the edge of his bed, Liam hesitated. Now that he’d called, everything he wanted to say caught in his chest, like that first time he saw her again over the gate. It seemed like the more important the moment, the less eloquent he became.
“How did you get my number?” she asked, when he didn’t reply immediately.
“Riley gave it to me,” he said.
She made a sound that could have been resignation or irritation. “Of course. Always looking on the bright side.”
He wasn’t sure if the bright side meant something good in this case. Right now, it was bloody hard to see any bright side at all. “So, uh…have you been online since you got back?”
“To see all the stories about myself? With all the details you gave Lainey Kingsley? If I hadn’t, the paparazzi pack waiting for me at the airport would have given me a clue.”
He’d seen the pictures—Jacinda shielding her face, sheltering in the lee of some huge minder, as reporters swarmed around. “I’m really sorry—”
“Listen, you didn’t have to throw me under the bus,” she said, cutting him off. “I would’ve gone anyway.”
“What? I didn’t want you to go.”
“Sure. That’s why you let me walk away after your mom turned up, without defending me. That’s why you apologized to her for forgetting everything.”
“You heard that?”
“I did. And that’s fine. For one thing, it made it really easy to come home when Hannah needed me.”
He wanted to reach down the line and shake her. For once, the words came freely. “If you’d listened a bit longer, you would have heard the rest of what I said. That I was sorry because I knew she’d find it hard to hear, but being with you is the only way I’ve ever been able to forget. The only reprieve from the fucking albatross of guilt around my neck.” He paused. “Which is now two albatrosses.”
“Well, good,” she said. “Because for everything I might have done wrong all those years ago, I didn’t deserve this. After everything we—”
He couldn’t stand it. “I never intended to hurt you. I had no idea she was a reporter. I’d been drinking, and it just…overflowed.”
She snorted. “You know ‘I was drunk’ doesn’t actually cut it as an excuse.”
“No, it doesn’t. But my own mother had just seen me with a full-scale hard-on, and a naked woman. And given that the woman was you, and the fallout was spectacular, I needed a goddamn drink. If you hadn’t left the country without saying anything, I could have explained.”
It was hot in his room, but he could feel the chill on the line. Shit. This apology wasn’t coming out as…apologetic as he’d planned.
“It doesn’t matter now,” she said, her words stiff and careful. “I’ve got fallout to deal with here too, thanks to you. It’s better if we just make a clean break. Like you planned when you snuck out that night.”
The reminder stabbed in his already aching chest. “If I could take back either of those shitty mistakes, I would. You know that.”
“I know,” she said. “But I’m not going to come between you and your family yet again.”
“The remnants of my family have nothing to do with you and me.”
She was quiet for what felt like a long while. Then she said, “We both know that’s not true.”
He let out a frustrated breath, and dragged a hand through his hair. She might be right, but he wasn’t going to give her the point. Right now, it seemed like his family was even more fractured than before. His father had called from Australia, enraged that Liam had dragged them “through the mud”. Liam had aimed a reciprocal anger down the line. If his father hadn’t been so determined to suppress the truth—unnecessarily, in Liam’s opinion—they could have stayed in the bay, surrounded by friends, and maybe found some kind of healing over time. Instead, they’d walked away from everything they knew, and their broken hearts had never begun to mend. Then he remembered what Jacinda didn’t know.
“There’s something you should know,” he said. “I found out that Ethan had ecstasy in his system when he died.”
He heard her intake of breath. “Really? I never…”
“Yeah. None of us would have picked it either. The thing is, I don’t think he ever felt as invincible as he wanted us to believe. Maybe he just needed to feel it that day.”
There was a heavy silence at her end. “I’m sorry I made him feel that way,” she said quietly.
“Don’t be. He had a lot going on. He’d been a local hero for…I don’t know, forever. I think the thought of going to Sydney and starting from nothing was more daunting than he’d admit. Then your news, and finding out you’d left…”
She made a small, pained sound.
“I’m not aiming that at you,” he said. “I think all he meant to do was escape for a few hours with a bottle of vodka and an uncomplicated high. Get away from things…just hang out somewhere secret and look at the moon. But…it went wrong. And when he found out about the coroner’s report, my dad pulled strings to get it suppressed because he was afraid it would mess with his chances of promotion. Even when he started out as a cop on the street, he always wanted the next step up, and the next. By then, he had a shot at making it to the top job in the country.”
“But you left anyway,” she said.
“From what Mum told me, he ended up more worried that people would find out he’d played the system. And she found it too hard living by this ocean…” He left the sentence unfinished.
“Oh, God.” She hesitated, then asked, “Is she okay?”
He sighed. “She’s angry with me. Luckily Lainey didn’t find out those extra details, but having the story all over the internet…and you and me…it’s brought everything to the surface again. But then, she’s been angry with everything for a long time. All these years.”
“I get that. Which is why me leaving was the best thing.”
“No, it wasn’t. I didn’t want you to leave. I wanted you to stay. And I never expected to want that. All these years, for me, thinking about you made me feel worse—the guilt of letting myself fall for you then, when you were with Ethan, and then the way those feelings wouldn’t go away, even after everything that happened.”
As he spoke, he expected her to interrupt and shut him down, but she didn’t. So he kept talking. He had nothing to lose now. Maybe, somehow, he’d find the right words to make her understand. And maybe they had no chance of a future together—but he wanted her to admit her feelings too. He wanted it to be real, to know that what they’d shared wasn’t just a desperate need to smother their memories with sex and denial.
“But being with you…” he said. “It was like I could breathe again. That summer turned into a nightmare. But this summer, it felt like we had a chance at something new.” When she didn’t reply, he added. “I think you felt it too. We weren’t just drowning out the past with lust and body heat. We had something. We have something.”
“Maybe…” she said slowly, and that one word held all his hopes. Two syllables of possibility, where his future could veer in a new direction.
“But we always knew this was trouble,” she continued. “We knew we should stay away from each other. The past never really goes away, especially a past like ours—it would always get in the way. And I’m not going to come between you and your mom—you’re all she has. She needs you. And you need your family.”
He could feel her slipping away from him. “What about you, though?” he asked urgently. “What do you need?”
“I need to move on, and that’s what I’m doing. And so should you.”
The finality in her voice was matched with a gentleness that made his heart sink.
“So I’m going to hang up now,” she said softly.
And then she did.