Her chest rises and falls as she keeps her head lowered, waiting for my response. “You want an exclusive?” I ask.

She chews on her lips, her gaze dropping. She hesitates a beat before her fingers move again. “I’m sorry. He’d e-mailed the questions to me a few minutes before I arrived and I didn’t get a chance to read them. I’m not looking for an exclusive, I swear. I don’t want you to feel like I expect more because of our history or whatever.”

Her eyes are on mine now, wide and filled with fear. And my memories, my visions, my dreams of her do not do her justice because she’s so much more.

I’m about to speak, but a knock on the door cuts me off. A moment later, Chris is back, Martin—holding three shoe boxes—following behind him. “I got it,” Chris says, the door already half open. Justin’s on the other side, his hands in his pockets. “Oh, I’m sorry.” He eyes Becca before switching to me. “I didn’t know you were still working.”

“It’s cool, man. What’s up?”

“We’re trying to get Tommy to head to the hotel, but he won’t go without—”

“I got it,” I cut in, not wanting Becca to hear. I get up and move to Tommy’s room in the bus and grab what Justin needs. “Here you go,” I tell him, back at the door. He pulls his gaze away from Becca and looks down at the skateboard, the camera, and the framed drawing of Tommy’s “family.” He focuses on the drawing, and then up at Becca, then back down, again and again, while my heart thumps in my chest and my eyes drift shut because I know he knows. His thumb swipes over the glass of the frame, over the bright green crayon eyes and he gasps, his mouth dropping, his eyes wide as he looks back up at Becca. “You’re—”

“Is that it?” I ask, cutting him off. But I’m too late because Becca’s already seen his reaction and now she’s on her feet, moving closer and closer to me. She takes the frame from Justin’s hands, her eyes as wide as his were while her thumb skims from the green crayon eyes to the bandage on her stick figure chest.

“Because you had a boo-boo,” I whisper. Then clear my throat. “Becca, this is Justin, Nat’s fiancé. Justin, Becca.”

The fear in Becca’s eyes is replaced with something else, and she hands back the frame before turning quickly and sitting back at the table, her hands on her lap and her focus on her computer.

“Thanks for this,” Justin says, and I nod and shut the door.

“Interview done?” Martin asks.

Becca shakes her head, glaring at her screen like it’s somehow going to give her answers to the thousands of questions a year apart has created.

Sitting back down, I watch the sadness take over, watch the tears fill her eyes. “Becs…” I start to reach over, but her eyes narrow, her lips pressed tight when she slams a finger down on a key.

“You took quite the hiatus for a few years there, and you’ve made it known in previous interviews the reason you did—your son Tommy—but you’ve never been clear on why you came back. Feel like giving a small time college newspaper an exclusive?”

I suck in a breath and keep it there while I hold her gaze. The seconds tick by, one after the other until my mind begins to spin, and my heart begins to race, and I know, deep down, that the only thing I can offer her is the pain that comes with the truth. “I met a girl with raven dark hair and eyes the color of emeralds…”

2

—Becca—

“I met a girl with raven dark hair and eyes the color of emeralds. I came into her life with an insecure past, and she came into mine with a tortured one. My future was set, and hers was uncertain, but at the time, it didn’t matter. We filled our days with porch-step kisses, filled our ears with three-year-old laughter, and filled our hearts with love. Deep, soul-aching, desperate love. She believed in me in ways only my father ever had, and I wanted to prove that I was worthy of that. So I agreed to SK8F8. For her. But then one day my future became as uncertain as hers, and I crumbled. I was so afraid of the destruction she’d cause when her life would no longer be filled with those things—kisses, laughter, and love—and so my fear pushed me to destroy the things I loved. Physically. Metaphorically. Every way possible. And when the dust of my demolition settled, she re-appeared, like sunshine between two buildings, and she gave me a chance to validate her belief in me. So I did. With her by my side or her following behind me, I skated my heart out. And as I stood on that pipe on the day of my so-called ‘come back,’ my heart hanging in the balance, just like my board on the edge of the coping, I looked down at the girl, a girl I knew I had lost, a girl whose emerald eyes were blocked by her camera, and I felt the same thing I felt the moment I fell in love with skating. The moment I fell in love with her. She made me feel weightless, feel free, feel airborne. So I kicked, and I pushed, and for the past year, that’s all I’ve been doing because it didn’t feel the same and I knew in my heart that without her, I’d never be able to coast.”

Journal

I dipped in his words.

Bathed in his declarations.

Submerged myself in the tale of his love.

His one true love.

It was perfect.

Too perfect.

Every sentence.

Every word.

Every damn syllable.

Perfect.

Until the last word was spoken.

And I drowned in his lies.

And I realized…

That the world was full of perfect things.

And broken, faulty people.

~ ~

I pull the earphones out of my ear and turn to my door where Dad is standing, calling my name. I spent the rest of last night thinking about Josh, and when I awoke, I thought about him some more. So I listened to his interview, over and over until I had his words memorized, and then I became angry. Unjustifiably angry. And when the anger faded, I became sad. Miserable, even. And I had no idea why. So I wrote down my feelings in the stupid journal and stared at my words until they, too, were memorized. Seared into my brain for all of eternity as a reminder that no matter how good he looked, how good he smelled, how good I felt when his eyes were on mine—that I could never go back there. We could never go back there. Because as much as he told me he loved me, that I was everything to him, my mother had said the same things. And I’d spent the past year, three days a week, in some form of therapy trying to force myself to believe that it was not love. It couldn’t be.

“How you doing, sweetheart?” Dad asks.

I nod and smile.

“You working on that article?”

Another nod. Another smile.

“Listen,” he says, stepping forward, his hands in the pockets of his sweats. His eyes—green just like mine—drop to the floor, and I know he’s nervous. It’s the exact way he’d approached me the first few months I’d moved in with him. “That Warden boy is at the door.”

I stand quickly, knowing—praying—he’s wrong, and rush to the door because there’s absolutely no way in hell that Josh is standing outside my house on the morning of a day when he should be competing. Yet here he is, looking as disheveled as I feel. My mouth forms an O as I stop in front of him, half hiding behind the door when he looks up at me. I feel the same way I did when he looked at me last night, exposed, as if he could see all my secrets and hear all my thoughts and sense all my fears.