“It’s not okay, Dad!” I shout, and he nods. He knows. “It’s not okay. We were meant to have the rest of our lives, and it wasn’t supposed to start like this. We were supposed to go to college together and get married and have kids and we’re eighteen and this shouldn’t be happening! I’m going to prison and she’s never going to heal from this and what am I supposed to do, Dad? Tell me!” I plead. “Tell me what I’m supposed to do?”

“Lucas,” he says, the same time Lane’s hand twitches in mine and I stand quickly, look down at her, at those eyes.

“Luke,” she whispers, her eyes fighting to stay open.

I wipe at my cheeks, try to hide my pain.

A single tear falls from her eyes, down her temple and into her hair. “I hurt, Luke.”

I scan her body. No crimson red. No blood everywhere. “Where, baby? Where do you hurt?”

Her eyes drift shut again. “I hurt everywhere.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

LUCAS

Laney falls asleep.

Judge Nelson says she has some paperwork to get back to in her office. She also tells me she’s “quite fond” of me. I tell her I “appreciate” her.

We leave.

I go home, pretend like I don’t care that everyone is fussing over me.

Lucy offers not to cook dinner, and I tell her I appreciate her, too.

I do my one minute with Lachlan and he wraps his arms around my head, tells me he loves me, that he’s glad I wasn’t the one shot by the bad man.

I fall asleep in his bed and wake the next morning to a phone call from Judge Nelson. There are detectives asking questions, and she wants to meet me at her new “headquarters.” I tell her I can’t right now, that I need to see Laney. She says her new “headquarters” is Laney’s room at the hospital. I tell her I appreciate her, again, and that I’ll be there soon.

It’s a media circus around the hospital. The Kennedys are rich and powerful and their son is in a hospital bed “fighting for his life.” Fuck the media.

According to what Lucy’s told me, the Kennedys have been very tight-lipped about it all. They refuse to speak, to answer questions, they just hope justice will be served. They want me locked up, and right now, that’s their priority. They don’t care about their son, about what might happen to him because he tried to fucking kill someone. Or that that someone actually did fight for her life. No. They care about fucking justice.

Judge Nelson’s waiting for Dad and me just outside the hospital doors. She says she lifted the restraining order on the condition that she be with me. I ask her why she’s so invested in this. She says she’s not invested in “this” so much as she’s invested in “us”… Laney and me. She being the only judge in town, she’ll be working both cases, Lane’s case against Cooper and his case against me. I guess that’s one good thing about small towns, everything is personal. And for the first time in days, I feel a win on my side. Because there are some things the Kennedys’ Fuck You money can’t buy, and Judge Nelson has them: common sense and common decency.

Lane’s awake and half sitting up when I enter her room. She smiles weakly when she sees me and I can’t help it, I smile back, race over to her.

“Hi,” she whispers.

I rest my forehead against hers, unable to hold back my cries. “Are you okay?”

She grasps my wrist, chokes on a sob. “I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you, too, baby. And I love you. So much.”

She pulls back, her tear-filled eyes ripping my heart in two. “What’s going to happen to us?”

“Nothing,” I assure. “I won’t let anything happen to us.”

“We’re going to get through this, right?”

“Of course.”

“I’m sorry, Luke. I shouldn’t have left with him,” she says, her cries hitching her words.

I kiss her lips, taste her tears. “Stop it. This isn’t your fault. I love you. You love me. That’s all that matters.”

She chews on her lip and presses a button on the remote that moves the top half of the bed back down to laying position. Then she scoots over, just slightly, and pats the bed. “One minute?”

I don’t care that there are other people in the room, the judge, my dad, her dad, our lawyers, two random detectives. Fuck, the media could be in here and it still wouldn’t stop me from getting in the bed with her and cupping her face and kissing her eyes and her cheeks and her forehead and her nose and her lips and all the things I love about her.

“Lucas,” she whispers, and I pull back. She pouts. “You went to jail?”

“No, baby.” I shake my head. “I was in a holding cell. That’s all.”

“Are you going to jail?” She’s so sad, so naive, so innocent. So Laney.

I don’t answer. Instead, I close my eyes, rub my nose along hers.

“If you do,” she says, struggling to breathe through her pain. “I’m going with you.”

I kiss her again.

Tell her I’ve missed her. Again.

Tell her I love her. Again.

“I heard you,” she says. “What you said in the ambulance, I heard it all. You were number four, Lucas Preston. I stopped counting at four.”

I smile. “It’s my new favorite number.”

“Your favorite number to go with my favorite person.”

“We’re so lame,” I tell her, my smile widening.

She laughs, reality shifts, and our reality is what she says next: “We’re not lame. We’re just in love.” It’s true. We are. And nothing and no one can take that love from us. Even the detective who clears his throat and introduces himself as Detective Keels and his partner as Detective Mayfield.

The questions start off easy and get harder from there until I’m sitting up in the bed, my hand linked with Lane’s, and I replay the moment in my mind: Was Cooper Kennedy in possession of the weapon when you began your assault?

The truth is simple. “Yes.”

“At what point was he no longer in possession?” Keels asks the questions, Mayfield takes the notes.

“Um… I guess when I lunged at him and brought him down.”

“Do you know where the weapon landed?” I hate that he’s calling it a weapon as if it’s somehow less deadly. It’s a fucking gun. I wish he’d just say it.

“Under a car.”

“How far was the car, Lucas?”

I look at my dad. I look at my lawyer. “I can’t be sure, sir.”

Mayfield pauses on taking notes and looks up, speaks for the first time. “You run track, right?”

I nod. “Yes, sir.”

Then he gets cocky, obnoxious. “So you have to have some idea of distance. Give me a ballpark, something to work with.”

“I don’t know. Like, ten, maybe fifteen feet.”

Mayfield goes back to taking notes. Keels says, “So not within reaching distance?”

“I guess not.”

“And you continued your assault on Mr. Kennedy even after the weapon had left his possession and was thrown under a car, out of reach. Correct?”