Chapter 4 Three Weeks Ago

Garrett's POV

I punch my pillow at two in the morning like it did something wrong to me, which is stupid, because the pillow isn't the problem. The problem is that every time I close my eyes, I see Paul Sutcliffe's face in that hallway, and it will not let me sleep.

Not guilty. That's the part that keeps snagging on something in my brain. If she'd looked guilty, like she got caught snooping through a closet that wasn't hers, I could let it go. People snoop. People get embarrassed. That's normal, that's boring, that's a story I could forget by morning.

She didn't look embarrassed either. I've watched Paul get embarrassed before, at school, plenty of times, even though she's good at hiding it fast. This was different. This was the kind of look I only ever saw on my own face once, in a hospital hallway two years ago, right before a doctor told my dad and me that my mom wasn't coming home.

She looked scared. Actually scared. Like the floor had opened up.

And there was a piece of paper with my mother's name on it, sitting in a box in our closet, dated to a time when my mom was still supposed to be alive.

I tell myself I'm tired and my brain is making things bigger than they are. I tell myself that four separate times before I finally fall asleep somewhere around four in the morning, and even then, it's not real sleep, just the kind where you keep almost waking up.

By the time I get downstairs for breakfast, my dad's already at the table looking way too awake for a guy who got married yesterday and probably should be sleeping in with his new wife. He's got his phone in one hand and a coffee in the other, and he's talking loud and cheerful about some trip he's already planning, some second honeymoon thing he wants to surprise Lila with, like he didn't just spend yesterday standing at an altar.

"Morning, champ," he says to me, way too bright for seven in the morning. "Big practice today?"

"Same as always."

"That's the spirit." He claps his hands together like I said something inspiring instead of nothing at all.

I watch him pour coffee for Paul's mom when she comes downstairs, watch him pull out her chair, watch him be exactly the kind of charming that used to make me proud to be his son. Something about it sits wrong in my stomach this morning in a way it never has before. I start paying attention to the things he says, and more than that, the things he doesn't say.

He talks about the wedding. He talks about the honeymoon. He talks about football, about my recruiting visits, about Lila's job, about basically everything two people getting married would talk about on the morning after.

He does not say one word about my mom. Not her name. Not a memory. Not even something small, like this, would have made your mother laugh, the kind of thing normal people say sometimes without even meaning to. He talks like she never existed at all, and I realize, sitting there with a piece of toast going cold in my hand, that he's done this for two years straight. Every single time her name almost comes up, he changes the subject so smoothly you'd never notice unless you were looking for it.

I never noticed before last night. Now I can't stop noticing.

Paul sits across from me, picking at a bowl of cereal she clearly isn't going to finish, and she will not look at me. Not once. Her eyes go everywhere else, the table, her spoon, the window, her mom's face, anywhere that isn't my direction. That's its own kind of answer. If it was really nothing, just boring old paperwork, she'd have no reason to avoid my eyes like I might catch fire and burn her if she looked too long.

"You two settling in okay?" Lila asks, glancing between us with this hopeful look that makes my chest hurt a little, because she has no idea what her own daughter is sitting on.

"Great," Paul says, way too fast, way too bright, sounding exactly like my dad sounded two minutes ago.

I almost laugh. Almost. Because watching her lie badly to her own mother is somehow the first thing about her I've ever found a little bit charming, even with everything else twisting in my gut.

My dad's phone buzzes on the table. He glances at it, and for just a second, half a second, maybe less, his whole face changes. The cheerful mask drops completely, replaced by something tight and worried, before he catches himself and shoves the phone in his pocket without answering it.

"Everything okay?" Lila asks.

"Work," he says. "Nothing important."

But I saw the name on the screen before he hid it, just for that half second, glowing on the lock screen between two lines of a text message he didn't open at the table.

Halverson Investigations.

The same name that was stamped at the top of that folder.

I look up, and Paul is staring at her cereal so hard you'd think it owed her money, but I catch the exact moment her shoulders go rigid, as she hears it too. Like she knows exactly who Halverson Investigations is, and exactly why my dad's face just went white reading a text from them three weeks after his own wedding.

I push my chair back from the table.

"I need to talk to you," I say to Paul, low enough that her mom can't hear. "Now."