I'd Give Anything(62)

Later, Avery would be stunned that she’d reassured Cressida in that way and had said things that amounted to defending Cressida against her own father. But she realized that it was because, at that moment, her mind hadn’t completely absorbed the fact that the man who had sat at that table and made Cressida feel humiliated actually was her father.

“Anyway, then he reached across the table and held my hand, and before I could pull away, I saw your dad’s face change and he pulled away. He’d seen this guy from work watching us, and that was it. Your dad got fired. I quit. And people started spreading rumors about me being a blackmailing whore and my dad putting me up to it. And I wouldn’t even care what people said about me. But my dad—” Cressida started crying again, quietly this time. “He’s the best person and he’s had a shitty year. He got diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. And now people are saying terrible things about him. They’re all lies.”

Avery remembered the man with the cane, how Cressida’s face had lit up at the sight of him.

“I’m so sorry that happened,” she said.

“It’s not your fault. You know what’s crazy?”

“What?”

“For a long time, I felt sorry for your dad. I hated what he did, but I felt bad for him. He seemed—lost. Like a person who had lost his way.”

“He did. He wasn’t always like that. My mom says he got depressed.”

“That’s awful. But even though I felt sorry for him, when he kept calling me, even after he got fired and it should’ve been all over, I started to hate him.”

Avery froze.

“You’re saying he kept calling you, even after my mom found out, after I found out?”

Cressida nodded. “Every day, sometimes more than once a day, for a week. I answered the first time because I didn’t recognize the number, and he told me he wanted to see me. I told him not to call me ever again. But he didn’t stop. He left messages, saying that he loved me and needed to see me. He said he thought he would kill himself if I didn’t talk to him. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to block him, but what if he did it? What if he killed himself because I blocked him? But then, after a week, the calls stopped. I thought it was all over, and then, two weeks later, he called again. I didn’t even listen to the message. I just deleted it and blocked his number. I deleted all his messages because I couldn’t even stand to have them on my phone, but now, I wish I’d saved them, so I could show people that my dad and I didn’t do what people are saying, that it was him pursuing me.”

Avery wrapped her arms around her stomach.

“No. He wouldn’t have done that. I don’t believe you.”

Cressida’s blue eyes regarded Avery with kindness. “Look, maybe he just wanted to see me to apologize.”

“Take me back to school.”

Cressida started up the car, but before she put it into reverse to back out of the parking space, she said, “It took a lot of guts for you to get in touch with me and for you to sit and listen to all of this. I just want you to know that.”

“Take me back,” said Avery, squeezing her eyes shut. “Please, please, please just take me back.”





Chapter Sixteen





Ginny


“I’d like to tell you something. It’s about what happened between us, after the fire. Wait. No. That’s not exactly right. It’s about how I behaved after the fire, when I failed you as a friend. And I want you to know that what I have to say is not an excuse because nothing excuses how I acted. I don’t expect you to absolve me. Absolutely not. So maybe it’s an explanation, although that also sounds too tidy. But at the very least it’s a true story, one that’s finally mine to tell, and I hope you’ll listen. But you obviously don’t owe me that or anything else, and if you don’t want to hear it, I’ll understand. I really will. But if you do want to hear it, please know that I don’t expect you to say anything right away. Or ever, if that’s better for you. It’s why I called you on the phone instead of seeing you in person. You should have time to absorb and sort out and think about this story—or to do nothing at all with it. If you want to talk about it, you can call in an hour or a month or a year. Whenever. And if you don’t, you shouldn’t have to, and I will never, if we see each other again, which I hope with all my heart we will, I will never bring it up again, ever. I promise.”

By the time I’d finished saying this to Gray, I was out of breath. It was a mouthful and also, as I was acutely aware, a painfully stilted, qualifier-riddled way to start a conversation. But I was trying to do what I should have done twenty years earlier: put Gray’s feelings ahead of my own. Would telling him the story be an unburdening for me? Of course. Would it be the best possible gift if after I told it, he forgave me? Yes, I can’t lie. But those could not be the reasons I was telling him. Gray had had a friend who loved him and that friend deserted him at the cruelest possible time and he never knew why. And maybe he’d stopped caring about why, but I didn’t think so, because what I knew, as surely as I knew anything, was that Gray had loved me, too. He had loved me and I had let him down and he was a good, kind person, and he deserved to know the story.

Before I’d even caught my breath, Gray was talking.