Meet Cute(7)

Chapter Two





Orphans


Daxton



Six Months Later



I’m staring at a stupid meme—of myself. The image is more than a decade and a half old, but it never seems to stop circulating the internet abyss. It’s one of those I Hate Monday memes, complete with an ugly cry face.

One of my colleagues and close friends sent it early this morning, so it’s the first email I check. Felix McQueen, a defense lawyer at Freeman and Associates, does it at least once a month under the guise of an URGENT email. We’ve been tight since undergrad, so I put up with his shit.

Also, his emails often are urgent, so I rarely hesitate to open them. He thinks he’s being funny, but in reality it’s another reminder that I will never live down my years as a child TV star, no matter how far I’ve come since the days of Teen Beat magazine spreads.

The knock on my door has me closing the email. Not that it matters. Everyone in the office has seen the same damn meme at some point. Felix has a coffee mug boasting the image, and he loves to drink out of it at meetings. Because he’s an asshole. Whatever. At least my humiliation is profitable. And I’m immune to it. Mostly.

I flip Felix off as his head appears in the doorway. “Thanks for being an asshole, asshole.”

He makes a face, one I can’t really read. “Sorry about the stupid email. I wouldn’t have sent it if I’d known.”

“Known what?”

He mutters something I don’t catch, his expression somber, almost convincing in his remorse. “I gotta talk to you.”

I lean back in my chair and cross my arms over my chest, a heavy feeling I can’t explain settling in my gut. I brush it off with sarcasm. “I already know there’s a twenty-four-hour It’s My Life marathon this weekend. No, I don’t want to watch it with you and let my vagina hang out.”

He closes the door behind him and passes a hand over his tie. He seems fidgety, which is unlike him.

“What’s wrong? Did you lose the Kent case?” The jury has been deliberating for two days. It’s only a matter of time before they make a decision, but it could go either way.

Felix shakes his head, refusing to look me in the eye as he comes around the side of my desk. “It’s not about a case.”

“Well then, what’s it about? What’s with this?” I motion to his serious face.

He scrubs at his chin with his palm, expelling a long breath. “Your parents were in a car accident.”

Disbelief needles under my skin, but anger is what pushes to the surface. “Don’t fuck with me, Felix.”

He licks his lips, throat bobbing with a hard swallow. “I wish I was, but I’m not.”

My chair flies backward as I push to stand, making the glass rattle when it connects with the windowpane behind me. “Are they okay? Which hospital were they taken to? How bad was the accident?”

The answers I don’t want are already written on his face in grief. “It was fatal. I’m so sorry.”

His statement ricochets around in my head, the word fatal a blow to the heart. “They’re…dead? Both of them?” I have to strain to hear him over the rush of blood in my ears.

“They were on the freeway. A tractor trailer jackknifed.”

“How did you find out? How do you know this?” Everything feels like it’s moving in slow motion and fast-forward at the same time. My mind spins with this new, horrifying truth.

“The police are here. I thought it would be better if the news came from someone who gives a shit. I’m so sorry, Dax. The police said they died on impact. Your parents wouldn’t have felt anything.”

I reach behind me for my chair and drop back into it, my legs suddenly watery. I drag a palm down my face, the news pinging around in my head, unwilling to settle. A crushing realization hammers into me: This loss isn’t just mine. This sudden gaping hole in my chest is echoed in another, more fragile body. “Emme?”

“She’s at school. She doesn’t know yet.”

I root around in my desk for my keys. “I have to— I need to get her. I need to be the one who tells her. I don’t want anyone else to tell her.” Poor Emme. I’m thirty and this is crushing me. How is this going to impact my kid sister? How is she going to survive without parents?

I round my desk only to have Felix step in front of the door. “Whoa, Dax, you can’t drive.”

I fist the lapels of his suit jacket, anger and grief stealing rationality. “They’re her world. I need to get her, and you need to get out of my fucking way.”

He puts his hands on my shoulders, none of my aggression echoed in him. “I know, man. I’ll take you. You have to keep it together though, okay? You’re all she has. If you need to fall apart, do it now, because you have to be in control once you get to her.”

He’s right. I’m all she has. And now she’s all I have, too. I’m not sure which one of us is worse off for it.

Before I can leave the office, I speak with the cops. Felix was right to be the one to tell me. They wear apathetic expressions, so accustomed to delivering bad news in the form of death. I vomit into the wastebasket beside my desk when I find out the tractor trailer was a fuel truck that exploded on impact. Which is also the moment I break down.