Meet Cute(80)

Emme lifts her hand in a wave. “Hi.”

“Is there somewhere we can go to discuss this privately?” Trish asks.

“Em, you want to run down to the café and grab a snack or something?” There’s a tightness in the pit of my stomach that I don’t like.

“Sure. I can do that.” Emme’s gaze shifts from Trish to me and back again as she closes her laptop and crosses the room, taking the twenty I hold out to her. “You want anything?”

“I’m good. Grab yourself whatever you want.”

As soon as the door closes behind her, Trish takes a seat opposite me. “I’m very sorry to drop in on you like this, but it looks like your aunt has been busy.” She pulls a file from her bag and sets it on the table between us. “There are some pictures of you that look less than flattering in here.”

“What kind of pictures?” Since college I’ve been incredibly careful about my public persona, aware that people are always watching and often taking photographs when I least expect it.

“You at a bar with some colleagues and a woman doing shots. There are time stamps that indicate it was after work hours.” Trish opens the folder and spreads out a series of images.

There are half a dozen pictures of the crazy fangirl who tried to get me to do a shot with her when I’d been at that bar with Felix, the night Kailyn had taken Emme to get a manicure before the dance. I’d had one beer and I didn’t touch the shot. “Those pictures have been taken out of context.”

Trish taps the desk, her smile patient. “I understand that you want to have a life—”

“I went out for one beer with my colleagues.”

“Which is reasonable. Unfortunately, with this most recent issue at the school and the underage drinking—”

“Emme wasn’t drinking.”

Trish gives me a sympathetic smile. “She was in possession of alcohol, though.”

I scrub a hand over my face. “I know possession is a problem, but I’m still working on getting to the bottom of that. Emme says it wasn’t hers, so I’m hoping there’s a way to prove that.”

“It’s commendable that you want to have faith in what Emme tells you—”

I cut her off. “If she said it wasn’t hers, I believe her.”

“Well, then you need undeniable proof.” She clears her throat. “The pictures aren’t the only thing your aunt has up her sleeve, though.”

Fuck. This just keeps getting worse. “What else could she have?”

“Did you know Emme kept a journal?”

She wanders around with a decorated notebook half the time. “Sure. That’s kind of a typical girl thing, isn’t it?”

“It can be. It appears that Emme shared some of her entries with your aunt.”

“She shared them with Linda?” That seems odd. Poetry I can kind of understand, but journals are usually personal, or at least that’s what I assume.

Trish gives me a pained look as she slides a stack of photocopies toward me. “These might be difficult to see, but please remember that these are Emme’s private thoughts, and although she shared them with your aunt, I doubt she intended for you to see them.”

“They’re that bad?” I laugh a little, but sober quickly at her piteous expression.

With each entry I read, written in Emme’s distinctive cursive, my heart shrivels and cracks. Phrases jump out on the page, ones in angry slashing caps, gone over again and again with ink until the paper threatened to tear under the pressure. The running ink and splotches on the page indicate she often cried while she wrote these. Each entry bears a date at the top right corner of the page.

One is dated around the time I started moving my stuff in and cleaning out our parents’ room:

I HATE THIS. I hate that Dax is throwing out all this stuff and there’s nothing I can do about it. He just comes in and takes over and changes everything. I wish he hadn’t moved in here. I wish I could just take care of myself.



Another is from the time Emme punched out that Billy kid and I confiscated her phone:

DAX IS SO MEAN. I hate him so FUCKING much. FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!!! He took my phone for the whole weekend. Now I have no one to talk to. And he’s such a hypocrite! One second he’s saying he gets why I punched Billy and the next he’s grounding me. He’s such an ASSHOLE!



There are endless entries, all of them expressing Emme’s frustration with living with me, my invading her privacy, trying to be her dad when I’m not. It’s hard to read and even harder to understand why she would show any of this to Linda.

I swallow down the surge of emotion that threatens to embarrass me. I reach for the cold coffee on my desk, anything that will help ease the sudden dryness in my mouth.

“I know this is difficult, Dax,” Trish says softly.

“I didn’t realize she felt this way,” I croak.

“I very much doubt she does. She’s a grieving girl who’s experienced a huge trauma and she’s working through her emotions,” Trish reasons.

“Even if Emme says she doesn’t mean it, the prosecution is going to say she’s being coerced to change her story.”

“There’s a strong possibility that they’ll use that argument against you.”