Toe the Line(44)

Ignoring it, I tore the condom wrapper and sheathed myself as Noelle watched my every move. We fell together onto the bed. I hovered over her as she looked up with wonder in her beautiful green eyes. This is really happening.

The phone finally stopped ringing, only to start again immediately.

“Who the fuck is that?” I muttered, finally looking over at the caller ID.

My mother.

I got an odd feeling—especially since she’d called two times in a row. So I answered. “Mom? What’s up?”

Her words were all jumbled together. I heard bits and pieces.

Hospital.

Your father.

Heart attack.

The room started to spin.

Couldn’t save him.

Died.

Died.

Died.

Dead.

I looked over at Noelle’s concerned face.

My father is dead.

By the time I hung up, I felt like I’d been transported someplace else. Every shred of the joy I’d been experiencing just seconds earlier was gone.

“My father had a heart attack.” Dazed and confused, I forced the words out. “He…died.”

Noelle shot up, covering her mouth with a shaking hand.

And just like that, summer ended.

My life as I knew it ended.





CHAPTER 16


NOELLE


PRESENT



MY HOTEL IN Sonoma, California, wasn’t the closest one to the wedding venue. But that was intentional. I was not interested in running into anyone from the event. The hotel I’d chosen was a few miles away, located next to a gorgeous winery. It was the perfect hiding place for me this October weekend.

This was the night before Archie’s wedding, and I’d decided to drown my sorrows alone in the hotel lounge with a word game on my phone and a couple of glasses of wine. Or at least that was my original plan. Then I made a friend.

Her name was Veronique. She was here at the hotel in Sonoma decompressing after a breast cancer diagnosis. Her husband had offered to take the kids so she could have a weekend away to clear her head and think about treatment options. Her situation certainly put my problems in perspective. Sure, I was here to watch the man I loved marry someone else, but that didn’t compare to cancer.

When she found out my situation, Veronique begged me to tell her the full story to take her mind off things. Recalling everything for an unbiased stranger turned out to be therapeutic for me as well.

I told her the whole story of the first and only summer Archie and I spent together, and I’d just gotten to the point when everything came to an abrupt end—the moment we found out Archer Remington had died.

Veronique leaned in. “So what happened after that?”

“It was surreal. Archie and I jumped into my parents’ car and met everyone at the hospital, where his dad was lying there dead.” I shook my head. “Archer was such a powerful man. It was hard to believe he was gone.” I looked away. “The worst part was knowing what it would do to Archie.”

“The guilt?”

I nodded. “I knew in my heart that it was the beginning of a really tough road for him. He and his father had never gotten along. But deep down he loved his dad, despite all the strife. All I wanted was to be able to help him. I remember offering to go back to California with him and his mom for a while, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He insisted I couldn’t miss school. My parents and I did fly out to California with them and stayed for the wake and funeral.” I shut my eyes. “The sad thing? That speech he’d written about his dad? It became the eulogy. When he delivered it in front of all of those people, he pretty much read straight from the paper, only looking up a few times. And when he did? He only looked at me. No one else.” I felt a tear roll down my cheek.

“Wow,” she breathed. “And then after that, you had to leave…”

“Yeah.” Emotion swelled my throat. “I had to start classes. I’d already missed my first day at BU to be there for the funeral. Those first few weeks of college were a blur. Archie was on my mind almost every moment of every single day.”

Veronique ran her hand along the stem of her glass. “Did he go back to school after that?”

“No. He took more than a year off to look after his mom. She’d insisted he go back for his last year, but he refused. He’d gone from preparing for law school to not knowing what the future held. Eventually, he transferred to a school closer to home for his senior year.”

“Did you ever visit him?”

“The summer after freshman year, yeah.”

“Did anything happen between the two of you?”

Now we were getting to a sore spot. I took a sip of my wine. “We emailed back and forth, but we never brought up the subject of us. Then during my trip out there, a year after his dad died, Archie apologized for everything that had happened—or hadn’t happened—between us. He wanted to make sure I knew that all he could be to me was a friend. He said I shouldn’t wait for him for any reason.”

“Were you…waiting?” she asked.

I exhaled. “Yeah. I think I was. I was holding out hope. And I was heartbroken that he’d closed the door on us. If he hadn’t told me to move on, I might’ve waited forever.”

“Do you think he was really uninterested, or was it just…life at the time?”