Chapter 239: Liam
I’ll always remember the first time I saw her.
We’d just come in with Finn and Sloane, smelling like rope and diesel, and Charlie met us at the door, grinning. “New girl’s here,” she said, like it was a surprise party. Then footsteps on the stairs. And there she was.
Like an idiot I said, “Wow.” Then, “Uh… hello.”
That was it. That’s all I had. She was so pretty I forgot nouns. Freckles had staged a full invasion across her nose and cheeks, her hair was some witchy copper that looked red until the light hit it and turned it to gold, and her eyes—Jesus—green like the shoal on a clear day. Then she opened her mouth and the voice that came out was soft and bright and better than the rest of it put together. For weeks my favorite part of every day was just… hearing it. “Morning,” she’d say, and there went the rest of my brain.
I thought I was going to fall in love with her.
But the truth? I don’t know what love is. I know laughs that last a long weekend. I know kisses that taste like beer and stop mattering by Tuesday. Maddie always felt like something too good for me anyway—like a museum piece I could look at and not touch. Being her friend seemed like a privilege I should sign for and guard with both hands.
We did movie nights, all of us in a stupid tangle on the couch, and sometimes she’d fall asleep on my shoulder and I’d sit still a little longer than I had to, watching the way her mouth went soft and her lashes made shadows. She taught me how to bake chocolate chip cookies and I burned the first tray black, and she still ate one, said, “It’s good,” dead serious, and I snorted and took her out for a real one at the café to erase the crime. When she was happy she bounced on her toes like her body couldn’t hold the joy and it had to leak out somewhere. Yeah. I liked her, all right.
But whatever I thought I knew about love—none of it looked like what I saw on the pier.
The twins scare me a little. Always have. They’re tall and mean-looking when they want to be, and they don’t take bullshit, and everybody in town knows they “handle things.” I’ve seen them quiet fights with a look. I’ve seen them talk a guy down with ten words that felt like a warning bell.
On the dock that day… they were broken men.
Reid white as a ghost, lips going blue, water still running off him like he’d been carved out of the ocean. Jake with his hands torn open and his face wrecked like he didn’t know what it was for anymore. Screaming. Both of them. Screaming at the medics to bring her back. Screaming at her to live. Screaming at God. I can’t get the sound out of my head. A week later and it’s loud as sirens in the quiet parts of the night.
When they brought her out, it was like the town stopped breathing.
She didn’t look like my girl. The girl I knew. She looked small and wrong and still, and I watched a medic climb onto the board and start pounding her chest and another say, “No pulse,” and the world tilted. I’ve had nightmares every night since, the kind where you try to run and your legs won’t work and all you can hear is the machine charging—clear—and the slap of the shock and the twins howling like wolves when nothing happens.
Nick got hauled out bloody and cuffed and I didn’t feel anything about him—just an empty place where rage should go. They say the helicopter took her to the city. They say the doctors are doing everything. They say a lot of things. None of them touch the hour between three and four a.m., when I lie there listening to Finn breathe like he’s trying not to, and staring at the ceiling waiting for my own heart to stall.
The house is wrong without her. Too tidy. Too quiet. No mug abandoned on the counter with a smear of too-sweet coffee. No socks under the table. No vanilla in the hallway after a shower. I make pasta and forget to salt the water. I burn toast. I check the time and think she’ll be coming down the stairs any second and then remember I’ve thought that twelve times today and she hasn’t.
Finn doesn’t joke. Not really. He’s got that muscle ticking in his jaw these days, the one you only see when the engine won’t turn over and we’re already late. Charlie tries to smile and it looks like it hurts. Sloane… I’m not talking about Sloane. When I think about Sloane, I want to throw a chair. When I think about the twins, I want to punch a wall and then sit on the floor with them and hand them water and tell them I’ll stand between whatever comes next and them if they need me to.
I keep replaying the small things, as if stacking them up will make a door she can walk back through. The way she sat on the dock and swung her feet like a kid. The way she said my name when she needed a jar opened—“Liam?”—like it cost her something to admit she couldn’t do it, and then the way she grinned when I handed it back like I’d moved a mountain. The way she looked at the ocean every single time like she was meeting it for the first time and it kept exceeding expectations.
Maybe that’s love. Not fireworks. Not some big speech. Just wanting her alive more than I want anything for myself.
I don’t know what happens next. I know Finn and I haven’t smiled in a week. I know half the town looks like they’re bracing for bad weather even when the sky is clear. I know we’re waiting—for a phone to ring, for a text from Charlie, for a sign. I know if she walks back into this house, I will buy every bag of chocolate chips in the county and learn to bake a decent cookie if it kills me.
I know I’ll say “wow” again. And “hello.” And probably cry like an idiot, right in front of her.
Until then, it’s the sound of the twins screaming that I can’t shake, and the grip of her sleeping on my shoulder, small and warm and safe, that I’m holding onto with both hands.