Chapter 3

Star

I can’t believe it.

This is just my luck.

The stupid car won’t start.

I’m stuck in the parking lot with Lacey watching from the window, and my mother’s stupid fucking car won’t start. I keep turning the key but the engine just won’t turn over. It just sputters and dies. Sputters and dies.

I give it one last shot, muttering every swear word I can think of as I twist the key in the ignition, but once again, nothing. Groaning, I slump forward and let my head fall against the steering wheel.

Fuck.

God. Fucking. Dammit.

What next? Just how much more am I going to have to deal with?

I already had to sit through Lacey’s entire rendition of the tragic life story of the guy she’d run off at the diner. She’d just sat there and went on and on, completely unaffected, like she was regaling me with the plot of a movie she’d just watched or something. It was shameful.

I don’t know if I’ve changed so much since we were kids, or if she has, but the girl I remember playing in the sandbox with wouldn’t have gotten so much joy out of another person’s suffering. Or wouldn’t have been so oblivious about it, as she seemed to be. Because I don’t know how anyone could cause the death of another human being unintentionally and not be suffering.

And, according to Lacey, that’s what the guy had done.

He’d killed a man. A father. A man with a family.

He’d gone to a party, had apparently gotten high as a kite and he’d driven himself home. But the party was three towns away, and he only made it back through one and a half of them before the accident. He’d made it nearly all the way through Thurould when his car had collided with the other man’s. And that had been that.

Lacey had taken such joy in telling me this that it actually soured what was left of my appetite, and I ended up pushing the rest of my food away. She didn’t even notice. She just grinned at me. “It was even bigger news around here then when the Fire Marshall’s son decided that he was a she, if you know what I mean. I mean, Avenue’s very own murderer. How insane is that?”

“Manslaughter,” I mumbled as one of the guys in the booth a little ways away started waving in our direction and calling out to her.

She glanced over her shoulder real quick, as the guy called out playfully, “Can we get some service over here, Babycakes?” then turned back at me, puzzlement in her eyes.

“What?” she asked.

“Manslaughter,” I repeated, louder this time. “Murder requires intent. Manslaughter is accidental. Unless he actually went out and tried to run someone down, he would have been charged with manslaughter. Not murder.”

“Lacey!” the guy had resorted to yelling by then, the playful tone fading out of his voice.

She twisted around in her seat and yelled “I’m coming! Keep your pants on!” at the guy, and then turned back to me.

“Whatever,” she said, waving me off and pulling herself up out of the chair and snagging the tray of food she’d abandoned earlier. “Listen, since you’re back now, there’s someone I want you to meet.”

That’s how I ended up getting dragged across the diner by my childhood best friend—who I would have been perfectly happy leaving in my childhood—and meeting a group of three guys who looked up at me like I was an alien that had just crash-landed on their planet. On Christmas. In the middle of dinner. Jesus, I was already sick of this town.

How is this my life?

“This is Preston,” she said, laying a plate of steak and eggs in front of the guy closest to her, the one with the blond hair and bright green eyes. Damn, I think. Apparently Lacey isn’t the only one that embraced the whole small-town-golden-child thing. I nodded at him, like his name was supposed to mean something to me. “Preston’s granddaddy owns this Mary Lou’s. Has for years. Preston,” she said, turning back to me and waving her hands at me like she was presenting some kind of door prize. “This is Star. We went to elementary school together.” He nodded at me, and I felt kind of like I’d just been dismissed by a dignitary or something. Who did this guy think he was? “And this,” Lacey continued, oblivious to how uncomfortable I was “is Clay.” She set another plate of food on the table, this time in front of a guy who I suddenly realized looked exactly the same as Preston. How the hell had she been able to tell them apart? “Clay is Preston’s brother,” she said to me, because apparently I was blind on top of being an alien.

“Much to my dismay,” the guy said, giving me a little smile before turning to his food. Okay, I liked this one a little better. But beside me, Lacey scoffed and whapped him on the shoulder with the back of her hand. “You be nice, Clayton,” she said. Then turned to me. “Preston’s my boyfriend,” she said. Ah, that explained it. “And Clay is just jealous.”

“Of course I am, Lacey. Of course I am.”

He clearly wasn’t, but Lacey didn’t seem to notice that, judging by the grin she had spreading across her face. “And that’s Barry,” she said, pointing at the other guy at the table who had broad shoulders and close-cropped brown hair. And who, mercifully, didn’t look anything like the other two. “He’s been friends with Preston and Clay since forever. He’s back from college for the summer. He’s on a football scholarship. Quarterback,” she said, her voice ripe with emphasis, much to my confusion. Did I look like someone who cared about football? I was pretty sure I didn’t.

“You know,” she said, turning to me with a strange little smile pulling at her lips, “since you’re here for the summer and Bear’s here for the summer, maybe you two could go out sometime.”

That was when my brain clicked back online and I realized I had to make my escape. I could see where she was going with this and I wasn’t about to let myself be led like a lamb to the slaughter of a summer full of bad blind dates. Quarterback or not, I was out of there. Before she could get another word out, I made my excuses, grabbed my stuff and tossed a twenty on my table—more than enough to cover my crappy BLT platter when I’d actually ordered a bacon cheeseburger in the first place—and hightailed it out of there before Lacey could stop me.

Unfortunately, my escape only got me as far as the parking lot where my getaway vehicle is refusing to start and sounds like an old woman with bronchitis and a three-pack-a-day habit. Fantastic.

I’m trying to decide whether screaming or crying would be a better option for venting my frustration before I freaking explode when there’s a knock on the window next to me and my entire body jerks.

I whip around in my seat, heart slamming in my chest, and find the guy that Lacey had all but kicked out of the diner standing there, looking at me through the driver’s-side window.

Great. Just great.

Ash

I fucked up. I know that.

But for some reason I hadn’t expected it to follow me around for the rest of my life.

It’s not like I’ve ever stopped thinking about it. It’s hard not to, when your fuck-up costs another man his life. But I’d just assumed that when I got out of prison, it would be over.

It is never going to be over.

No one is ever going to let me forget what I’ve done.

What they don’t seem to realize is that they don’t have to bother. I’ve been living my mistake every single day for the past five years.

It had been stupid, so goddamn stupid, but by the time I’d figured that out, it had been too late. The guy was already dead.

Peter Hanlon-Wright. Father of a son with another baby on the way. His face is burned into my brain, and will be for the rest of my life.