WHAT IS HE talking about? I’ve never written him a letter.

Lucas tried to pull his hand back, but my hold on his wrist didn’t allow him to go anywhere. Not until he answered my questions.

“Explain,” I said.

The glare Lucas shot my way was enough to kill, but behind that anger there was…hurt. Pain. And he seemed to be under the impression I’d put those there.

I loosened my grip on him as a niggling feeling in the back of my skull told me something wasn’t quite right here. He was angry, sure, but his reaction had been more extreme than what I’d been expecting. A brief thought flickered through my mind, and I prayed to God that the conclusion I was jumping to wasn’t what had actually occurred.

“Lucas,” I said, letting go of him, and he backed up against the island so there were now a couple feet between us. “What is it you think I did?”

A humorless smile crossed his face as his thumb stroked over the medallion he wore. “‘Dear Lucas,’” he said, and then began to pace around the kitchen. “‘I’ve been told by my parents and staff of your continued visits, and I need to make this clear: I don’t want to see you. Not now, not ever again. Whatever you think it was that happened between us was a figment of your imagination, and I want nothing more than for you to forget even the mention of my name. You were a mistake, one that I sincerely regret, and you’re wasting your time by coming here. Please do not contact me again, or I’ll be forced to call the police and take out a restraining order. Signed, Jackson.’” Lucas let out a snort. “It was sweet, however, of you to include this.” He ran his thumb over the triskele before tucking the necklace back into his shirt and facing me again. “So. Amnesia miraculously cured yet?”

I couldn’t breathe. The air would not physically enter my lungs as I stood there gaping at Lucas. What he was suggesting… That I’d ever do something so cruel was beyond my wildest imagination. It was not, however, beyond the imagination of someone close to me.

“Oh my God.” I finally managed to suck in a shallow breath as the truth slammed into me with more impact than the gale-force winds outside.

“No? Not ringing a bell? Hmm, I might have to jog your memory with physical evidence, then.” Lucas opened a far drawer and rummaged through it before pulling something out. He sauntered over, a cruel smile playing on his lips, and then dropped a wrinkled envelope on the island in front of me. “Go ahead.”

The front of the worn envelope had Lucas’s name typed out, but there was no stamp or return address, like it’d been hand-delivered and not mailed. I knew without opening the letter what would be inside, but I reached for it anyway, pulled out the paper that had been crumpled and then smoothed out again so that the words on the page had faded a bit in the creases. As I began to read, the tremor in my hand made the letter shake, and I had to use both hands to steady myself.

Nausea rolled through my gut the more I read, and as I came to the final line, I had to go over it once, twice, and then again, my brain desperately trying to make sense of things. “Lucas, I didn’t… That’s not my…” I couldn’t get the words out, as the revelation of what had actually happened all those years ago stunned me to my core, changing everything I thought I’d known. And as my world went into upheaval and I fell onto the barstool, the letter fell from my hands.

MY FATHER DIDN’T bother knocking on my bedroom door before he entered. He never did, and it no longer made me jump when the door flew open and his tall frame suffocated the space. “Jax, look what’s just arrived,” he said, and the pride in his voice made me look up from where I’d been searching the clutter on my chest of drawers. When I saw the large envelope he held, I refocused on my search.

“Well,” he said, waving it at me. “Aren’t you curious if you got in? This one’s Yale. About blasted time, too.”

“Uh… You can do the honors.”

I could feel his narrowed stare as I opened the top drawer and rifled through it. There were no strings my father wouldn’t pull to get me into the school of his choice, his alma mater, so it was pointless opening the dumb thing. Yale was the one he wanted, so Yale was the one it’d be. I’d already resigned myself to that fact years ago.

“What is that you’re doing?” he said, growing irritated at my lack of attention and excitement, but I had more important things on my mind. Like where my necklace had disappeared to.

“Just looking for something,” I mumbled, slamming the drawer shut and opening the one underneath.

“Looking for something?” My father wagged the envelope in front of my face. “How about you look at your future? Now.” His tone brooked no argument, and I reluctantly took the thick envelope from him and sat on the edge of my bed. Thick envelopes meant one thing—welcome to university life, oh, and here are the housing forms and the classes and the extracurricular activities and the blah blah fucking blah.

“Congratulations, you’ve been accepted to Yale—” I didn’t even get out the rest of the sentence before my father let out a triumphant shout and snatched the paperwork from my hands.

“See? What’d I tell you? A Yalie, just like me.” His eyes shone as he looked down at the paper in his hands, and when he looked my way, I tried for a smile, really I did, but all I could think about—all I’d been able to think about for the past two weeks—was the person I’d left back in Georgia that I’d never see again. Especially on this Yale path, a place he wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near, even though his grades were more than enough to get in.

“What? Aren’t you excited? This is what you’ve wanted your whole life,” my father said, trying again to rouse me into the same state of exuberance he was in.

“It’s great,” I said. “Really.”

“‘It’s great,’” he repeated, his lip curling. “That’s all you have to say? ‘It’s great’?”

“Well, it is—”

“It’s more than ‘great,’ Jax. Do you know how many kids are getting rejection letters right now that would kill to be in your shoes?”

Without thinking about it, I reached up to fidget with the necklace I’d worn for months, but my fingers landed on nothing but the collar of my shirt.

“Stop doing that.” My father sneered. “Your mother used to do that.”

I dropped my hand and pushed myself off the bed, heading back over to the dresser to resume my search. “Habit. I lost my necklace a couple days ago and can’t find it anywhere.”

“Since when have you worn a necklace?” he said, curling his lips in disgust at the word “necklace.” “Only women wear those.”

“No, it’s more like a pendant thing on a black cord… I got it from… I mean, I bought it at school.”

My father’s eyes were like coal as he stared at me. “Well. I’m sure it’ll turn up, then.”

“Yeah.” And then before I could stop myself, I asked, “Is that all the mail I got?”

“What else were you expecting?” He shoved the acceptance letter back inside the envelope.

Nothing. I’d been expecting nothing at all. But I’d held on to some silly sliver of hope that even though I’d left South Haven abruptly, and without giving Lucas any contact information, that he’d somehow find a way to me. It was a stupid idea, us keeping in touch, which was exactly the reason I’d had to leave in the first place, but…I missed the guy. I missed my friend…and whatever else we had become.

At the hopeful look on my face, my father’s lips straightened. “Actually, I do have something for you that was dropped off.”

I perked up. “You do?”

He nodded at my desk. “Take a seat.”

“Take a seat” was code for “you’re not gonna like what I have coming for you,” but I did as I was told anyway, pulling out the chair at my desk and waiting for the ball to drop. Since I’d been home, there’d been an awkward distance between the two of us, but nothing had been said about why he’d pulled me out of South Haven early, and I didn’t dare bring up the subject. Deep down I knew why, and not letting me walk the graduation stage with my peers last week had seemed to be punishment enough.

My father took something out of his inside suit jacket pocket and then dropped the sealed, unmarked envelope onto the desk in front of me and stepped back.

“What’s this?” I flipped it over, expecting to see a return address for another one of the colleges I’d applied to, but the other side was unmarked as well.

“Why don’t you open it up and see for yourself?”

That was where I should’ve said no. Nothing good ever came from unmarked envelopes, at least according to crime shows.

After carefully popping open the seal, I pulled out the contents—a stack of photos, and I recognized the handsome guy in the picture on top immediately. It was the slightly shorter guy I couldn’t pinpoint.

I felt a sense of foreboding, and I swallowed hard. I didn’t want to see the rest. “What is this?”

“Why don’t you keep going?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Oh, come on. It’ll be fun. That’s your buddy, right? What was his name…Lucas something or other?”

I met his eyes, and something malicious hid in their depths.

The next photo was much the same as the first—Lucas was standing in the personal space of the guy, leaning in close to his ear as if he was telling a secret. So, they were friends talking. Big deal.

Yeah, then why did my heart seem to be thumping with the treble turned all the way up?

I fumbled through the next few, my vision blurring at the edges as Lucas’s lips touched the guy’s neck in one shot, and then moved to his mouth in the next. I knew that mouth. I knew the faint taste of butterscotch that came from his tongue, and the way he’d tease and nip at my bottom lip to draw out the anticipation. Those lips were mine. No, correction: had been mine. For a brief, fleeting moment, one I still couldn’t believe or begin to process. It didn’t make sense to me that I’d fallen for a guy. A guy. The thought of being attracted to a male simply hadn’t occurred to me before, but now I couldn’t get him out of my head. Two weeks apart hadn’t made things easier—they’d only intensified to the point I was ready to tell my father to screw off and hop on the first flight down to Georgia. I wasn’t crazy; I knew the feeling had been mutual. All those promises made in the dark, plans and futures and what we’d become. Together had been the only thing we’d agreed on. Which was why I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

No… Maybe this had happened before Lucas had come to South Haven. Maybe it was all a—

My eyes caught the numbers at the bottom corner. The photos were timestamped yesterday.

Heat rushed to my face as I tried to understand what I was seeing. Why? Why was Lucas kissing some guy, and who the hell was he? No one from school, that much was obvious. Had he been seeing this guy the whole time we’d… No. That was impossible. We’d spent almost every waking minute together, so whoever this was, it had to be some kind of rebound. Right?

And then another thought: if my father had pictures of Lucas, and Lucas seemed oblivious to the fact that he was being photographed, then I could only imagine the evidence he had mounted against me from our time together. The thought of my father’s beady eyes watching the two of us made me fucking sick. No wonder he’d pulled me out of South Haven. Looking back, our friendship had been leading up to the inevitable, and it was clear my father had hoped to put an end to things before they reached the point of no return.

Too late for that, I thought, and as my father gave a brisk nod for me to keep going, my hands shook.

The next photo continued the progression—Lucas cupping the guy over his jeans… Jesus Christ. Then the blond pulling up Lucas’s shirt as he backed him up against a brick wall in the next. It was clear where this was going, and I didn’t need to look at the rest. Seeing Lucas with someone else, moving on already, was like a stab through my intestines, the knife twisting and gutting me completely.

I shoved the photos back inside the envelope and had to breathe through my nose. If I opened my mouth, a choking cry might come out, and there was no way I’d break down in front of my father. He didn’t need to know he’d gotten the best of me, that he’d won. His life’s work was knowing how to crack his opponent, how to break them and bend them to his will. He always won. This would be no different.

Show nothing. Give nothing away.

When I spoke again, it wasn’t until I could keep my voice strong. Steady. Unaffected. “You looked at these?” I asked, keeping my gaze on the desk.

“My private investigator filled me in on the details. I don’t need to look at that filth.”

“And why would you hire a private investigator to scope out some kid?”

My father stalked across the room and then braced himself over the desk, bringing his face in close to mine. “You see, Jackson, I’ve got far too much riding on you for you to fuck it all up. You were nothing more than another play toy for this kid. Don’t you see that? Just one of many distractions that’ll cross his path.”

My hands clenched under the table. “That’s not true.”

“It is true.”

“We’re just friends—”

“Wrong.” He straightened, his large shoulders dwarfing me in his shadow, his voice reverberating off the walls. “You were just friends. But that stops right now. I didn’t send you down to the most expensive school in the country for you to come back a queer.”

Holy shit. There it was. Out in the open, no one skirting around the issue at hand. And all I could do was sit there, my mouth parted, unable to speak.

With a growl, my father said, “He means nothing to you, you hear me? And you mean nothing to him.” He glanced down at the envelope on my desk. “You can keep those.”

The door slammed behind him, the walls trembling in his wake. It wasn’t until I heard the purr of his Jaguar heading down the driveway that my heart split in two and I gave in to the silent tears that’d been blurring my vision. I reached up again for the necklace, but there was nothing there to comfort me, no piece of Lucas left behind to help me know it was real. Because it had been real…right? He’d meant more to me in those short eight months than anyone I’d known in my entire eighteen years. But those pictures… God, they told a different story, one I never would’ve believed if the truth wasn’t staring me in the face.

Why, Lucas? Why?