“Mike likes them broken, Hailey. It makes him feel important.”

My gaze slowly swings back to the window, because counting trees is easier than trying to digest anything she’s saying. I don’t want to believe her, and I know I shouldn’t.

“You don’t want to be with a guy like that, do you?”

Sixteen trees, seventeen trees, eighteen trees.

Danica faces forward again, and after a moment, she releases an exaggerated sigh and says, “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter anyway.”

I look at her again, alarms sounding in my head. When she turns her chin in my direction, her brows knit into a pitying expression.

“Oh, sweetie, you didn’t think I was going to let you keep flirting with my boyfriend, did you?” She admonishes me with a shake of her head. “I’m doing you a favor. You realize that, right?”

“What are you saying?” I ask point-blank, tired of the charade that Danica won’t stop playing. Concerned cousin. Loving girlfriend. Decent human being.

“I’m saying that if you ever see him again, call him again, even talk to him in passing again”—her mask slips away, revealing the monster underneath—“you’ll be lucky if all I do is put a call in to my dad.”

Chapter 26

Dee Dawson and Rowan Michaels are good at many things. They’re good at finding replacement computers, which they claim they got for free from some guy who got it from some other guy who got it from some other guy. They’re good at cleaning up trashed bedrooms and unflipping flipped-over desks. And they’re good at making sure that when Mike Madden calls me when I’m in bed that night, his name shows up on my phone as “Dee-licious-andra” instead of “Sexy as Fuck Drummer.”

“Hello?” I say on the fourth ring, after I stop gnawing on my thumbnail and summon the courage to hear his voice.

“Hey.”

My door suddenly flies open, and when Danica points at my phone, I roll my eyes and show her the screen. Satisfied that I’m talking to her arch nemesis instead of her ex-boyfriend, she makes a face and leaves me alone.

“Hey,” I reply.

“Hey.”

I crack a tiny smile at the ceiling, marveling once again at how easy it is for Mike to make that happen. “How long are we going to keep saying hey?” I ask, and his reply makes my butterflies flutter.

“Until I get tired of hearing your voice.”

I sigh, and I’m not sure if it’s because that was such a perfect thing to say, or because of how hopeless this all is. I like Mike, he likes me, and Danica hates us both. If she knew I was talking to him right now, all hell would break loose. I’m extending a personal invitation to the very nightmare I’ve spent the past thirty-six hours trying to avoid.

Two years. It’s going to take me at least two more years to finish my bachelor’s degree, which doesn’t even include my plans for my doctorate, and Danica plans to be here for just as long. Talking to Dee-licious-andra on the phone in hushed conversations isn’t going to cut it for that long, but anything more will land me back on the farm.

Either way, I lose. Danica makes the rules, and no matter how I play the game, I lose.

“How have things been since you left?” Mike asks, and I decide to start with the good.

“Dee and Rowan helped me clean up my room.”

“That’s good . . . What else have you been up to?”

“Pretty much just working on all the homework that was due today so I can turn it in tomorrow.”

“Danica hasn’t been giving you any trouble?” Mike asks, and I find shapes in the pattern on my ceiling. A snowman. A dog. A three-headed Hell Beast with long, sharp teeth.

“She said you only like me because I’m broken.”

It feels like a confession, so I say it extra quietly. I’m acknowledging I remember what Mike said. I’m asking him to tell me if Danica is right.

“What?” he asks, the word a gust of disbelief. When I don’t reply, he demands to know, “How are you broken?”

Instead of naming a thousand ways, I simply say, “I don’t know.”

“You’re smart. You’re in school. You’re working hard for your dreams.” I can hear the anger in his voice. It’s like a bold underline beneath every word he says. “You’re beautiful. You’re funny. You’re kind. You work at an animal shelter, for God’s sake. Everyone loves you. How the hell are you broken?”

Beautiful. Smart. Funny. Kind. I let his words comfort me, not wanting to argue.

A sigh of frustration cuts across the line. “Look, Hailey, Danica is going to say lots of things to you because she’s upset. She hasn’t stopped texting me all day—”

“She’s been texting you?” An unfamiliar pang of jealously flares in my chest, but Mike douses it in an instant.

“Not since an hour ago. I blocked her. But listen, just . . . don’t let her ruin this, okay? You’re not broken, and that’s not why I said what I did. If anyone is broken, it’s her, and that has nothing to do with either one of us.”

I know he’s right. I know he has to be right. “Okay.”

A moment of silence passes, and I find more shapes on the ceiling. A hippopotamus. A sunflower. Half a heart.

“I want to take you out,” Mike says, and my pulse quickens. “Tomorrow. Can I take you out to dinner?”

He’s asking me out. On a date. A real date . . . Oh my God. “I have a lot of homework to catch up on,” I stammer in a panic.