Oh man, if you only knew. I swallowed and stood up, saluting my dad. He knocked my arm down, and drew me in for a hug. "Looks like all that thinking took a lot out of you. Let your mom coddle you for a bit. It'll make her feel good."

I spent the day with my parents and then drove over to my brothers' garage and they took me in without question. Unlike my dad, my brothers knew immediately what was wrong with me and it wasn't that I'd been wrestling with a decision about my future. "Girl troubles, huh?" said Luke, my oldest brother, but that was it. I tooled around in the garage doing odd jobs, running errands and learning a bit about custom painting, silently stoking my pain into hardened determination. Then it was back to Camp Pendleton.

My bruises were mostly healed by the time I got back to base but my CO still called me in. “Am I gonna hear about some Marine breaking shit in bars and generally making the Corps look bad?”

“No, sir.”

“I’d better not,” he harrumphed. “Where’s your reenlistment papers then?”

“I’m not reenlisting, sir.”

CO Dailey looked alarmed and then narrowed his eyes at me. “You better tell me what happened out there.”

“Nothing important, sir.”

“If it ain’t important, then why the hell aren’t you reenlisting? If it’s a tiny bar fight, then we give you an Article 15 and call it a day. With your record, that ain’t gonna hamper you.”

“No need for a non-judicial punishment, sir. Nothing will reflect poorly on the Corps, sir.”

The CO stared at me for a long time hoping I’d cough up some details but I stood rigidly at attention, giving him nothing but the stony face I’d learned in boot camp.

“Go on then, get out of here.”

Samantha

ADAM’S CREW CAME IN THE night I returned from England.

“You look good,” Eve commented.

“Do I? Because I feel like shit.”

“Okay, I was lying to make you feel better. You look like you went on a bender in Reno and are still hung over, rather than a ten-day vacation to jolly England.”

“The Reno description is pretty close to how I feel. Besides England isn’t very sunny. Lots of rain.” It had mirrored my mood.

“Sorry I pushed you on soldier boy.”

I didn’t bother correcting her. Gray wasn’t even around to appreciate it. Oh Gray. That stupid asshole. I hated and loved him at the same time.

One by one Gray’s friends came up to the bar to tell me how much he missed me.

“How come he’s not here saying it?” I said curtly.

“Because if he’d stayed around till you got back, he’d be absent without leave, court martialed, and kicked to the curb,” Bo shot back just as curtly.

That shut me up, but I wasn’t interested in hearing reasonable things about Gray Phillips so I made Eve serve them the rest of the night.

They were persistent, though. Bo and Noah showed up the rest of the week I worked, and while they didn’t talk to me, I got the message. Gray missed me and he was showing me through his friends.

And it was working. Even Eve was impressed.

“He’s got good friends. You can tell a lot about a guy by his friends.”

It was true, but I wasn’t ready to forgive him. Eve just wanted me to get over it. We hadn’t made any extra tips because I didn’t want to kiss anyone but Gray, not even Eve.

When Bitsy, Mom, and I came home from England, I went with them. I wasn’t ready to go back to the condo, where now it was filled with my memories of Gray. At first my mom wanted to kill Gray—or at least file a police report—but then I explained that it wasn’t him but some other dude who’d hit me and that I’d hit him first. She dropped it after that.

But she frowned whenever she saw me in her house, and unlike after Will died, she started making comments about how little birds pushed out of the nest should learn to survive on their own. Her most recent comment was about how older sisters were supposed to be good examples for their younger sisters.

“Am I screwing you up, Bitsy?” I asked, dragging myself out of my bedroom about noon one day, wearing hobo overalls and not bothering to brush my hair.

“Nope. I’ve accepted that you are pathetic and weak and I’m the stronger sister,” Bitsy said airily. I winced but she wasn’t wrong so I just shut up and ate my cereal. Tired of my moroseness, she jabbed me with her finger. “Why’d you guys break up?”

God, what to tell Bitsy. “I think he got scared and then I got scared back.”

"Because you didn’t want to move to San Diego? So you're making him choose between the career he loves and you? What is it that you're giving up here? A knitting group?" Bitsy gave me no quarter.

“My family.” It was a weak argument, and I knew it.

"You'll always have us. It's not like Mom and Dad wouldn't pay for you to fly back every month if you wanted to."

"What are you going to do in three years?" Yes, I was changing the subject.

“Chicken,” she said softly. “One thing I liked about Gray was that you smiled a lot when he was around. Anyway, be a sad sack. I don’t care. I’m going to go to medical school and be a transplant surgeon. Save lives." She flexed her fingers.

“I thought you were going to law school?”

“No way!”

I reached across the table and patted her arm. “That’s awesome, but does Mom know this?”

“Of course,” Bitsy said, annoyed.

Then I laughed and couldn't stop. Bitsy stood up and stomped around the kitchen. "What's so funny?"

"Oh, Bitsy. I love you. You are the absolute best."

Whatever expectations people had of Bitsy, she didn't care. She made her own path. If my fifteen-year-old sister could do that, couldn't I be brave enough?

I MOVED BACK INTO THE condo. The sheets still smelled like Gray, and I cried the first time I washed them as if I were cleaning him out of my life. I couldn’t forget about him; he wouldn’t let me. At first, I received phone calls and then voice mail messages. I deleted his entry from my recent call list and binned the messages. After a week of silence from my end, he began texting me once a day, at the end of his day.

Initially, his texts made me angry and I deleted the messages without even reading them. In the second week, I began reading them and was surprised at how ordinary and conversational they were. It was like a diary entry of how he spent his days. And he ended each “conversation” all the same—late at night, right before he went to bed—he sent me a three word message.

I love you.

As July wound down, I started to prepare for classes at Central. When I thought about the fantasies I’d cooked up about Gray and me together on campus, my heart ached so much I actually had to rub my chest, but no amount of medicine was going to ease the pain. I attended two more painful lunches with Carolyn and David. Tucker came to both; he had been extra nice since the Gray incident. I was just glad he’d never brought it up.

When classes started, none of them interested me. I was both bored and extremely busy. Eighteen credit hours were too many for me, even though I’d quit bartending. Making friends with eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds was painful. The seniors were the only people my age, but I didn’t have anything in common with them either. Rather than go drinking with them, I would find myself down at Gatsby’s where Eve still worked. Sometimes I’d see AnnMarie or Grace or Bo or Noah around campus, but I avoided them as much as possible. I didn’t want to be around reminders of Gray.

I missed him though, so much. I missed his body next to mine. I missed his smell. I missed just talking to him. I’d never really given him a chance to explain and the distance from it all made me reflect on how maybe I couldn’t believe everything Ethan Drake had said to me. After all, he threatened to lie about what had happened between us, which had been a big old nothing up until I hit him and he returned the favor. But whenever I got to that point, I remembered Gray apologizing so profusely. What did he have to apologize for if he hadn’t meant to test me? That was a question that would only be answered if I talked to him.