Page 1 of All of You

CHAPTER ONE

Whit

The phone lying face down on the couch caught my eye while my head hung in downward facing dog. I grit my teeth and turned back to my mat.

This wasn’t the time for that.

I pushed through two more reps of the yoga routine for my rest days. But the gritting teeth wouldn’t let up—clearly, the routine was failing to do what my trainer designed it to.

Arms splayed, body loose, I lay in shavasana on the mat, wishing I could stay there and sleep, wishing I could find satisfaction in relaxing into anything anymore. Oh, and seeing him behind my eyelids.

Again.

As usual, of late.

The relaxing thing would have to wait. Flipping to my side, I crawled across the plush gray carpet of my living room floor and grabbed the phone. Some part of me refused to turn it over until I’d given myself a stern talking to.

If he hasn’t responded, you’ll find someone else. You’ll ask Damon. You’ll ask Reese. You’ll do something else besides obsess over this man.

Because I had been. Ever since I’d met Lieutenant Ben Holder at my cousin Reese’s house two weeks ago and then spent a few hours with him on a tour of the military base after my concert, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking of him.

And really, even that was a lie, because I’d been thinking about Ben Holder a lot longer than that. I just hadn’t known his name was Ben.

I could still see the five o’clock shadow on his face as he slumped over the bar, inebriated by whiskey and grief, over a year ago. The first time I saw him… and that night, that conversation, had played itself in my mind a thousand times.

With ten minutes until my set, I sat down at the bar to wait for a water. My second time doing this—dressed in a disguise to come sing to a late-night crowd, and it had been incredibly helpful. Performing in front of an audience without them knowing me proved to be the best kind of feedback.

“It’s just like this, you know? A beautiful woman walks up next to you, and that’s gone, too, you know?”

The voice next to me thrummed low, rough, and slow, almost inaudible, but something about it made me turn to look at the man who’d spoken.

He kept sliding an empty highball a few inches in one direction with his index finger, then sliding it back. He sat slumped on the stool, but when I looked at him, he tilted his head sideways, almost peering upside-down, which it nearly felt like since I was sitting straight and somehow towering over him thanks to his posture.

“You know?” he asked me.

“Do I know what?” Somehow compelled by the misery in his face despite its slackened features, no doubt a byproduct of several rounds of whatever he’d had in the glass, I couldn’t resist asking.

“I just got back. I been back two weeks. And you’re so pretty, sitting there, humoring me, and I can look at you, you know? And he can’t. Jones can’t. He never will.” His head slumped down, and he leaned more heavily on his arms braced against the bar.

My heart ached.

“Why not?” I asked, scared to know, but needing to.

He straightened then, making it obvious just how large he was. He turned and looked me straight in the eyes. His were bloodshot, heavily lidded and ringed in shadow.

“He’s dead. I held him while he died. And now, he’ll never have a stolen moment like this—not any of ’em.”

We’d talked for a few more minutes, and he’d told me of other stolen moments, as he’d called them, that his friend would never have.

He broke my heart that night, and he changed me. I’d sung a short set, then raced home, and “Stolen Moment,” my chart-topping and supposedly Grammy-contender single, had poured out of me in hours in what had to be the most complete song-writing experience I’d ever had. It’d grown out of compassion and grief and sadness for this man, this shell of a human who’d had nowhere to go with his pain.

Then I saw him again, over a year later, at my cousin’s. He’d been standing tall and beautiful and sober and clear-eyed and fairly articulate considering the moment. He’d been fun and charming and so completely different from the man I’d seen that fateful night, and yet, they were the same. I knew they were.

It felt impossible to stop thinking about him. Was he so much better now? Had he put the loss of his friend out of his mind? He definitely hadn’t recognized me—I mean, he had, but as me, Whit Grantham. He’d clearly had no idea we’d talked, and based on what I remembered, he’d likely forgotten the entire night.

But enough about that. On a slow, deep breath, I turned the phone over, entered my password, and clicked the app. 1 new message.

My stomach flipped, and I resisted the urge to break out in a little dance of celebration. Instead, a tap on the little flag brought up my direct messages, and there it sat, at the end of a long thread.

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