Page 37 of His Build

“No fireworks,” she agreed, looking into his eyes. Then she turned away abruptly. It was too dark to see, but he could swear her skin was flushed. “Anyway, I’m heading back to New York in a few weeks.”

That sinking feeling came back, but he nodded. “Yup.”

Suddenly he wondered if she’d been dropping a hint by bringing this up. She probably wanted him to go.

“Lucy, I could—”

But when she turned back, her face was serious and his words dried up.

She leaned closer to him, reaching out and running a finger across his jaw. He closed his eyes at the feel of her hand there.

“How did you get this scar?”

A jolt shot through his stomach.

So much for not being serious.

He knew it would come up, but somehow, he hadn’t prepared for how to tell her. It wasn’t something he had to tell many people—everyone in Barkley Falls knew exactly why he had a long gash along the side of his jaw.

He cupped his hand on the back of hers.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want. It just… looks like it was bad.”

“I—” he began, then brought her hand down next to his on the arm of the chair.

It was bad. It was the worst thing that had happened to him before or since. And it haunted his dreams. He wanted to tell her this, he was so close to having it all spill out. But instead he looked forward over the lake, thankful the dim light inside the room spilling out onto the balcony wasn’t enough for her to see his expression too closely.

“I was in the car, with my parents.”

She was quiet for a moment, and he could tell she wanted to ask more. He waited to see if she would, but she held back. Maybe it was this that made him keep talking. Lucy was being respectful and letting him decide. She wasn’t allowing her curiosity take over, the way the strangers whohadwanted to know sometimes did. That usually resulted in him shutting down.It was a long time ago,was his usual go-to, followed by a quick subject change.

But when he brought his eyes back to Lucy’s, she was looking at him with nothing but kindness. Like she cared enough to know, but not enough to probe.

“It was the accident that killed them,” he said.

He saw the shock of this go through her. He waited for the next one, the look of pity that his coach made when he told him he was quitting the high school football team. Or his high school girlfriend when he told her she would do better to be with someone else. The one almost everyone in town except Aubrey and her mother, Aubrey Senior, made anytime he went into town to buy so much as a tube of toothpaste for years afterward.

He didn’t blame them. But he just couldn’t take it, even all these years later.

But Lucy didn’t make this face. Hers was one of compassion. Oftell me more if you want to, but it’s fine if you don’t.

So Graydon drained the last of his glass of rosé. He placed it down on the little patio table where it landed with a clink. And he told Lucy the story of how he’d been responsible for the death of his parents.

For the death of his family.

“It was my sixteenth birthday,” he began. “We were going on a road trip to New York to check out the NYU campus. They were blackmailing me because I wanted my license so bad. They said after this trip I could go for it, so I went along happily, even though I knew I didn’t want to go to college. I wanted to go to culinary school back then, but god knows I wasn’t telling them that.”

Lucy smiled, and Graydon continued.

“They were reminiscing about how they’d met on that campus. It was this ongoing joke because my dad wasn’t a student. He was a carpenter, and he’d gotten a job building a set for the theater department. My mom was an actress…”

Graydon’s voice broke a little here—he wondered if she heard it. He had a dog-eared black-and-white photo of his mom on stage inThe Cruciblein his office at home he wished he could show her now. She looked fierce. He cleared his throat.

“She always swore she never wanted to pursue acting, but the way she talked about it, I knew she missed it a little. Even that day she was wistful about it, talking about her standing ovations. She was going on about life in New York, how much I would love it, and how much fun she’d had there before she met my dad. They were teasing each other. They were so in love, even seventeen years after they met.”

Now his voice broke for real and he turned away, blinking at a mortifying wetness in his eyes.

“I told them to quit it, I was acting grossed out. But really, I loved how my mom talked about New York. And I loved how Mom promised, even that day, that she never regretted marrying my dad. I made Mom turn up the radio when they got too gushy in the front seat. They looked back at me and laughed because they’d landed onWhen a Man Loves a Woman,by Percy Sledge. They were singing it together, and they kept turning back to watch me cringe. That’s when the semi swerved into our lane.”

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