Page 83 of The Summer I First Saw You
Harrison sleeps soundly on the red-eye to DC while I remain awake, a nervous wreck.
Dear God, just let us get this over with. Let it all turn out okay.
My entire future is riding on what takes place over the course of the coming day. Twenty-four hours from now, I could still be the woman Harrison respects. A college senior nearly done with her degree, ready to make her mother proud.
Or I could be none of those things.
When we land in DC, he instructs the driver to take us to the Mandarin Oriental. I glance up at him. “Why are we going to a hotel?”
“The hearing isn’t until one,” he says. “I need to shower and get a suit on. And you need to do whatever’s necessary to look innocent, lost, and scared.”
I give a sad laugh. Most of those things are already true. Though I guessinnocentis a stretch, under the circumstances.
We check into our room and take turns showering. By the time I emerge, wrapped in a towel, he’s already buttoning up his shirt. I glance at the bed and raise a brow.
He laughs. “Absolutely not. We’ve got the whole weekend for that once this is behind us, and I need to focus, while you need to look as if you weren’t fucked within an inch of your life by your attorney.”
I remove the towel. “You wouldn’t have said itthatgraphicly if you weren’t already thinking about it.”
His nostrils flare, and he adjusts himself. “Daisy, I’m always thinking about it, but this matters too much to take a risk. Get some clothes on, and then we’ll go over everything one last time.”
Reluctantly, I do as I’m told. My most innocent dress is probably not innocent enough, so I cover it with a cardigan. It’s brutally hot and stiflingly humid outside, the way it always is in DC during the summer, which means I’m going to be sweating my ass off the whole way there.
“Take a seat,” Harrison says when I come back out, fully clothed. “I just want to get my facts straight.”
I go to the desk chair, my stomach in knots, as he paces with a notepad in front of him. “You dated Christian all semester?” he asks.
“Most of it,” I reply. I haven’t lied, but it already feels as if I have.
“And he broke up with you by text,” Harrison confirms. “What exactly did he say?”
I swallow. “Just that he felt things had run their course, and since the semester was ending, it was a good breaking point.”
“And you had no idea prior to this that he was going to end things?”
I hitch a shoulder. “We’d just gone away together before Thanksgiving. It seemed like everything was fine until we were on the way home. I thought maybe he was annoyed that I’d referenced winter break, but until then, I didn’t have a clue.”
I’d looked back on it, of course, and seen the small signs. The way he’d snapped at me over dinner the week before. His brief irritation with me in class over something minor. But that’s the problem when someone is losing interest: you can convince yourself of anything. You can convince yourself his irritation is just a sign that he’s comfortable with you, or that he’s finally realizing something you’ve known all along—that you’re not that great and don’t deserve the care and consideration he showered you with at the start.
“You were ill for how long prior to the onset of finals?” he asks.
“I’d been under the weather for a few weeks. I started throwing up about three days before finals began.”
“I’m going to ask you, when we’re in there, to tell us verbatim what they said at the health center and what happened at the clinic when you went. I’m also going to ask you to describe your father’s history of mental illness and what you went through during the spring. I need you not to minimize it, okay?”
I nod, clutching my clasped hands to my stomach.
“Great,” he says, glancing at his notepad again. “You discovered Christian had been lying to you about the girlfriend and went into a tailspin while he walked away scot-free. I presume he’s now graduated?”
I stare at him, frozen.
The truth could ruin things, but lying about it and getting caughtdefinitelywould ruin things. And what if the hearing committee demands names and numbers and addresses andtexts? I have to tell him the truth. As much as I don’t want to, there’s really no choice.
“I never said he was a student,” I whisper.
Harrison freezes. “What?”
I bury my face in my hands. “He wasn’t a student. He was my professor.”
