He gently pries my fingers off his keys, finds the right one, and a moment later, he's pulling out a bottle of whiskey and two gla.s.ses.

"Sit," he says "I am sitting."

He sighs. "On the chair, son. Sit."

"I'm fine," I murmur, standing up, eyes on his office door because Dad and I don't drink together. We don't even talk. Not like this. We make plans, set schedules. We don't talk.

"Sit," he says, and this time it's an order.

I take the seat on the other side of his desk, the one where his clients or his a.s.sistant sit when they have meetings in the office, and I'm nervous, afraid of what he's going to say because he just caught his seventeen-year-old son trying to break into his liquor cabinet at two in the morning and he loves Laney. They all do.

He stays standing when he pours the brown liquid into both gla.s.ses, then slides one across the desk toward me. "Did you drive home like this?"

"No," I tell him. "I've been drinking in the apartment."

"Good. This family's already experienced one death. We don't need another."

I say nothing.

"Lucas," he says. "What happened?"

I finally look up at him, across the desk, past his sleep pants, beyond his white t-shirt, above his dark beard and into his worried eyes. I didn't expect to see worry. Disappointment, anger, yes. But not worry. For seconds he stands there, eyes on mine and when I don't speak, his shoulders drop and so does he, right into the chair opposite me. He sips on his whiskey, our eyes locked.

"Where did you go earlier?"

"To see Lane."

"Where did you sleep last night?"

"At Grace's."

He nods, like he already knows where this is going.

I add, "After I went to see Lane."

He puts down his gla.s.s, then places both elbows on the table and leans in, waiting for me to continue.

I swallow. Nervous. "I told her I loved her."

"Grace?" he asks.

I shake my head.

His teeth show behind his smile, but it lasts only a second before his brow bunches and his lips purse. "But you spent the night with Grace?"

I inhale deeply, exhale slowly.

He's shaking his head now, side to side, slowly, slowly. "What did you do, Luke?"

I tell him everything, everything, my knees bouncing the entire time because we don't talk, and now we're talking, and I'm giving him reasons to hate me like she does.

"Maybe she'll forgive you," he says, as if it's that simple. "She always does."

"This is different, Dad." He knows it's different. I can tell by the way he lifts his hand, pours another drink for himself and eyes my untouched one.

"She's going through a lot right now, Luke. Her mother coming to see her-"

"You know about that?" I cut in.

He nods. "Brian told me today." Another sip. "I told him we could arrange a loan if it meant getting Lane to UNC."

My chest tightens. "You'd do that?"

His huge shoulders lift once. "Lane's like a daughter to me, and your mother loved her. We all do." His voice cracks and he clears his throat. My dad's not an emotional man but any thought, any mention of his wife can bring him to his knees. "I wasn't sure how you'd react to her mother being here, but my truck has a full tank in case you need it." He stands up and heads for the door, but he stops beside me, his hand on my shoulder. "Give Laney time. You're a good friend to her, Luke, and maybe that's all you can be, even if it's from a distance."

PAST

LUCAS.

"It's not a big deal," Laney said, slamming her locker shut.

"It's your sixteenth birthday!"

"So?"

"So you have to do something!"

"With who, Luke? My eleventy-three friends? I have you and that's basically it."

"You have me and your dad and my family... so that's eleventy-seventy."

She giggled, handed me her books and started braiding her long black hair to the side. I watched, fascinated. She raised her eyebrows. "What?"

"Nothing." Then I blinked hard and cleared the fog in my mind she'd created. "Will you at least let me take you out to dinner or something?"

She whined, "It's really not a big deal."

"But I want to," I said, giving back her books.

She stopped in front of me, her books held against her chest. "Nothing fancy?"

"I promise."

"Okay."

"Good."

"Good."

She started to walk away, and I followed. She must've washed her hair the night before because I could smell her shampoo and was stupidly drawn to it. She stopped suddenly, causing me to almost slam into her. "What are you doing?" she asked, eyeing our surroundings. She pointed behind me. "Your cla.s.s is that way."

"Luke! You promised it wouldn't be fancy!" she whisper-yelled over the menu.

"It's not that fancy!" I said. It was. A few weeks earlier I asked Virginia, our nanny at the time, for the fanciest place I could take a girl and so there we were, sitting opposite each other in a booth made of red, shiny leather, smiling at each other, her in an olive green dress and me in a suit, sans tie. "Order whatever you want."

She shook her head, her smile spreading. She said, testing me, "I'm going to order the lobster."

"Do you even eat lobster?"

She laughed out loud, and I wanted to kiss her right then and there in the middle of the fanciest restaurant in town. "I've never had it, but I always see it in movies, you know? The lobster's the most expensive thing on the menu." She started flipping through the pages, her eyes scanning each item quickly. "It's ninety-eight dollars, Luke!" she whispered, her shoulders bouncing.

I leaned back in the seat, basking in everything Laney, and said, "Order it."

She dropped the menu, narrowed her eyes at me. "How can you even afford this?"

"I've worked a couple of shifts for Dad lately."

Her eyes widened. "For this?"

"Yeah, for this."

"No." She shook her head. "Let's just order a pizza and go back to my room or something. This is too much."

I called for the waiter and ordered the d.a.m.n lobster.

Laney did not like lobster.

Neither did I, but I traded my steak for it and pretended like lobster was the greatest thing I'd ever tasted. I skipped dessert, she ordered two, and I sat and I watched as she told me about her new job at the movie theater and how she'd made sure her shifts didn't collide with my track meets, and I fell deeper and deeper. And when she was done, I pulled out the rectangular box that'd been burning a hole in my pocket and watched her eyes light up when I slid it across the table toward her. She looked so beautiful, hair braided to the side, lips red, eyes bright. She whispered my name, and I imagined our lives ten years from then when she'd whisper it again but in a different way. She opened the box and instantly covered her mouth. "It's stunning," she said, and I verbally agreed, but I wasn't talking about the gold bracelet in the box. I was talking about her. "Now I feel bad for getting you that heart rate monitor strap."

"That was a perfect present, Lane." My fingers shook when I clasped the bracelet to her wrist. I was nervous. Scared. Because for the past few weeks, I'd been counting down to that night, to the moment I'd tell her how I felt about her.

"Can you send a picture to my dad?" she asked, so I took out my phone, aimed the camera at her, focused on her smile, and sent the picture to Brian.

"I can't believe you got me this, Luke. It's too much," she said.

It wasn't enough.

She added, "I feel like we need to make a pact or something to remember this moment. Like, what if something happens over the next couple of years and we change and our lives change and we never get to celebrate birthdays together again? We barely see each other now with school and your practices and me working on weekends and... we should go to senior prom together!" She shouted the last part. "Yeah, Luke. We should do that!"

I smiled. "Okay."

"Yeah?"

"Of course."

She leaned back in her seat, watched the light glisten off of her new present.

I told her, "We have one more stop before I take you home."

My family wanted to see Laney on her birthday, so I drove us back to my house where a cake was waiting, along with sixteen candles. My dad had taken my brothers to the mall, handed them each twenty dollars and said to pick out something for her. She opened present after present, responding to each one equally, even the candle made to smell like vomit that Logan had gotten her, which I'm sure only cost a few bucks so he could pocket the rest. Lachlan gave her a hand-made card with a picture of her and me and him in the middle, and I know she wanted to cry. She didn't. But she held him for a long time and kept him on her lap when Dad announced that he had one more gift. I wasn't aware of the gift until he pulled it out of the hallway closet. It was a basket, Mom's basket, filled with all her craft items: knitting needles, yarn, thread. It used to live on the floor between Dad's recliner and the couch where Mom would sit and hadn't seen the light of day since my aunt Leslee decided it was time to pack up all of Mom's things.

Laney actually did cry when she saw it, the back of her hand covering her mouth as she fumbled through her words, "Are you sure?"..."But it's Kathy's!"..."I can't."..."I love it."..."Thank you, thank you, thank you."

And then we lit the candles, sang Happy Birthday, and I took more pictures of her blowing out the candles, holding her presents, smiling, smiling, smiling. We told everyone about dinner, about lobster, about our pact to go to senior prom together and that's when Lachlan started acting out, laying on his back and kicking the c.r.a.p out of Logan for no reason. He was tired, it was hours past his bedtime, so I picked him up off the floor and said I'd do his "one-minute." He was out like a light after a few seconds in his bed, but I lay there for a while, trying to form words that would hopefully bring Laney and me closer. I couldn't just come out and say, "I love you, Lane. Will you be my girlfriend?" because, at the time, I thought it would suck. Now, looking back, it probably would've been enough. I closed my eyes, tried to think, but then the song Wonderwall by Oasis started playing from downstairs, and I sat up quickly, my heart in my throat. Us kids had grown up with the song constantly playing loudly from the kitchen when Mom would be preparing dinner. Some nights, Dad came home early from work, and they'd dance together, my mom standing on Dad's feet, to the song they danced to on their wedding day.

I was almost afraid to go downstairs, to see my dad, to see his reaction to the song. But when I landed on the seventh step down, just enough so I could see the living room from my spot, I saw the lights dim, the original record playing, and Laney in Dad's arms, dancing amongst her many gifts scattered around the floor. "She'll be all ready for you come senior prom," Dad called out to me. Smiling.

I sat on the stairs, watched them through the gaps of the staircase. The song played on, and my brothers and I sat in awe as we watched my best friend give my dad a reason to smile, and we took a moment to miss our mother and to appreciate Laney for every single thing she brought to the family.

I helped Laney carry all her presents to her room, where Brian was waiting for us. "How was your night?" he asked.

Laney hadn't stopped smiling. "I tried lobster!" she announced.

Brian laughed. "Did you like it?"

She scrunched her nose, dumped the presents on her bed. "Luke did, though," she said.

Brian eyed me and I gave him a face that showed I really didn't like lobster, but that it was just between us. The men. He smiled at me, but his expression changed when he faced Laney and asked, "Did your mother call you, honey?"

"No." She sat on the bed next to her dad. "But I didn't expect her to, so it's not a big deal." It was a big deal. Even if she didn't admit it, it was a huge deal.

Brain said, "She called me a few days ago, said she might not have a signal today, but she sent you something in the mail."

For the umpteenth time that day, Laney's eyes lit up. "She did?"

Brian reached into his pocket and pulled out a small box wrapped in purple and gold paper. "This is from her. It came in the mail yesterday, but she asked I give it to you on your birthday."

"Wow," Laney said with a sigh. She unwrapped it quickly, revealing a pair of diamond earrings. It made the bracelet I bought her look cheap. It wasn't. Trust me. "These are great," she said, but her reaction was less than when she opened my brothers' or when she opened mine, and I felt pride swell in my chest. She removed her green and purple dreamcatcher earrings and replaced them with the diamond ones. "How do they look?" she asked her dad.

"Beautiful," he said. "You look beautiful, Lo."

"Beautiful," I agreed.

"Should I call her?" she asked. "To thank her?"

"No," Brian said quickly. "It's late now, and I'm sure she has no signal otherwise she would've called."

"Right," said Lane.

Brian stood. "Well. I'm off to bed. Don't stay up too late. You have school tomorrow."

Laney nodded, stood, kissed her dad on the cheek. "Goodnight, Dad."