Chapter Thirty-Six.

LUCAS.

Laney falls asleep.

Judge Nelson says she has some paperwork to get back to in her office. She also tells me she's "quite fond" of me. I tell her I "appreciate" her.

We leave.

I go home, pretend like I don't care that everyone is fussing over me.

Lucy offers not to cook dinner, and I tell her I appreciate her, too.

I do my one minute with Lachlan and he wraps his arms around my head, tells me he loves me, that he's glad I wasn't the one shot by the bad man.

I fall asleep in his bed and wake the next morning to a phone call from Judge Nelson. There are detectives asking questions, and she wants to meet me at her new "headquarters." I tell her I can't right now, that I need to see Laney. She says her new "headquarters" is Laney's room at the hospital. I tell her I appreciate her, again, and that I'll be there soon.

It's a media circus around the hospital. The Kennedys are rich and powerful and their son is in a hospital bed "fighting for his life." f.u.c.k the media.

According to what Lucy's told me, the Kennedys have been very tight-lipped about it all. They refuse to speak, to answer questions, they just hope justice will be served. They want me locked up, and right now, that's their priority. They don't care about their son, about what might happen to him because he tried to f.u.c.king kill someone. Or that that someone actually did fight for her life. No. They care about f.u.c.king justice.

Judge Nelson's waiting for Dad and me just outside the hospital doors. She says she lifted the restraining order on the condition that she be with me. I ask her why she's so invested in this. She says she's not invested in "this" so much as she's invested in "us"... Laney and me. She being the only judge in town, she'll be working both cases, Lane's case against Cooper and his case against me. I guess that's one good thing about small towns, everything is personal. And for the first time in days, I feel a win on my side. Because there are some things the Kennedys' f.u.c.k You money can't buy, and Judge Nelson has them: common sense and common decency.

Lane's awake and half sitting up when I enter her room. She smiles weakly when she sees me and I can't help it, I smile back, race over to her.

"Hi," she whispers.

I rest my forehead against hers, unable to hold back my cries. "Are you okay?"

She grasps my wrist, chokes on a sob. "I've missed you."

"I've missed you, too, baby. And I love you. So much."

She pulls back, her tear-filled eyes ripping my heart in two. "What's going to happen to us?"

"Nothing," I a.s.sure. "I won't let anything happen to us."

"We're going to get through this, right?"

"Of course."

"I'm sorry, Luke. I shouldn't have left with him," she says, her cries. .h.i.tching her words.

I kiss her lips, taste her tears. "Stop it. This isn't your fault. I love you. You love me. That's all that matters."

She chews on her lip and presses a b.u.t.ton on the remote that moves the top half of the bed back down to laying position. Then she scoots over, just slightly, and pats the bed. "One minute?"

I don't care that there are other people in the room, the judge, my dad, her dad, our lawyers, two random detectives. f.u.c.k, the media could be in here and it still wouldn't stop me from getting in the bed with her and cupping her face and kissing her eyes and her cheeks and her forehead and her nose and her lips and all the things I love about her.

"Lucas," she whispers, and I pull back. She pouts. "You went to jail?"

"No, baby." I shake my head. "I was in a holding cell. That's all."

"Are you going to jail?" She's so sad, so naive, so innocent. So Laney.

I don't answer. Instead, I close my eyes, rub my nose along hers.

"If you do," she says, struggling to breathe through her pain. "I'm going with you."

I kiss her again.

Tell her I've missed her. Again.

Tell her I love her. Again.

"I heard you," she says. "What you said in the ambulance, I heard it all. You were number four, Lucas Preston. I stopped counting at four."

I smile. "It's my new favorite number."

"Your favorite number to go with my favorite person."

"We're so lame," I tell her, my smile widening.

She laughs, reality shifts, and our reality is what she says next: "We're not lame. We're just in love." It's true. We are. And nothing and no one can take that love from us. Even the detective who clears his throat and introduces himself as Detective Keels and his partner as Detective Mayfield.

The questions start off easy and get harder from there until I'm sitting up in the bed, my hand linked with Lane's, and I replay the moment in my mind: Was Cooper Kennedy in possession of the weapon when you began your a.s.sault?

The truth is simple. "Yes."

"At what point was he no longer in possession?" Keels asks the questions, Mayfield takes the notes.

"Um... I guess when I lunged at him and brought him down."

"Do you know where the weapon landed?" I hate that he's calling it a weapon as if it's somehow less deadly. It's a f.u.c.king gun. I wish he'd just say it.

"Under a car."

"How far was the car, Lucas?"

I look at my dad. I look at my lawyer. "I can't be sure, sir."

Mayfield pauses on taking notes and looks up, speaks for the first time. "You run track, right?"

I nod. "Yes, sir."

Then he gets c.o.c.ky, obnoxious. "So you have to have some idea of distance. Give me a ballpark, something to work with."

"I don't know. Like, ten, maybe fifteen feet."

Mayfield goes back to taking notes. Keels says, "So not within reaching distance?"

"I guess not."

"And you continued your a.s.sault on Mr. Kennedy even after the weapon had left his possession and was thrown under a car, out of reach. Correct?"

My heart thumps, my mind shuts down. "I-"

My lawyer sighs. "I guess self-defense is out of the question now."

f.u.c.k.

Keels ends my questions there, for now, and moves on to Laney. Same standard questions with her.

What was her relationship with Cooper Kennedy?

How long have they known each other?

Were they intimate? (Like it f.u.c.king matters.) And I start to wonder if maybe these f.u.c.king detectives are on the Kennedys' f.u.c.k You payroll. Then they ask something that has Laney sitting up, joining me. Where was she the first week of May? She was in Charlotte, in a hotel. But she's taking too long to answer, and her eyes are everywhere at once. She won't make eye contact with Keels and she won't look at me, even when I squeeze her hand. I whisper, "You were in Charlotte, remember? In a hotel. You needed to get away for a while."

Her throat bobs with her swallow, but she still doesn't speak.

Mayfield flips his notepad, page after page, as if we have all the time in the f.u.c.king world. I wish they'd leave. I wish we could go back to fifteen minutes ago when one minute was the greatest thing in the world.

Mayfield finds what he's looking for among his notes. "So you weren't in the hospital... Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte? Is that what you're saying?"

Her eyes go wide like they did when I asked her about her gla.s.ses, deer meet headlights, and nothing makes sense.

Mayfield continues, "It says here you were complaining about stomach pains. Two broken ribs, swelling around your jaw, large bruise on your back? That doesn't sound like stomach pains to me."

Brian sits higher. Two deer in headlights. "Lois. What is he saying?"

Lane shakes her head. "What do you want me to say?" she whispers.

Keels is blunt. "The truth, Miss Sanders." c.u.n.t.

Lane's cry is quiet, almost silent. "I think you can guess, detectives."

"We have to hear it from you."

"You want me to tell you that my boyfriend used me as a punching bag?"

Rage.

White. Hot. Rage.

"Which boyfriend?" Keels asks. "Cooper or Luc-"

"No!" she almost shouts. "Lucas would never... G.o.d, what is wrong with you two? Why are you even here when he's down the hall!" Her volume rises with each word. "You want the truth. Fine! I tried to break up with Cooper the previous week. We were in his dorm room, and he wouldn't let me leave. He locked me in there and said we could "talk it out" but we didn't talk. He yelled, hit, slapped, punched. And then he f.u.c.ked me as if it was going to make everything okay."

I cover my mouth to stop the puke because it's right f.u.c.king there, like my anger, ready to explode.

"And it wasn't the first time this happened. It'd been going on for months, and I'm sorry," she cries, spit flying from her mouth, and she lets go of my hand and continues, "I'm sorry, Dad. I couldn't tell you." She looks at me. "I couldn't tell either of you because I thought he'd do something to hurt you and I couldn't..."

She cries into her hands.

Brian cries into his shirt.

And I'm too f.u.c.king angry to cry.

Keels looks at me, speaks to Laney. "If that happened, Ms. Sanders, then why is Cooper Kennedy's signature on the hospital bill?"

"It's not," she sobs. "It's not Cooper's. It's his mom's."

I'm on my feet before I can think, before the consequences come to me, and I march for the door with one thing on my mind: I'm going to finish Cooper f.u.c.king Kennedy. "Lucas!" Judge Nelson yells at the same time Dad grasps my arms, keeps me in place. The judge is in front of me now, her eyes red and raw. "Don't do this, Lucas. Don't make me question my investments."

LOIS.

"Your boyfriend's got quite the temper, doesn't he?" Keels asks, watching Luke storm out of the room.

I glare at him, eyes wide in shock. The Kennedys had requested detectives from a different precinct because they felt like Misty's connection would somehow sway the investigation. I didn't tell Lucas. I knew how he felt about the Kennedys. "You have no idea, do you?" I croak.

Keels crosses his arms, widens his stance like he's readying himself for a confrontation. But he's a blur. Everything is. I lost my gla.s.ses the moment I lost my breath somewhere in the parking lot of the hotel. He asks, "No idea about what, Miss Sanders?"

"Lucas isn't the threat here, sir. Luke's reaction is because he has a heart, not a temper. You heard everything I said, right?"

They don't respond.

"Because you're both looking at us like you don't know us, like you don't understand us. We're just kids, detectives. We didn't plan for this to happen. You think Luke's got a temper? Imagine if I were your mother or your wife, your sister"-I glance at Dad-"your daughter. And then try to fathom how you would react if you were Luke." I wipe my eyes, a memory searing my brain. "I got my first period when I was thirteen. By then it was just Dad and me. I didn't know what was happening or what to do, and we didn't have the supplies I needed. It was a Sat.u.r.day; Dad was working overtime so I was all alone. I sat in my bathroom and I called my mom but she didn't answer, not that she'd do anything, but I was that desperate. I called Lucy, Luke's older sister, but she didn't answer, either. Then I called Luke. I was in tears by the time he picked up the phone. I was so nervous and scared and awkward. He thought something had happened to me, and he kept insisting he call 911. When I finally told him what was happening, he took charge as if it was something he'd done a thousand times before. He raided his sister's bathroom and packed everything in his backpack and rode his bike over to my house. He sat on the other side of the bathroom door while I-you know-and he read the instructions out loud to me. He kept saying things like, This is normal, Lane. Nothing to worry about, Lane. It just means you're a woman, Lane...'" I speak through the giant knot in my throat. "Lucas is still that same amazing boy he was back then, and up until Sat.u.r.day night, he'd never laid a hand on anybody. He's the most caring, most gentle person I know. He tucks his little brother into bed every night. Without fail. No matter where we are or what's happening, 7 pm comes along and he's there for his youngest brother. He's there for all of them. It was those qualities in Luke I found in Cooper that made me fall for him in the first place."

The detectives are listening to me now, not just hearing me. Mayfield says, his voice weak, "Will you please tell us about your relationship with Cooper Kennedy. In detail?"

I nod slowly, fear of the memories squeezing my throat shut. I twist my hands, look over at Dad. "You can leave, Dad... if you want to."