I slammed my hands on the tabletop. “Landon lies! When will you realize that? That’s all he’s ever done to me. Lie and leave. It’s what he’s good at. I know you love Wilder, but you’ve known him for all of five months. I’ve known them for years.”
“That’s not entirely fair—” Penna interjected.
“He turned down the Gremlin offer!” Leah shouted.
A tiny kernel of hope flickered in my stomach. I squashed it mercilessly. “Right. If he actually did that, I’m sure he’s just holding out for more money.”
“Can’t you believe me?” she asked.
“You, I will always believe. But no, I don’t believe anything he says.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Both. If I even open myself to the possibility, give him any benefit of the doubt…” I shook my head. “Look, I’m holding myself together by a thread. It’s killing me to know that he’s just down the damned hallway. Hell, I can’t even sleep without him creeping into my dreams, and I can feel the madness, the heartbreak, the utter destruction hovering, waiting for me to break down and let it in. All I have is this tiny thread, and I’m not giving him the scissors. Or you—as much as I love you.”
Her eyes and posture softened. “We can’t talk about this, can we?”
“No,” I said quietly, knowing I was drawing a line in our friendship that had never been there before.
She dropped her gaze to her lap, her eyes darting back and forth, which I knew meant she was weighing her options. Leah was nothing if not logical. Finally she looked up and forced a smile, but it was sad. “Okay. If that’s what you need.”
“It is.”
She drew in a shaky breath. “Talk to your parents lately?” She forced out in an obvious change of subject.
Tension drained from my shoulders, but guilt quickly took its place. I hated shutting her out. She didn’t deserve it.
“I saw my mom right before I flew out. It was…” Sad. Horrible. Frustrating. “…heartbreaking.” She’d begged me to understand, but I couldn’t. All I saw when I thought about either of them were a pair of liars. “Dad has sent a bunch of emails apologizing, but I can’t get past my anger long enough to write him back. I understand his reasons—getting me back to Dartmouth and away from a guy he thought would break my heart—but all he did was break it that much faster.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. I’m so angry at them both, which is kind of ironic since I was adopted to save them from divorce the first time they thought about filing. Man, everything is just shit right now. Is there anything happy to talk about?”
“Maybe,” Penna said, resting her air-casted leg on the chair in front of her. She’d lost the cast over Christmas break, but when the doc told her she should be okay to walk on it, she didn’t believe him. She’d requested additional support, hence the air cast.
I hadn’t said a single word to her about it. If she wanted to hide behind her injury, then who the hell was I to stop her? I’d blatantly hidden behind her all Christmas, knowing that her house was the one place they’d never look for me.
Funny how the one Renegade who had hated me ended up being my saving grace when shit went south.
“Please, fill my heart with sunshine,” I said with more than a hint of sarcasm.
“Good. I think I may have found something. But don’t get excited until I check it out. We don’t exactly have a lot to go on.”
By not a lot, she meant next to nothing. The only papers Dad had given me were the ones from the court at my adoption. The ones that didn’t mention my name at birth, just that my birth mother’s name was Seo-yun Jhang, which turned out to be one of the most popular names in Korea.
Not so helpful.
But it did have the one thing I needed: the name of her birthplace.
“Do you think you found it?” I asked.
She grimaced. “There’s an orphanage there that did a heavy number of adoptions back when you were placed, but there’s no guaranteeing that’s it. It would be like assuming you lived your whole life in L.A., when in fact you live in New Hampshire most of the year while you go to Dartmouth.”
“Right,” I said, dropping my head into my hands.
“I’m not saying it’s not possible,” Penna reassured me.
I sighed. “It’s a long shot, but I have to take it. It’s the closest I’ll ever be, and even if it’s not where I was adopted from, then…”
“Then what?” Leah asked, squeezing my hand. “Will you feel like you did everything? Because that’s what this is for, you feeling whole. Not the result.”
I nodded. “I think so?”
She looked at me, watching for whatever sign she always used to see right through me. “Okay. Then I’ll go with you.”
“No. You have the Great Wall thing,” I protested.
She shrugged. “Pax is always going to be jumping off something, revving some engine, or generally trying to get himself killed. You’ll only have this happen to you once.”
“Hell, maybe I’ll go, too,” Penna muttered.
“You’re supposed to go with Landon,” I countered.
“I thought you didn’t care,” Penna said, looking at me from over her laptop.
I played with the pen on the table in front of me. “I don’t want him to die. I want him to get his ridgeline. It’s complicated.”