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He winks at her. “You, later.”
Sammy’s mouth opens, shuts, again and again, and I give Jonah this: no one, and I mean,no one,has ever rendered Sammy speechless before.
“I need a picture of you girls,” Jonah says, taking out his phone.
We line up, arms around each other, as Jonah gets in position. Then he says, his eyes trailing over us, “You guys look ridiculous in this setting. You know that, right?”
We laugh, loud and free, because wedoknow, and that’s what makes it perfect.
Jace
I stare at the picture Jonah just sent through of Harlow and her friends dressed in gowns, arms around each other, standing in front of the rink. Her dress is ruby-red, matching the class ring on her thumbandthe necklace I gave her. I assume she got the ring recently, but the necklace she’s worn ever since I gave it to her. She’s never taken it off, even after we broke up. I zoom in on Harlow, on her face, her smile, as her head throws back with laughter.
Before Harlow and I got together, I’d only ever see her smile like that around her friends or around Jonah, and I wanted so badly to be the cause of her smile, that one day, I woke up and set out to do exactly that. She always seemed sad around me, though. At least in the beginning. Then things changed, and it felt like every smile, every bit of laughter that came out of her wasforme. Like I’d put in the work and earned every single one of them.
“Something wrong, son?”
I pull out of my daze and pocket my phone, then look up at the man sitting opposite me. He’s already watching me, his eyebrows drawn, but eyes clear for the first time in years.
I smile, forhim. Becausehe’searned it. “Everything’s good, Grandpa,” I say, switching my focus to the chessboard between us. “Who’s turn is it?”
“Yours.”
Sweeping my gaze over the pieces, I ask, “And remind me again, the horse?—”
“Knight.”
“Right. Theknight. L shape?”
“You got it,” he beams, and my smile only widens.
I move my piece without really looking and then watch my grandpa’s reaction. His eyes shift, taking in the entire board,thinking. Mygrandpa didn’t do a lot ofthinkingwhen he was drunk, but he does it now, when he’ssober.
He’s been at the rehab center for a while now—ever since Judge Wallace dropped the charges and released him to the care of the facility. There’s still a lot more work he needs to do and a lot more testing to come, but for now, it’s working. I didn’t know if it would or if it would only make things worse. For years, I thought I could handle it all. That I could take anything my grandpa would throw at me. And that I could do all of it alone.
Turns out, I was wrong.
And I couldn’t quite convince myself of that.
It wasn’t until I went to dinner at Jonah’s house that I truly confronted the absolute truth of the situation I was in: that the decisions put on me to make were like weights strapped to my ankles while submerged under water, dragging me down until I was drowning under the pressure.
The uncertainty.
I didn’t want to leave my grandpa alone.
Since the night of his arrest, I’d hear his voice in my head, calling for me,beggingfor me when the cops tried to take him down. He didn’t know what was happening then. I’m not sure if he knows what’s happening now. Even sober.
The judge picked up on that too.
That’s why she suggested what she did.
“There’s something wrong with your grandpa,” she’d told me when she called.
“I know,” I’d whispered back. And I’m not sure if it was relief I felt at that moment. Relief orfear. But at least someone else picked up on it, because the many doctors I’d taken him to prior blamed it all on the alcohol.
“There’s something wrong with him,” I’d tell them, but it always fell on deaf ears.
“Checkmate,” Grandpa says now, pulling me from my thoughts.