Page 88 of All These Beautiful Strangers

“My boyfriend?” She turned around to see who I was talking about. “That’s my brother Hank,” Grace said, laughing.

I felt the tightness in my chest instantly ease and I laughed too.

“He’s just being protective,” Grace went on. She paused a moment. “I don’t—I’m not seeing anyone at the moment.”

I nodded and couldn’t quite meet her eyes.

“Jake mentioned you a lot, you know?” Grace said, looking back at Jake’s portrait. “When he’d talk about Knollwood and his friends there, yours was the name that came up the most.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” Grace said. “He looked up to you.”

I only nodded. I didn’t know what else to say. I hadn’t talked about Jake with anyone for years. When he’d first passed away, it had been difficult not to talk about Jake, not to think about him. But now, after all this time, the words eluded me.

“I get that you don’t like to talk about him,” Grace said. “So we don’t have to. But I just have one question first before we never talk about it again. I never got to see Jake at Knollwood—he talked about it all the time, but I never got to go visit, to actually see it. And I always wanted to know what Jake was like at school. Did he seem happy there?”

“Yes, he seemed happy,” I said.

“I thought he was,” Grace said. “He always sounded happy.”

“Everybody liked Jake,” I said. “He was hard not to like, even though you kind of wanted to hate him, because the bastard seemed to be good at everything.”

Grace chuckled knowingly.

“He was an ace in the classroom and an ace on the tennis court—definitely gave me a run for my money,” I said.

“That’s the thing that always got me,” Grace said. “He seemed to be doing so well. But I guess that was all a lie. I never knew how much he was struggling.”

“Knollwood is a very competitive school,” I said. “All of us struggled from time to time.”

“He never said anything to you about falling behind?”

My throat constricted. I didn’t want to talk about this anymore. I opened my mouth to answer her but couldn’t. I simply shook my head.

“He never said anything to me about it either,” Grace said.

I had to put an end to this line of questioning before things went too far.

“I can tell you a lot of things about Jake,” I said. “But if you’re looking for an answer as to why, I don’t have one.”

Grace was quiet for a moment. “This may be horrible for me to say,” she said, “but it actually makes me feel better to hear you say that. I just—for a long time, I felt like I had failed him by not seeing it. And it’s just comforting to hear, that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t see it coming.”

I instinctively reached forward and grabbed her hand. She looked surprised by the gesture, but she didn’t draw her hand away.

“Listen to me, Grace,” I said, slowly and deliberately, because it was important that she heard me. It was important she understood. “What happened to Jake, that wasn’t your fault. You had nothing to do with it.”

She just looked at me—her eyes wide and searching and so full of loss.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said again.

She put her other hand on top of my mine then, and gave it a little squeeze.

“It wasn’t yours either,” she said back to me.

I recoiled at her words. I couldn’t stomach them. But she held my hand firmly between her own.

I cleared my throat and looked away from her.