Page 8 of The Five Year Lie

These days I live in the carriage house behind the Victorian mansion where I grew up. But the summer I met Drew, I had my own place near the park, and we used to meet under the tree and go for long bike rides together. Or sometimes we’d just wander along the paths, holding hands and swapping gossip.

Our relationship was—and still is—my biggest secret. My father was a controlling man, and actively hostile toward every boyfriend of mine he ever met. So Drew and I had to keep our dalliances quiet. As a Chime Co. employee, it would have complicated his life, not to mention mine.

I was twenty-four that summer, and I already knew I’d never please my father. So we snuck around. It wasn’t even difficult. Drew had a small apartment on an unfashionable street near the university, where my parents wouldn’t deign to go. And I was sharing an apartment with a high school friend in Parkside, out of their sight lines.

Pedaling toward the park with the wind in my face, I feel like a time traveler. Five years ago I was still a carefree artist in training, working for my dad that summer just to get him off my back. I spent all my other waking hours at the glass-blowing studio. I didn’t have a boyfriend, and I wasn’t interested in dating.

Until I met Drew, that is. And fell fast and hard into the kind of love where you fall asleep dreaming about him and wake up looking for him. Every time he smiled at me, I knew I’d found my other half.

Or so I thought. I had no idea how badly I could be hurt. And if someone had tried to caution me, I wouldn’t have listened.

Even Drew warned me against getting too attached. That first night we went to dinner, I asked him if he was new to Portland.

“Just passing through, to be honest,” he said. “I needed this job, but I probably won’t stay long.”

“Why?” I heard myself ask, while we sipped vodka tonics at a dockside clam shack, under cheap string lights at an open-air table.

“Maybe this isn’t something I should tell the boss’s daughter.” His blue eyes flashed as he gave me a guilty smile.

“Really? Because my dad and I are so close?”

He snorted. “No, but it’s going to sound ungrateful. I got a medical discharge from the army, and I needed a job. Pretty glad your father hired me even though my programming is rusty.”

“But now you’ve realized he’s not your dream boss?”

Drew lifted his broody eyes, giving me a view of his strong neck while he contemplated the night sky. “It’s not that. I just don’t think I’m cut out for corporate work. I can’t make a whole career of it, because I don’t believe in the product.”

“Too invasive?” I asked. Because if you work at Chime Co. for more than ten minutes, you realize how many thousands of hours of surveillance the company captures.

“Toopointlesslyinvasive,” he said. “The product creates a culture of fear. Like if you don’t put these cameras all over your neighborhood, you’ll never be safe.”

I changed the subject after that. His plan to leave Chime Co. bothered me, and I didn’t really want to examine why. From minute one, I’d fought my attraction to him. Preppy computer programmers really weren’t my type. In theory.

Yet it took me a single hour to fall headlong into his crooked smile. After the bar closed, we walked along the docks, and he took my hand in a lazy way that asked for nothing in return. He tippedhis head back and whistled along with the Steve Miller tune a cover band was playing two docks over.

His confidence was at least as attractive to me as his strong jaw. He had a quiet brand of swagger and a thick scar on his cheek under one eye. It was the kind of flaw that only served to bring his perfections into higher relief.

He wasn’t at all like I expected. He told me about his years in the army, and I asked if he’d had a girlfriend waiting at home. I was still looking for the fatal flaw.

What can I say? I’ve always had trust issues.

But he laughed and pulled out his phone to show me a picture. “Yeah, here’s my one true love.”

I braced myself, but the picture on the screen was... “Is that a German shepherd?”

“That’s right. Her name’s Coby. She turned out to have a lousy nose for explosives, so I adopted her overseas. Now my buddies are taking care of her in North Carolina. But one day I’m going to win her back.”

A hot army vet who loves dogs? It was hard to believe he was real. And by midnight—when he finally kissed me on the moonlit pier—I would have followed him anywhere.

I was young and full of the rawest kind of hope. When he captured my face in two broad hands, I already felt sorry for all the people who didn’t know it was possible to fall in love in a single night. They hadn’t looked into his clear, bright eyes. They hadn’t felt this deep tug in the belly on the first kiss.

It was magic. Three months of magic. And even knowing what I know now, I’d jump off the same cliff a second time. No question.

Plus, I got Buzz out of it. He’s the best thing in my life.

There’s a long traffic light at Forest Avenue. I stop, my foot onthe ground, my heart thumping against my rib cage. Most of me knows that Drew isn’t waiting under that tree. He left me, and then he died. I’m still angry about the first thing, if not the second.

But the park is just out of view. For another whole minute, anything is possible. I love him with the darkest, greediest part of my heart, and I’d shave several years off my own life just to see him one more time.