Chapters (51)
- Cover
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Acknowledgments
- P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
- About the Author
- About the Book
- Also by Alison Gaylin
- About the Publisher
Quentin smiled, tears forming in his eyes. He closed his laptop. Clicked the light off, thinking back to months ago, weeks after his mother’s death, when he’d awakened from a nightmare and reached out for Dean, pulled him too close and held on too tight, his lips pressed to Dean’s shoulder, his face wet against Dean’s neck, both fists jammed into his stomach, hanging on for his life. Don’t leave me, please don’t leave me, please . . . Dean waking, holding him. The gentle ssshes and it’s okays, and I won’t of course I won’t. I’ll never leave you.
But you don’t know me. You don’t know what I’ve done.
Neither one of them had mentioned it in the morning. Neither one of them had spoken of it again. “You’re right,” Quentin said, his eyes open in the soft pitch-dark. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
Five
Quentin
THE HOUSE WHERE April Cooper had lived with her doomed stepfather and baby sister had been leveled decades ago. But Santa Rosa High School, where she’d gone for what was commonly believed to have been the last year of her life, was still around, located in a dusty little town of the same name—a far-flung L.A. suburb situated between Duarte and Monrovia that was nowhere near as lovely and exotic as its name suggested.
Judging from the old pictures Quentin had found online, it hadn’t changed much over the last forty-three years, save for the stores in the strip malls that lined the wide, treeless streets. Back then, it had been all about Perry’s Pizza and Sunglass Hut and Good Earth Health Foods (Now serving frozen yogurt!). These days it was mostly nail salons, punctuated by the occasional Chick-fil-A or Starbucks, plus a surprising number of crafting shops with overly cute names. Stitches n’ Such, Buckets O’ Yarn, Trimmin’ the Tree. All those apostrophes, cropping up like dandelions everywhere you looked.
Santa Rosa High School was less than a five-minute drive away from St. Xavier, the Catholic boys’ school attended by Gabriel LeRoy. But Quentin already knew that. It was part of the lore, how Cooper and LeRoy had met cute at the McDonald’s between their two schools. The thing that surprised him most about SRHS was how close it was to Duarte, where George Pollard lived and worked. He’d grown up more than fifty miles away and had gone to college at Stanford, which was 350 miles north of here. Yet when it came time to settle down, he’d somehow made it back to his first love’s last-known location. Quentin wondered how often Pollard drove by April’s old school on a weekly basis—because that really was the question, wasn’t it? Not if, but how often?