I smirked at him and leaned against the car, crossing my arms. He took a final drag of his cigarette and stomped it out.

“Parker’s heart will always belong to Greer.” I shrugged. “I’m not trying to spend my life in the shadow of a dead woman. There are plenty of living women whose shadows I can be in.”

Mason scoffed and squinted at me. “Parker has always had the hots for you.”

I eyed him curiously.

He eyed me back and sort of half chuckled. “Oh my God. You don’t know.”

“Know what?” I wasn’t just playing coy. I really didn’t know. And I was morbidly interested to find out.

“The fight.”

Those two words took me back to the smoky Tackle Box. We were all underage, but no one cared. Mason was royalty. I was the royal girlfriend—or well, the royal girl of the week, at least. Parker was the royal brother. All the other people in town were subjects. I remember thinking that Parker, Watson, and Spence were a little too fired up that night, a little too rowdy, more than a little too drunk. But Mason had just pitched his last game at Cape Carolina High, a complete shutout. I had been the girl who had run out on the field to congratulate him, the one he looked for, the one whose lips he kissed for the whole town to see. I was the one whose ear he’d whispered into, as we walked off the field, “This is how it’s always going to be, babe. Big wins. You and me.” The glare of stardom will blind a girl, especially a seventeen-year-old one.

I never really knew what happened, only that one minute I was dancing barefoot by the bar with my girlfriends, basking in Mason’s victory as if it were my own, and the next minute, Watson, Spence, and Parker were in a pile on top of Mason, and he was screaming in a way that made the ambulance, the arm broken in three places, and the surgery less of a surprise. But, still, what happened was unthinkable.

And then everything was over for Mason. His career. Our relationship. It was worse for him than for me, of course, but to just be abandoned like that… The way he threw me out of his life without a single word changed me. I longed for him the way only a teenaged girl truly can, spent nights crying myself to sleep and days moping around. I promised that I would never mourn for a man like that again. I sulked for a couple months of my senior year. Then I went to college. And, well, in the fun and the freedom and the buffet of boys, I forgot about Mason. I realized that we didn’t really know each other, that we had nothing in common, and that what we’d had wasn’t real. I’d never looked back. And I’d never let a man do that to me again. Not even Thad.