Free This One Moment by Stina Lindenblatt

parents. Or maybe, in retrospect, it might’ve been a better idea to let her find out about it in front of them. Better for me, anyway.
    I removed her duffel bag from the trunk. Clouds obscured the sun, but it didn’t look like it would snow. At least not in the next few hours.
    “Where are you staying?” she asked as we walked to her building. This was the first time she’d mentioned it since I announced I couldn’t stay with Brandon. I’d moved out of his apartment three days ago, the same day I helped Kayla move. Hailey hadn’t agreed to my crashing in Kayla’s old room, so her best friend and I had decided I shouldn’t mention where I was staying until Hailey had been released from the hospital.
    “Kayla told me about the guy at the nightclub who was harassing you,” I said, stalling the inevitable. “Do you remember his name?”
    A red car crawled toward us, the driver searching for an open spot. It stopped in the middle of the road, even though nothing was available nearby.
    “The cops asked me the same question. I never asked him his name. I didn’t care what it was.” Hailey muttered the last part and looked away.
    I paused. Her messy ponytail was sexy as hell. I brushed a stray strand of hair behind her ear, my callused fingertips grazing her soft skin. “Hey, I’m not judging you.”
    Dropping her gaze, she nodded. I couldn’t tell if she believed me or not.
    “But I am wondering if he was involved in the attack.” From the corner of my eye, I noticed the car move forward again. It continued past us, the driver a girl in her early twenties. “It might have nothing to do with him,” I continued. “He might not have known you were in Westgate. But there’s also a chance he followed you there.”
    In which case he’d been stalking her. But even if that was true, it didn’t explain why she’d been in that part of town.
    “It’s possible.” Hailey’s eyes found mine. “Like I told the cops, I haven’t seen him for about two months. Ever since Kayla and I stopped going to Trysting.”
    “Would you recognize him if you saw him?”
    Again she nodded, and we resumed walking.
    “Good. Then as soon as you’re up to it, I think we should go dancing and see if we can find him. If he was the one who attacked you, it’s possible that just seeing him might help you remember. It’s worth a try.”
    She turned her head and narrowed her eyes at me. “And what if I do recognize him, Nolan? What are you gonna do?”
    Ouch. Guess I deserved that. Well, semi-deserved it. “Don’t believe everything you read.”
    She frowned. “What does that mean?”
    “Just that.”
    “So you’re telling me you weren’t involved in that bar fight in San Antonio?” Her words were like stubbing your bare toe on an amp, the intense pain lingering after the initial shock had passed. It shouldn’t have bothered me that she even questioned what had happened, but it did.
    “Not in the way the media reported it.”
    She huffed. “Either you were or you weren’t. There’s no in-between, Nolan.”
    But sometimes, there was. “The paparazzi ambushed us. One of the lowlifes had found dirt on Mason that could have destroyed him. At least it could have if the asshole had twisted it to benefit the story.
    “Mason swung at him. I tried to stop it from turning into something nastier. The other paparazzi took objection to that and jumped on a story that wasn’t true.” I shrugged. “At least it distracted them from going after Mason.”
    Hailey nodded but didn’t say anything more on the topic. She also didn’t ask what the dirt on Mason was, which came as no surprise. Hailey was like that. She respected people’s privacy. It was one of the things I loved about her, along with her own need to keep her life private. I never had to worry about her selling me out for a few minutes of fame when it came to my secrets.
    The same couldn’t be said for the other girls I’d been with. Which was one of the reasons I