Free Why Lie? (Love Riddles #2) by Carey Heywood Page A

that know I came up here.
    “Hey,” I answer.
    “What happened? Did you find Sydney?” Jake asks, skipping any sort of greeting.
    “I’m at the hospital with her. Her car got caught in a mudslide.”
    He whistles low. “She okay?”
    “She was unconscious when we got here and I haven’t gotten an update yet. Best case is she’s just banged up. It was bad, the mudslide took her driver side door right off the car.”
    “Shit. That’s crazy.”
    “It was. I think seeing that took ten years off my life,” I admit.
    “I’ll bet. Are you okay?”
    Am I?
    Hell, that’s not an easy question to answer. Physically, sure, I’m all in one piece. Mentally, a replay of what happened earlier is stuck on repeat in my head.
    If those cops weren’t there, if that branch hadn’t held her car against that tree for as long as it had. If so many things had or hadn’t happened, she could be gone.
    My first memory of Sydney Fairlane was at Lola’s. It was summer and my parents’ had brought me there after a swim meet for a celebratory slice of pie with some ice cream. They weren’t the only ones who had that idea so the diner was packed with kids and their parents.
    I must have been fourteen, and puberty had not been kind. I was gangly, had braces, and acne. She had to have been nine, or ten since she was a year older then Reilly.
    She was helping Gigi and delivered my apple pie and vanilla ice cream. She told me I was missing out. That the Boston Crème pie with chocolate chip ice cream was the best.
    Jake was my best friend so I was already used to dealing with pesky girls. I argued there was a reason apple pie was an American pastime. It was because it was the best.
    She had looked me up and down with a smirk on her face and replied, “That’s all right if you want to be boring.”
    Before I could argue apple pie wasn’t boring, Gigi took offence and did it for me. For some reason, for years I held on to that. How dare some ten-year-old girl imply I was boring. Every time I saw her after, that memory dug at me. There were times I behaved stupidly just to fight those words, to prove I wasn’t boring.
    I broke into a neighbor’s garage and stole beer to supply a party I didn’t even want to go to. There were other things, risks I took, partly out of feeling helpless during times my mom was sicker than usual and to convince myself I wasn’t boring.
    The night I charmed Sydney into letting me into her bed, I realized what an idiot I’d been to hold onto that for so long.
    An idiot who took that realization and instead of learning from it, went on to make the biggest mistake of my life. A mistake that has me pacing this emergency room.
    Every five minutes, I harass the woman at the check in desk. She remains tight-lipped. “Heath.”
    I turn at the sound of my name to see Gigi and Mr. Fairlane hurry into the emergency room. Mr. Fairlane pauses only to shake the rain from his umbrella while Gigi comes straight to me.
    “How is she? Have you heard anything?” she asks.
    I shake my head and look over my shoulder at Vern, the front desk worker. “She might tell you more because you’re related.”
    Gigi gives my hands a squeeze and moves past me to interrogate Vern. Mr. Fairlane waits with me while she does.
    He doesn’t miss what my mud-coated appearance implies. “What happened up there?”
    I shake my head. “I’ll tell you once we know Sydney is all right.”
    His eyes follow mine and together we watch Vern pick up the phone on her desk while Gigi not so patiently waits.
     

 
     
    I’ve lost count with how many pins and screws are now holding me together. On the left side of my body, there seem to be more bones that are broken than are not.
    Surprisingly, my pinkie toe made it out unscathed. How that happened is anyone’s guess.
    When Heath, still wrapping my brain around that, rescued me, I had apparently gone into shock. I suppose seeing my life flash before my eyes, ten separate times in a row in such a