Free In Deep with the FBI Agent by Lynne Silver Page B

saying, tell me about your trip to Bermuda . “What do you want to know?” She’d only spoken about her eating disorder with two people: her mother and her therapist. And now Sam.
    “When did it start? Is it something you’re born with?” Casually, he put the car into reverse and backed out of the spot.
    “It started during the beginning of our freshman year.”
    He turned the car out of the restaurant parking lot and onto the main road. “I remember I bought you a pack of M&Ms from the vending machine during orientation. You ate it. You weren’t anorexic then?”
    “God, how do you remember stuff like that, Sam?”
    He took his eyes off the road to give her a penetrating look. “Because I thought I was buying a treat for my new best friend at my new school.”
    Regret stabbed through her. “I’m sorry.”
    “I’m over it.”
    Was he? She wasn’t. It would take a lot of apologizing and inward reflection to get over how bitchy she’d been in high school. She told her therapist she’d been bitchy because she’d been hungry all the time, but the hunger was an excuse. The bitchiness had come from some place deeper, the same place that caused her anorexia. It had been her drive to be perfect, to be in control. Her mother had been a good mom most days, but then there’d be weeks when she called in sick to work and didn’t get out of bed. Weeks in which Casey had to be the adult in the family. She’d had little control over lots of things, so she’d tried to exert control over what she could eat. With therapy, she understood that now.
    “Anyway, don’t you remember what it was like when we started at Montgomery Prep?” She snorted. “Never mind. Of course you do. You remember that I ate M&Ms on the first day of school.”
    “I remember being terrified,” Sam said, “that I couldn’t keep up. I’d been top of my class in middle school, but a public middle school in a low-income area is a world away from Montgomery Prep. Plus, I was scared of getting the shit kicked out of me in the locker room. I was a little smaller then.”
    “I remember,” she said softly. “You’ve grown.”
    A meaningful silence penetrated the car as Casey’s word choice took on a double meaning. Her cheeks felt hot, but Sam laughed. “In lots of way. If you’re lucky, I’ll show you.”
    “Sam!” Her fist bumped his biceps, which felt solid under her punch. “I’m confessing my soul here. Stop joking.”
    “I’ve always felt soul-baring confidences should be doled out with a modicum of humor,” he said. “Life is only as serious as we make it. Every person on this planet walks around with their own cross to bear. Some crosses are more publicly displayed than others, and some are heavier than others, but everyone’s got one. The goal is to carry yours with dignity and humor. The humor makes it lighter, and the dignity makes you remember that someone else’s burden is always worse than yours.”
    “Wow,” she murmured. “Deep.”
    “There are a few folks who haven’t found their cross yet. You know those folks. They tend to be overbearing know-it-alls. Carrying a burden around gives you empathy,” Sam said.
    “You’re amazing,” she said, wondering what his cross was, and staring at him as he drove through a dark suburban neighborhood of D.C. “I wish I hadn’t turned on you freshman year. Maybe you would’ve helped me be less intimidated when we started Montgomery Prep. God, everyone there was smart and wealthy. And skinny.”
    He glanced over at her emphasis on the word skinny .
    “I remember the smart and wealthy. The skinny not so much.”
    “Well, you were the skinniest, smallest boy,” she said, realizing that had been his cross to bear. He’d had four years, maybe more, of taunts and being the runt of the pack. “You were probably wishing to gain some weight, right?”
    “Would’ve come in handy against Eric Cohen,” he said, shrugging.
    They shared a moment of weighty silence in memory