Yet there he was, when almost nobody else had shown up for me.
Why? Why had he come?
When Tristen saw that I’d noticed him, he pulled his hands from his pockets, and I realized that he wasn’t uneasy at all. In fact, as he walked toward me, I got the impression that he’d just been waiting, patiently, for his turn. For the right time to approach me.
And what a time he picked. It couldn’t have been more dead on.
“It’s going to be okay,” he promised as he came up to me, reaching out to take my arm, like he realized that I was folding up inside, on the verge of breaking down.
I looked up at him, mutely shaking my head in the negative.
No, it was not going to be okay.
He could not promise that.
Nobody could. Certainly not some kid from my high school, even a tall one dressed convincingly like a full-fledged man.
I shook my head more vehemently, tears welling in my eyes.
“Trust me,” he said softly, his British accent soothing. He squeezed my arm harder. “I know what I’m talking about.”
I didn’t know at the time that Tristen had vast experience with this “grief” thing. All I knew was that I let him, a boy I barely knew, wrap his arms around me and pull me to his chest. And suddenly, as he smoothed my hair, I really started weeping. Letting out all the tears that I’d bottled up, from the moment that the police officer had knocked on the door of our house to say that my father had been found butchered in a parking lot outside the lab where he worked, and all through planning the funeral, as my mother fell to pieces, forcing me to do absurd, impossible things like select a coffin and write insanely large checks to the undertaker. Suddenly I was burying myself under Tristen’s overcoat, nearly knocking off my eyeglasses as I pressed against him, and sobbing so hard that I must have soaked his shirt and tie.
When I was done, drained of tears, I pulled away from him, adjusting my glasses and wiping my eyes, sort of embarrassed. But Tristen didn’t seem bothered by my show of emotion.
“It does get better, hurt less,” he assured me, repeating, “Trust me, Jill.”
Such an innocuous little comment at the time, but one that would become central to my very existence in the months to come.
Trust me, Jill . . .
“I’ll see you at school,” Tristen added, pressing my arm again. Then he bent down, and in a gesture I found incredibly mature, kissed my cheek. Only I shifted a little, caught off-guard, not used to being that near to a guy, and the corners of our lips brushed.
“Sorry,” I murmured, even more embarrassed—and kind of appalled with myself. I’d never even come close to kissing a guy on the lips under any circumstances, let alone on such a terrible day. Not that I’d really felt anything, of course, and yet . . . It just seemed wrong to even consider anything but death at that moment. How could I even think about how some guy felt, how he smelled, how it had been just to give up and be held by somebody stronger than me? My father was DEAD. “Sorry,” I muttered again, and I think I was kind of apologizing to Dad, too.
“It’s okay,” Tristen reassured me, smiling a little. He was the first person who’d dared to smile at me since the murder. I didn’t know what to make of that, either. When should people smile again? “See you, okay?” he said, releasing my arm.
I hugged myself, and it seemed a poor substitute for the embrace I’d just been offered. “Sure. See you. Thanks for coming.”
I followed his progress as Tristen wandered off through the graves, bending over now and then to brush some snow off the tombstones, read an inscription, or maybe check a date, not hurrying, like graveyards were his natural habitat. Familiar territory.
Tristen Hyde had come for . . . me.
Why?
But there was no more time to reflect on whatever motives had driven this one particular classmate to attend a stranger’s burial, because suddenly the funeral director was tapping my shoulder, telling me that it was time to say any final goodbyes before the procession of black cars pulled away from the too-white tent and the discreetly positioned backhoe hurried in to do its job because there was more snow in the forecast.
“Okay,” I said, retrieving my mother and guiding her by the hand, forcing us both to bow our heads one last time.
We sealed my father’s grave on a day of stark contrasts, of black against white, and it was the last time I’d ever find myself in a place of such extremes. Because in the months after the dirt fell on the coffin, my life began to shift to shades of gray, almost like the universe had taken a big stick and stirred up the whole scene at that cemetery, mixing up everything and repainting my world.
As it turned out, my father wasn’t quite the man we’d all thought he was.
Correction.
Nothing and no one, as I would come to learn, would turn out to be quite what they’d seemed back on that day.
Not even me.
And Tristen . . . He would prove to be the trickiest, the most complicated, the most compelling of all the mysteries that were about to unravel.
Chapter 1
Jill
THE FIRST PERIOD of the first day of my senior year kicked off with an academic ritual that I’d dreaded since my earliest days in school.
The choosing of partners.
“Come up and get your get new lab manuals,
