by Mary Strand
Before Zach and Dad could make their way here, though, I gave my mom a gigantic hug. Because she had always been there for me. In a wild, screeching, totally unpredictable way, but she’d been there. Even at the worst times of my life.
Okay, often with her credit card.
“Lydia?” Coach Burns eyed Mom’s high heels and the floor mat she was probably putting holes in as we spoke. “Great job, but can you take this off the mat?”
I steered Mom off the mat and away from as much of the crowd as possible, but another small crowd quickly gathered around us. Dad. Zach. Cat and Jeremy. Liz and Jane and their guys. Mr. Fogarty, who was still clapping. Lauren, who stopped hating Zach and me after she started dating a really sweet college friend of Zach’s who had more tattoos and piercings than I’d ever seen up close. Even Mary, who’d made a surprise trip home from college just for my first gymnastics meet.
And Rachel Langdon, Liz’s BFF since the dawn of time, who shocked my whole family when she showed up hand in hand with Wild Bill Cooper, the biggest weirdo on the face of the earth, and softly announced that she was pregnant.
Yeah. Like, eight months pregnant.
“You were the best.” Zach, despite the constant threats my dad made to toss him into a ditch and leave him for dead, put his arm around me. “Even on the balance beam.”
“Slight problem: I don’t do the balance beam.”
Except really, really badly. And when no one else was around.
“But you’d be the best if you did.”
I rolled my eyes. “So much for honesty in a relationship.”
“Hey, honesty can be overrated.” Liz stepped closer, getting in Zach’s face until he let go of me so she could give me a bone-squeezing hug. “For instance, Alex never tells me what he really thinks of my sweatpants.”
As Alex’s eyebrows danced, Jane held up a hand. “He doesn’t need to. Even Charlie says they belong at the bottom of a landfill.”
“Hey! I never said that.” Charlie, Jane’s blond cocker spaniel of a boyfriend, who was quite possibly the sweetest guy on the planet, shook his head. “I said they looked like something my grandmother wore. In the nursing home. I meant it in a good way.”
Liz slugged him anyway.
Mary, whose boyfriend Josh hadn’t been able to make the quick trip home from MIT, gave Charlie a high-five before offering me one, too. “You were even better than me on the bars. Or parallel thingies. Or whatever you call them.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
As Cat and I said it in unison, we looked at each other and grinned. I happened to glance over at Dad just then, though, and caught him with tears in his eyes. But not from allergies or anything like that. Serious tears.
Dad.
My dad.
I tilted my head, a question in my eyes, but he just shook his head and walked away.
I followed him all the way to the far side of the gym, near the exit to the parking lot.
Somewhat shockingly, no one else in my family tagged along.
“Dad?”
His back was still to me, as if he was headed out without so much as a simple “congrats,” let alone a much-needed increase in my allowance. I mean, let’s get real: all those dinners at Russo’s with Zach were costing serious money, and I still felt squeamish about a guy paying and expecting results. Even though it was Zach. Or, okay, maybe because I knew he was saving up for a new bass guitar.
Just when I thought Dad was going to walk out on my big night, he turned and faced me. The tears were streaming down his cheeks now.
Clearly, he spent too much time with Mom.
“I’m . . . so proud, sweetie.”
He probably hadn’t called me “sweetie” since I was three or four, which was another clue. Of what, I wasn’t sure.
“Uh, thanks?”
“And you did it—” He swept a hand through the air, at the gym and the uneven parallels and mats and everything. “You managed to do this after everything that happened to you. After everything I did to you. After I cost you a year of your life.”
“Oh, Dad.” I actually threw my arms around him, also probably for the first time since age three or four. “Yeah, you totally did.”
He flinched. As in, the way he would if he’d just taken a mortar round to his chest.
I shrugged. I wasn’t going to lie, but I’d also moved past it. I mean, as much as I could. “But I should’ve told you how it was. What Justin did.”
And what Blake, Mr. Star Quarterback, did to me freshman year. Because Dad would’ve done something. Maybe something stupid, or possibly illegal, but he would’ve done something. And then maybe he wouldn’t be crying right now.
And maybe neither would I.
He brushed a hand roughly across his cheek, exactly the way Liz did on the rare occasions anyone caught her crying.
“I suspect it’s too late now, but I want you to know that when you looked me in the eye and told me those drugs in the Jeep weren’t yours, I believed you.” He cleared his throat and took a swipe at his other cheek. “And if I could give you back that year, I would. A thousand times over.”
I looked down at my feet, which were bare and a little cold, and then back at him. “It made me stronger.”
“It’s a strength I wouldn’t wish upon you.” He tapped my nose, maybe to distract me from the fact that he was still crying. Like, seriously crying. His yoga training was making him way too sensitive. “But, yes, you’re strong. Like Liz.”
Laughing, I flexed my mostly nonexistent bicep. “Yeah, that’s what everyone says.”
“You are.” He smiled as his flow of tears finally slowed to a trickle. “Actually, so are Jane and Mary and Cat. Each of you, in your own way, has become a strong woman, and I’m very proud.” Okay, the tears started again. His and mine. “But you may be the strongest of all.”
Stronger than Liz, our family’s fearless Amazon? Startled, I blinked, but then nudged him with my elbow. “Let’s not tell Liz, okay? She’ll put me in a headlock in the middle of the mat just to prove you wrong.”
“It’s our secret.” He held out a hand, shaking mine, before drawing me into another hug. “After all, she’d probably knock me to the mat first, and all the yoga in the world hasn’t made my back strong enough to take a blow like that.”
I laughed. “Fair enough.”
“Oh, and Lydia?”
I looked up at him—with respect, even—which was something I hadn’t done for a long time. “Yeah?”
“Tell Zach to quit worrying about me leaving him for dead in a ditch somewhere. I’d be much more creative than that.”
I nodded, knowing Dad would never actually do anything to a guy I liked. Especially one who drove a bright-orange VW Beetle just because his mom had picked it out. “I’ll let him know. Maybe.”
Laughing, we walked arm in arm back to the rest of my family and friends and Zach. And to my future.
It looked pretty freaking amazing.
About the Author
Mary Strand practiced corporate law in a large Minneapolis law firm for sixteen years until the day she set aside her pointy-toed shoes (or most of them) and escaped the land of mergers and acquisitions to write novels. The first novel she wrote, Cooper’s Folly, won Romance Writers of America’s Golden Heart award and was her debut novel.
Mary lives on a lake in Minneapolis with her husband, two cute kidlets, and a stuffed monkey named Philip. When not writing, she lives for sports, travel, guitar, dancing (badly), Cosmos, Hugh Jackman, and ill-advised adventures that offer a high probability of injury to herself and others. She writes YA, romantic comedy, and women’s fiction novels. Livin’ La Vida Bennet is the fourth and final novel in her four-book YA series, The Bennet Sisters.
You can find Mary at www.marystrand.com, follow her on Twitter or Instagram (@Mary_Strand), or “like” her on Facebook (www.facebook.com/marystrandauthor).
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Links:
Website: www.marystrand.com
; Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/M0EwH
Facebook: www.facebook.com/marystrandauthor
Twitter: http://twitter.com/Mary_Strand
Instagram: http://instagram.com/Mary_Strand
Also by Mary Strand
The Bennet Sisters Series
Book 1: Pride, Prejudice, & Push-Up Bras
Book 2: Being Mary Bennet Blows
Book 3: Cat Bennet, Queen of Nothing
Book 4: Livin' La Vida Bennet
The Bennet Sisters Boxed Set (Books 1 - 4)
Cooper’s Folly, Bell Bridge Books
