Chapter 26

26

It's Friday night, so I should be doing something fun and exciting. I should be out at a club with my friends, sipping cocktails while I flaunt my ID to a bartender, having a good time and enjoying the summer before I have to go back to college.

But the last year hasn't offered up any evidence that I enjoy clubs, so I made some excuses to avoid a big night out with everybody. Plus, they're still hung up on the exciting reveal of who my mom is, and I don't think I can stomach another round of questions about her. When I check Instagram Stories and see some of the other interns having a fun night in a dark place with flashing lights and packed with sweaty, shouting bodies, I'm relieved I'm not there having to pretend I'm having a better time than I actually am.

Instead, I'm in a place that's much more comfortable.

When it's empty like this at night, the Arrowmile offices remind me a bit of the library at college. Sometimes I stayed late to prep for an exam or test, but most of the time I went just so I didn't have to deal with the party girls I lived with. Between nine o'clock at night and around two in the morning, when I'd normally end up there, it was always almost empty, with just a few other lone souls or insomniacs wandering the stacks or settled down in a booth with their feet up and earbuds in. There was a camaraderie between those of us in the library that late, even if we never spoke and rarely made eye contact.

Once or twice, I fantasized that I'd see a cute boy there, and we'd meet each other's gaze and smile, and share a little moment, and then maybe after a few more times of seeing each other around we'd start a conversation, and he'd be someone like me, someone who understood me, and it'd be a sweet, romantic connection that would spark a real relationship.

Those kinds of daydreams only existed in my most exhausted and sleep-deprived moments, though. More actual dreams than daydreams, really.

I must be in a similar state tonight to be thinking about it and to find myself drifting away from my desk and the work I've somehow let pile up again. It really is never-ending; I don't know how anybody here does it.

I head for the lift, empty mug in hand. When the doors open and I step out onto the twelfth floor, my eyes are already seekinghim.

And he's there.

Somehow, I knew he would be.

Tonight, unlike the last time our paths crossed late at night in the office, the lights are on. Lloyd's in the kitchenette, filling the kettle. He doesn't seem to have heard the sound of the lift or noticed my arrival, but when I hesitate, suddenly not sure what to say or do or why I even came up here looking for him, he looks over.

He looks…not pleased to see me.

To put it lightly.

A frown settles on his face and a muscle ticks in his jaw.

But at least he doesn't tell me to go away. Instead, he sighs, like he was almost expecting this too, and adds some more water to the kettle, then gestures for me to set my empty mug beside his on the counter.

His outfit today is a little more casual than usual, a lightweight blue flannel over a white T-shirt. The sleeves are rolled up again, but now they're lopsided, one of them coming loose. A stray curl falls over his forehead; he's wearing his glasses again. There are bags under his eyes, a weariness to the slope of his shoulders. He looks as exhausted as I feel.

For perhaps the first time, I'm not sure what to say to Lloyd. I've never been short of words with him before. But now, I replay our last interaction—the look in his eyes and the venom in his voice when he called me a hypocrite—and I can't find it in me to demand an apology. I think he was probably right.

Lloyd takes a deep breath, and relief washes over me. Thank God, he's going to speak first.

"So, your mom."

But then he doesn't say anything else.

"That sounds like the start of a bad joke, Fletcher."

A smirk flits across his face. It's quickly replaced by his more serious frown, and a heaviness settles on my chest, pressing down on my lungs.

"How was lunch the other day?" he asks instead, as the kettle finishes boiling.

"Oh. Fine. Thanks."

He pauses pouring the tea for a moment, but it's so brief I wonder if I imagined it.

And suddenly I want to tell him everything. I want to spill it all: how horrible lunch was and that I felt press-ganged into it, that I told my mom what I really thought and still feel a bit sick about it, how she spoke down to me and that she's apparently been getting my life story from my dad when she couldn't get it from me, but I don't want to confront my dad and end up in a fight with him, too. I want to tell Lloyd the gory, grimy truth in the way we've done with each other before.

But there's something off between us tonight, a distance I created by saying I couldn't date him, and I swallow the words back down.

Lloyd pushes my mug toward me. He takes a step back, like whatever is between us right now requires physical space, too. If anything, it just makes my chest feel a little tighter.

He lifts his cup of tea to his lips to blow the steam off it, and eyes me over the top of it, almost warily.

"You're not here to tell me off for calling you a hypocrite,then?"

He's right. This is where I push back with a sharp, haughty retort because I think I have the moral high ground and he, with his generous humor, teases me for it.

What I should do is say sorry. Regardless of my mom's career—all those comments I've made about Lloyd throughout the summer have probably been needling at him the entire time. He's just been too nice and too easygoing to call me out or tell me it bothers him.

But instead all I can do is mumble, "I'm not a hypocrite."

Before, I was scared that people at Arrowmile would judge me for being too closely associated with Lloyd. That's how I feel now: terrified that my mom will tarnish whatever Lloyd thinks of me.

"I never lied to you about my mom," I tell him. "I told you we don't have a relationship. She's never done anything for me, not even paid for a school trip. She's practically a stranger. Most of what I know about her is stuff anybody could read online. Do you have any idea how sad that is? That I only know what my mom's up to if someone reports it in the Sunday Times or updates her Wikipedia page?"

He doesn't answer, and I don't really know what I expected him to say anyway.

Then I make the mistake of saying, "At least your dad wants you around and wants you to be involved."

Lloyd scowls, glaring at me. Knowing that I've said the wrong thing should make me feel sympathetic, but this isn't like all the other nights we've spent together. This is twisted, tense, and agitated; we're on a crumbling precipice that threatens to send us spiraling the second one of us puts a foot wrong.

Which, it seems, I just did.

"Oh, right, because that's such a fucking gift," he snaps, with a venom I wasn't expecting. "Always living in his shadow. Always being expected to be more like him, and never living up to expectations, never doing anything right. You act like I've got it made because of him, but it's a poisoned chalice. You have no idea…."

He's never been this up-front about his dad or being at Arrowmile, and I take a stab in the dark. "Is it about your college course? How you stepped up to follow in your dad's footsteps so that Will didn't have to?"

Lloyd flinches. "How'd you—? Fuck. Will. He had no right to tell you about that."

"I didn't ask him to."

"It's none of your business. And whatever you think you know…" He shakes his head. "You don't understand anything about it. All right?"

"So tell me! Make me understand."

But Lloyd refuses, gritting his teeth. He sets his tea down and leans against the counter, shoulders hunched, hands balled so tightly into fists that his arms are taut with the strain. I want to reach out and stroke his arms, hold him until he relaxes. But I forfeited any right to do that when I broke things off, so instead all I can do is try to reach for whatever parts of himself he's trying to bury, that are making him feel like this now.

"You can't be mad at me for not telling you something, then do the same thing to me and be mad I don't know what you're hiding," I tell him. "I'm trying to understand. I'm not the only one putting up walls and keeping people at arm's length, you know. I mean, you won't even tell me what you actually do here—or what's so important that you stay so late on a Friday night. You act like everything's always so great but never actually feel anything real— just like you said your dad does."

I must have hit a nerve, because the scowl is back, as quick as his smile usually is.

"Would you stop already?" he says, and this time his voice isn't angry or upset. It's steady and even and…cold, in a way that it usually isn't. He straightens up and runs a hand through his hair. His eyes burn like a forest fire when they catch mine again.

"I didn't—"

This isn't how I wanted the conversation to go. I just wanted him to know I hadn't lied to him. I thought he'd understand. I thought…he knew me well enough to understand. And I thought if I could just understand him better, we could fix this. Be friends again. But my words aren't coming out right, and I just keep making it worse.

"You act like you're so above it all. Annalise Sherwood, working hard but never hardly working. She earns everything she gets. She's worked for it in a way that puts everybody else to shame." His words fill the space between us, bloated and poisonous, twisting my stomach into knots. "You've made enough comments about me having everything so easy because of my dad—being the ‘golden boy,' right? But what about you? Like you're any better, with your ‘She-EO' mom? Looked like she was pretty happy to see you the other day. Wants you around, wants you involved. And you don't think that makes you a hypocrite? You don't get to lord it over me like that when you're exactly the same. The next generation of the company. Right?"

He sneers, and it fractures something in the remnants of my heartbreak from last week.

I didn't think Lloyd was even capable of sneering. Of looking so intentionally nasty.

The worst part is knowing I've brought that out in him.

He scoffs, a soft, breathy noise of resentment. He shakes his head again, eyes focused on some point on the floor now. "All that stuff you said," he mutters, mostly to himself, "about why you wanted this internship so badly, why you're giving it everything…It was all just…"

He trails off, pulling a face like it pains him to have to say it out loud, to have to confront a horrible new reality of who I am, who he now believes I've been all along.

All those times I looked at him and wondered where the boy from the riverside was and had to play dot-to-dot to connect the different versions of him as I uncovered new secrets, new quirks…Now, I realize, he's doing the same thing with me.

It bruises, knocks the air out of my lungs for a moment.

For all the irresistible connection I've felt to Lloyd, all the times I couldn't help but be drawn in or had to fight to keep him at arm's length, he's never felt more impossible to reach than rightnow.

Too taken aback by how badly this conversation has gone to think straight, I blurt out the first—the only—thing that comes to mind.

"You think we're the same?" I snap. "We're not. I meant what I said, Fletcher. I'm doing this to give myself the best future, to open doors, so I don't have to be like my mom."

Lloyd looks up, meeting my eyes again at last. There's no anger in his eyes this time, no impetuousness or darkness. They are clear, and weary. His shoulders slump, all the fight leaving him as he exhales quietly, calmly.

Whatever thoughts just passed through his mind, they've given him the clarity he needed to connect the dots between the version of me he knew and the stranger he sees in front of him right now. I see the understanding, the resignation on his face, and it's frightening.

I don't want to be this person. I don't want to be the girl who snaps at him in the middle of the night in an empty office, all teeth and snarl, with no care or compassion. I don't want to be this angry, feral thing.

I want to be the person he's seen in me before. The one eating cake late into the night, the one who found herself in his touch, who lost herself tangled up with him. I want to be the girl who walked on air through a strange city with a cute boy beneath a starless sky, eating gravy-smothered chips and swapping secrets like they weren't such precious, fragile, perilous things.

"So you don't throw anybody under the bus," he says slowly, remembering what I said last time we were here—the last time I talked to him about my mom. "Stomp all over them on your way to the top."

And something in his face hardens, a hurt that seeps into a small, soft smile on a mouth I kissed, when I was that other girl, and I suddenly realize something, too.

"Annalise," he tells me, before I can beg him not to, "that's exactly what you did to me."