Page 15 of The Shot You Missed
Blowing out a breath, I rake a hand through my hair. “Look…” I stare at her, waiting for her to tell me her name.
“Lola.” She sighs. “Indie’s best friend.”
I used to be her best friend.
“Lola, I’ve been trying to find her for ten years. I know you don’t know me, and you have no reason to trust me, but I?—”
“I don’t know you, but I know all about you.”
Griffin’s eyebrows rise to his hairline. He shoots me a look that says exactly what I’m thinking.
She knows all about me?
Inhaling through my nose, I try to sound calm and unaffected when I say, “And what, exactly, has Indie said about me?”
“Oh.” Her deer-in-the-headlights look would be hilarious if I didn’t suspect she was making it because the things she’d been told were less than flattering.
Because, of course, Indie didn’t have good things to say about me. How could she, when she ended a years-long friendship without so much as a conversation? Obviously, I did something wrong. Or she finally realized I wasn’t on her level. She was a movie star’s daughter, and I was solidly middle class with the odds stacked against me ever achieving my dreams. I’ve workedhard to be someone worthy of her over the last ten years, but that doesn’t change the fact that she apparently found me wanting that summer. Or her parents did.
“Look, Lola, I’ve been trying to get ahold of Indie since we were eighteen. Please, I just want to talk to her.”
Maybe it’s the desperation dripping from each word, or the fact that I have my hands clasped in front of me in supplication, but Lola wavers.
“Bash is one of the best men I know,” Griffin says, clapping me on the back. “I promise he won’t be a creep or anything.”
Lola deflates as she levels me with a pitying expression. “I’m sure he wouldn’t be, but I still can’t do it. I’m a girl’s girl. If Indie wanted you to have her number, you would. Even if I think she’s being dumb.”
Panic claws at my throat. This is the closest I’ve come to talking to Indie in a decade, and I can’t let this chance pass me by. “Please, Lola. Can you… Can you at least ask her to call me? My number is the same as it was ten years ago. I can write it down for you.” I frantically search my pockets for a pen, even though I know I don’t have one. “Fuck. Griff, do you have a pen?”
“Sorry, man, no.”
“I have one,” Lola says, sighing. She fishes around in her purse and pulls out a pink pen and a receipt. “Here.”
“Thank you.” I write my name and number in the most legible handwriting I can manage, despite the pen tip poking through the receipt multiple times. “Please tell her she can call me anytime, day or night, and I’ll answer. Tell her I miss her. I’ve missed her every day for the last decade.”
Lola’s smile is rueful, and I hate how it flays me open. All the confusion and hurt, all the vulnerability I’ve struggled to overcome since she disappeared out of my life, comes rushing back as Indie’s best friend looks at me with sadness because she doesn’t believe Indie will use my number.
“I’ll tell her. And I’ll try my best to get her to call you, okay? No promises, but I’ll try.”
“That’s all I can ask,” I tell her. “Thank you.”
“No problem. I, uh, I should probably get going. It was nice to meet you guys. Sorry again about running into you.” Lola doesn’t wait for a response, just gives a frantic little wave and scurries toward the registers and away from us.
“You okay?” Griffin asks softly.
Am I?
“Don’t know.”
“She’s still in town.” He rubs the scruff of his jaw.
“Yeah.”
“Do you think she’ll call you?”
I think if she was going to call me, she would have done it ten years ago, so I shrug.
“Yeah. Not sure you should leave it to chance, man.”
