Page 131 of All the Ugly Things
I was blowing over the rim of my coffee mug to cool it, when something caught my attention and made me turn.
An empty glass, a half-emptied bottle of some kind of alcohol was out. But also a picture frame.
I held my coffee mug to my mouth, not taking a sip. In all the times I’d been here, I’d never seen any pictures out. Hudson’s home was decorated in masculine colors for comfort, but what he’d never had out were family photos. Not even of his dad or mom. Or Brandon.
Between the drinking, his stressed-out and distant attitude, and now this… a warning alarm sounded in my head, sending a cold shiver down the back of my neck.
I hadn’t even asked how he was or what he seemed upset about when he first opened the door, all the lights off behind him. So why would he have been drinking, staring at a picture in the dark?
My feet pulled me toward that photo. Whatever was in it held the answer to all of those concerns. I knew it as surely as I knew my own name, but I took another step toward it, the prickling at my subconscious screaming at me to go slow. An entirely unpleasant sensation started at my fingertips before traveling like needles up my arms.
I picked up the picture and then turned it, in order to see the photo. My jaw fell.
“What the hell?”
Hudson was in the picture… with a woman.
At first glance, she was beautiful, with long, blonde hair and piercing dark eyes. Hudson was embracing her from behind and behind them were metal bleachers and a baseball field, but it wasn’t the location or Hudson’s wide smile I loved so much that grabbed my attention. It was their eyes.
Hers.
I’d seen those in another life.
“Holy shit.” I blinked, then two more times, hoping I could chase the image away. Surely it wasn’t. I picked up the picture to get a closer view only to have my hand holding it start to tremble.
Nooo.It couldn’t be.
But it was true. I knew those eyes. That smile. That serene expression this girl wore.
Looked right into them while I poured my heart out in prison and watched as tears, true, genuine tears had filled them right before she cried with me.
“No,” I gasped.
I wish you would have had a dad like mine.
“Oh my God.”
The photo shook in my hand. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be her. Because that would mean…
A rush of ice raced down my body, sparking goose bumps on my arms, straight to my toes. I glanced at the hallway leading to Hudson’s room. To the room where I was falling in love with a guy who’d shown me something beautiful.
Where he could take all the ugly pieces of my past, all the ugly things I’d done and had done to me, and with his help, forge something beautiful with the ashes.
And he’dlied.
This entire time.
He let me cry on his shoulder and in his arms while I told himeverything.
Things I’d only told this woman before. And he’dknown—so much more than he ever let on.
The sound of a door clicking shut made me whip my head in that direction and Hudson was suddenly there, frozen at the entrance to his hallway while I gaped at him.
“Who is this?”
He didn’t take his eyes off me to bother glancing at the picture still shaking in my hands. “Lilly—”
“You know her?!”
