Chapter 4

The online attacks only got worse.

Someone dug up that Steve was an intern at Lottie's company, and the posts accusing him of sleeping his way up piled thousands deep.

To put an end to it once and for all, and to protect him.

That night, Lottie posted.

The picture was one of her and Steve, side by side and smiling, at the amusement park.

【He is my boyfriend. Please stop the online harassment. Don't hurt innocent people.】

The tide underneath flipped in an instant.

I became the "scheming wife," and my father became the "evil father-in-law."

A flood of private messages, curses, and doctored photos poured in on us.

I wrote out a long post and uploaded all the photos of Lottie and me from all these years.

A second before I tapped "Send," the door to the hospital room swung open.

A dull thud.

Lottie, always so proud, was on both knees now, kneeling bolt upright at the side of my bed.

"Russ."

Her eyes were rimmed red.

"I'm begging you. Delete what you wrote. Don't post it."

I stared at her in disbelief, tears spilling over:

"They're attacking my father! I'm the one they're smearing! Lottie, what is wrong with you?"

She looked away from me.

"Steve, he... he just graduated. He can't take this."

"Russ, if you post that, he's really finished."

"I'm begging you. Trade our twenty years for him this once, please? Give it some time, and I swear I'll make it up to you."

I looked down at her, kneeling there in a mess.

And I thought of freshman year, when she fought a whole crowd for me and wouldn't bend even with her face pushed into the mud.

Now she was trading twenty years of growing up together to buy my silence.

How funny.

The question nearly came out on its own: "Why?"

"I can't stand to see him suffer."

Can't stand it.

Those words went in like a knife.

She'd protected me all these years, and in the end I'd become the person she could stand to hurt.

I looked at my phone screen, at my father's photo maliciously edited into a funeral portrait, the vicious curses stacked underneath it.

I ignored her pleading and pressed Send without hesitation.

"Russ Simmons!"

Lottie shot to her feet, eyes blazing red.

"You won't rest until you've destroyed him?! How did you get so vicious!"

She threw the words at me and slammed the door, eyes still red.

The day after the harassment blew up.

My father, choked with fury and grief, suffered a sudden brain hemorrhage and closed his eyes for good.

He never even got to see the belated clarification I'd posted.

He never knew that I'd meant to spend the three years I had left taking him to all the places he'd wanted to see when he was young.

He'd said he wanted to watch the sun rise over the mountain lake, wanted to see the snow in Scandinavia, wanted to pray for a string of blessed beads for me in front of the great mountain palace temple.

I never got the chance to tell him I'd already booked all of it.

I forced my weak, sick body to hold up and handled every part of my father's funeral.

It was the first time I'd done anything without leaning on Lottie. Back then she fed me my medicine, and whatever I wanted to eat would be on the table the next day, and even when I got up in the morning she'd cover my eyes so the light wouldn't sting them...

And of all things, the first thing I learned to do without her was lose the only family I had left in this world.

The night of the wake.

I opened my phone.

Steve had posted something new on his feed.

The picture was the two of them in the snow beneath Mount Rainier, Lottie beside him holding an umbrella, smiling gently.

The caption: 【Thank you for pulling me through this.】

Right then, an unknown number sent me a video.

In the frame, my father sat in a chair across from her, his voice low and humble:

"Lottie, Russ only has these few years left. I'm begging you... just be good to him in his last days..."

By the end, his voice had begun to shake.

In the video, Lottie was silent for a long time. "I have my own difficulties."

I looked at that cold back on the screen and laughed out loud, a bleak sound, laughed until the tears ran down.

The one who'd once knelt in front of him and said, "For the rest of my life, there's only Russ," was her.

And the one now watching us get pushed into the pit of despair was her too.

I packed the last of my things and headed for the airport.

A message came in from Lottie.

【Russ, the harassment gave Steve mild depression. I have to take him away to clear his head. Once we're back in the country, I promise I'll make it all up to you and set everything right.】

I opened my settings and blocked and deleted Lottie's number, her messages, every way she had to reach me.

I stood up, walked to the security checkpoint, and looked back once at the snow falling over Riverton beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows.

That snow was coming down hard, so hard it looked like it meant to bury the whole city.

The three years I had left, I would live them for my father, and for myself.