Starless Nights (Hale Brothers Series Book 2) by Kathryn Andrews

know. I guess you could say he didn’t want me to be his best friend anymore.” My heart aches and tears fill my eyes. He sees this and freezes.
    “What did you do?” he whispers out.
    “I don’t know.” And that’s the truth. I have no idea what I ever did to him to make him not want to be friends with me anymore.
    “You should ask him.”
    “Maybe.” If only it were that simple.

 
     
    TIME SLIPPED BY, and before I knew it, July was over and August had arrived. The leaves on the trees in the parks are noticeably darker, and the neighborhood slowly began to get more crowded with students returning. Charlie and I fell back into our comfortable routine as the seasons started to change. The excitement that came along with the approach of fall filled the air. With Fashion Week just around the corner, every free second that I had, I spent working on my designs to complete the collection, and desperately tried to not think of Beau.
    The morning after my conversation with Matt, I quietly said my goodbyes to Ali and Drew, and snuck out of the house without having to see Beau, Matt, or their mom. I didn’t get much sleep and most of the night I laid there thinking about the things that Matt said. If he thinks that I’m mean to Beau, do others think that too? I just don’t understand anything.
    Having nowhere to be, I ended up driving to Charlie’s parent’s house, and he welcomed me with open arms as I stepped out of the car.
    At that moment, being with him, someone who cares for me, I couldn’t help the tears as they started to fall.
    “Hey, what’s this?”
    He wrapped his hands around my face and looked in my eyes. The emotion in his voice was so sincere, I cried even harder.
    “Sweetheart, I think maybe I’ve seen you cry once in the last year. I’m kind of concerned right now, and I think it’s time you spill it and tell me truth.”
    “The truth about what?” I sniff, secretly willing him to not ask what I know he wants to know.
    He pulled back and gave me a knowing look, “Beau.”
    My shoulders fell.
    “You know you’ll feel better once you do,” he said quietly, still looking at me curiously.
    I’d never talked about Beau to anyone, not even Ali. She suspected a few things and I may have mentioned some things in passing, but we’d never had a heart to heart conversation over him. Besides, he’s her family now anyway. That made everything different.
    “Okay,” I said in defeat.
    Charlie deserved to know the truth. We’d been together—side by side—for almost a year and a half, and it seemed unfair to keep secrets. If he’d kept them from me, I’d probably feel a little hurt too. He took me by the hand, we walked around the back of his parent’s house, curled up in a large wooden swing, and I told him everything. I watched his face as he listened to every detail.
    “Leila, I hate to say this to you, but none of it adds up. Don’t shoot the messenger here, but as a third party outsider, you called him a coward, but yet you were one just as much as him. After all that time, and all those years together, you should have demanded answers from him, and only him, no one else.”
    “Probably, but it’s too late now.”
    “I don’t think so. I saw the way he looked at you the other morning in the café.”
    “How was he looking at me?”
    “Like you are the sun, the moon . . . and the stars.”
    At Charlie’s use of the word stars, my tears returned. He wrapped his arm around my shoulder and pushed off the ground with his foot. The swing rocked us and I closed my eyes.
    Charlie was right, I did feel better after telling him about Beau. The weight of all of the details of our ‘relationship’ over the years had taken its toll and it was crushing me. Along with the constant heartache, I felt like I was breaking.
    Interestingly though, since that afternoon, Charlie and I have grown closer. It wasn’t that we weren’t close before, but now he knows all of my secrets and there’s