The Search for Lily Myers ✓

02 | Exposition

Amelia was already in over her head.

Now that she was here, she wasn't sure why she'd thought she would be of much use. Even when disregarding the unfortunate reality that she was clumsy as hell (she had almost stumbled on a tree root before the parking lot was even out of sight), there was no avoiding the fact that she quite frankly just wasn't great at comforting people. It wasn't a matter of her not being empathetic—on the contrary, she probably cared a little too much about other people's emotions—but that she simply wasn't always great at expressing it. Thoughts that were eloquent inside of her head fell out of her mouth clumsily. It was no wonder that she'd chosen a career that allowed her to hide behind a computer screen.

But she didn't want to force Henry to be the one to initiate conversation, not when he was the one going through what probably felt like a living hell right now while she could just walk away from the situation in an hour or so when they were done here. Nor did she think it was a great idea to immediately start prying with too many potentially invasive questions about Lily before she got to know the person she was talking to a little bit.

"So..." she started somewhat shyly as twigs crunched under their feet. The only place she could think of to begin at was the one where they had common ground. "What were you studying at Bellevue?"

"Hmm?" he asked, not in a manner that suggested he had been ignoring her but more so that he was slightly thrown by the change of topic. "Oh, Pre-Pharm. They let you start working on classes towards your doctorate during your junior year if you want, so I just have a few more to do for that online and then I'm done."

"Wow."

"What about you?"

"Graphic Design. I worked in Tampa for a little while after graduation and came back here last fall...I was starting to miss home."

Once the words were out of her mouth, it occurred to her that Henry Caruso probably didn't really care about where she'd lived or the vague homesickness she had felt while she was gone. But if he wasn't in the mood for small talk, he was doing an excellent job at hiding it.

"I get it. I ended up moving out to Seattle after we graduated 'cause I got a job offer that was going to be really good for me—you know how it goes. But being away from my family also really sucked, and now with Lily....it has me wishing I had come home sooner."

A pang of sadness on his behalf gripped at her. "When did you move back?"

"A couple of months ago."

If she was doing her mental math right, that meant that he had been on the other side of the country for somewhere around two years. Sometimes she wished that she had stuck it out in Florida for longer than she did—being back in the same city as her parents wasn't always a good thing—but had that happened, she never would have met Colton.

Somewhere in the far back crevices of her mind, she questioned if not meeting Colton might have been a good thing, but she shoved the thought aside and diverted her attention back to Henry.

He was quiet, hands shoved into his pockets like he wasn't sure what else to do with them. But when she saw him reach up and fiddle with something by his ear, she realized that he was wearing hearing aids. They were discreet enough to go unnoticed unless one was purposefully looking for them, which gave her the odd compulsion to avert her gaze, almost as if she'd seen something that she wasn't supposed to. She didn't want to be caught staring and yet she now had a whole new slew of questions for him.

But instead of speaking on any of those—the poor guy surely didn't want to answer too much random trivia about himself when his mind was clearly elsewhere—she decided that she was ready to gently prod at the elephant in the room.