KEEP DRIVING - H.S

Chapter 68

April 3 2023, Cancún

"HORCHATA IS BETTER THAN JAMAICA!" Alliah protested, slapping her hand against the table.

Harry shook his head. "It's too sweet."

Alliah gasped, placing a hand over her chest. "Traitor. That's it. Engagement over."

"'Kay," Harry answered, casually sipping his iced tea.

Maria, Alliah's mom laughed as she watched the two interact. "Now, Alita, everyone's allowed their own opinions... their own wrong opinions."

Alliah snorted with laughter at Harry's bewildered expression.

"Okay, now I see where Alliah gets her sassyness from," Harry spoke, chuckling as he did.

Mom's phone rang, and she looked at the contact. "Sorry, I have to take this." Walking into the next room, she answered, "Bueno?"

Harry sighed, a soft smile on his face as he looked out the balcony. "This place is beautiful."

"It is, isn't it?" Alliah agreed, looking out to the waves crashing along the sand.

Her mom had bought this place almost five years ago, a little while after Alliah moved to LA.

Since then, Alliah had very rarely been able to visit the beautiful beach house, always stuck in LA for work or opting to stay away for her own sanity.

The house was right on the beach, the balcony they were sitting on had a few steps you went down before reaching the sand. Even though the beach was technically public, it was always quiet and reserved here. And the water was crystalline, a radiant blue that matched Harry's shirt.

Harry looked exquisite in this lighting, the sun hitting his face, making his skin glow and his green eyes glimmer.

"Is that your dad?" Harry softly prompted, pointing at the picture frame on the coffee table. "He looked so young."

"Yeah, that's my dad," Alliah confirmed, as Harry gently picked the picture up. "He was thirty-nine in that picture. It was actually one of the last ones we ever took as a family."

Back when the four of them used to be a normal, happy family. Even back then, things were bad between Alliah and Lucy, but they'd been a pretty happy family nonetheless.

The four were standing on a beach, all of them with eyes squinted in the glaring sun, but looking picture perfect nonetheless.

"You don't talk about your dad much," Harry commented delicately, scanning her face for her reaction.

Alliah shrugged, playing with the strap of her swimsuit. "It's hard to talk about. I loved my dad a lot, and he kept the family glued together. When he died... it was hard on all of us."

Alliah remembered that day like it was yesterday. She sixteen and was out ice skating with Katie at the mall, in the middle of the summer because the heat was too much to bear. It had seemed like a normal day until Alliah got out of the ring, grabbing her phone from the locker and finding dozens of missed calls from her mom and sister.

It had been Katie's mom who drove Alliah to the hospital and waited with her as her own mom was glued to her father's side.

The moment her mom stepped out through the double doors, shaking and trembling as she sobbed, escorted by a nurse. That was the moment their family shattered into a thousand pieces.