All Chapters of You Were Only Passing Through: Chapter 1 - Chapter 7

The whole hall went dead quiet.Panic finally hit the faces around us, and the crowd started to churn."God, she's not actually doing this, is she?""Where's her phone? Somebody call an ambulance."Ryan's whole face changed. He just stood there staring at me.It took a hard cough out of me to bring him back, and then he started walking my way."Alessia, don't scare me."He was almost to me when Brooke laughed again."Oh, that's good. That is really good acting."She got in front of him, opened her phone, and pulled up a form."I had someone look into it ahead of time. This is Alessia's health screening from this semester."Look at the internal medicine line. Heart and lung auscultation, no abnormality."She tilted her head at me, and there was something sly behind it."Alessia, if you really took a bullet to the heart and spent ten hours in the ICU, you're telling me a physical wouldn't catch that?"Ryan stopped moving.His eyes went from my bloodless face down to the re

The whole hall went dead silent.Nobody moved. Ryan was staring at the crest on my father's lapel.Gold. An olive branch wrapped around a scepter. The Bellandi crest.If you knew what it meant, nobody had to tell you what the man wearing it could do.My father's eyes came off me and settled on the half-length of torn silk in Brooke's hand."You tore that?"Brooke took a step back, caught her heel on the step, and nearly went over."It wasn't me. I didn't.""I'll ask you one more time. Did you tear my daughter's dress?"He didn't raise his voice. It went in slow, like a knife dipped in poison, and stopped at her throat.Brooke went white and couldn't get a single word out.Ryan pulled in a breath, stepped up, and put her behind him."Sir. Don Bellandi. I'm Ryan, Alessia's boyfriend."I think there's been a misunderstanding tonight."My father looked at the two of them pressed together and laughed, low and cold."A misunderstanding."You tell me you're my daughter's boyfr

The day Brooke came to apologize, she came with a production.Her father drove her himself. A silver Mercedes pulled up at the gate with the trunk stuffed full of gifts.He was in a good suit with his hair combed flat, but the collar of his shirt was ringed with sweat.Brooke came in behind him in a plain dress, wearing so little makeup you could barely see it.Nothing like the girl I remembered standing in the middle of that hall with her arms folded, laughing.She caught sight of me the moment she came through the door and her whole body flinched.I'd changed into a high-necked velvet gown with my hair up, my face completely uncovered.The collar hid the pacing patch. All you could see was one thin lead running along my collarbone.Her father bent almost double, his voice shaking."Miss Bellandi."I've brought my daughter to apologize to you. What happened that night was ignorance on her part, and our whole family accepts the blame."He tugged Brooke's sleeve and she dropp