Storm Warning

She's not there when Jeff gets back. As soon as he jumps off the boat and hits the wooden dock, he heads back up to the house to look for Lyla but he can't find her anywhere. He asks around, even seeks out his sisters to find out if they've seen her lately, but nobody seems to know where she is. Mia stops him on his way across the backyard to try to coax him into going swimming with her but he brushes her off to continue his search. It's not until he pulls his phone out of his pocket to call her that he sees the text from his brother.

just dropped lyla back @ your house. seemed upset. you should prob check on that

Immediately he's worried that he's done something wrong. Maybe she wasn't okay with him going with his friends, leaving her with people she didn't know. She'd barely even met Ben and yet she'd asked him for a ride just so she could get out of there. She must have been desperate to leave. He quickly responds to his brother's message, asking him to give their sisters a ride back to the house later, and then he takes off toward his car, not even bothering to tell anyone else that he's leaving.

The cottage is completely quiet when he walks in the front door but the bedroom door is closed now when it had been left open that morning so he's pretty sure she's in there. He knocks softly on the door before he opens it and Lyla's head pops up from the pillow at the noise. When she sees him standing in the doorway, she slides up the bed to sit with her back against the headboard, drawing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms tightly around them. Jeff shuts the door behind him and walks over to cautiously sit next to her, leaning his back against the headboard and stretching his legs out in front of him. They sit there in silence for a few moments, Jeff carefully scrutinizing the side of her face, but she just drops her eyes to the small smattering of freckles above her knee instead of returning his gaze. It's so quiet that they can hear the rustling of the trees outside caused by the cool night breeze.

"It was a car accident in Nice in 2013."

His brows furrow at the sudden break of the silence and what seems like nonsense without any sort of context. "W-what?" he asks in confusion.

"Some tourists who didn't know the streets well-- they hit her head on. That was April 15th." Lyla still doesn't look at him. "My father couldn't live there any longer after that so we moved to the States, back to Seattle where they were from. He wasn't the same after. He missed her so much that he couldn't function anymore. He got really sick and had to be admitted to the hospital only a few weeks after we arrived. I didn't know what to do, how to help him. He just got worse every day he was in there and by the end of the week-....that was it. It was over. The doctors told me his heart just....stopped beating. That was on May 31st."

Jeff just stares at her, both in shock and in sympathy. He isn't sure where this topic of conversation suddenly came from or why she's telling him all this but he feels sorry for her because this story is already terrible.

"My parents were only twenty-three years old when I was born but there were a lot of complications so I ended up being their only opportunity for a child. They wanted a big family, six or eight kids, but things just didn't work out that way for them."

Still, Lyla just focuses on her lap even though she can feel Jeff's gaze burning into her skin. Her voice shakes, betraying the emotions she's struggling to keep from showing. She knows she's kind of dumping a huge load of information onto him out of nowhere but she's just trying to get through it without breaking down.

"My mother grew up in foster care, never knowing who her real parents were or if she had any siblings. My father was an only child. His father passed away from a heart attack when he was barely a teenager and his mother died of breast cancer shortly after my parents were married. Since he was the only child and living relative, my father inherited their entire fortune. My parents sold everything material then decided to start traveling and that continued until the day they died. After that, the rest of the money was left to me."

"Not-....not that I'm complaining," Jeff says carefully. "But why are you telling me this?"

A valid question, she says to herself, and then to him, "I have money of my own, Jeff. More than I could ever spend in a lifetime. I'm not here because of your salary."

"W-what? I'm not-....I don't think-....Who said you were?"

"No one," she says dismissively.

"Someone at the party? That's why you left, isn't it? Who was it?"

He's quickly becoming angrier than she's ever seen him and that's saying a lot, considering she's watched the infamous video of him and Patrice Bergeron. This wasn't her intention, to make him mad at his friends, so she shakes her head and reaches over to grab his hand. "It's not important."

"Yes, it is, Lyla. Tell me who it was. Who said that to you?"

"No one said it to me," she replies softly. "They said it in front of me but I guess since they were speaking French, they didn't think I could understand them."

"You've got a fucking French accent. How could they not know you speak the language?" He's still angry and she knows it's a rhetorical question so she says nothing in response, instead softly stroking her thumb over his. "I'm going back over there."

He's up off the bed before she even realizes he's let go of her hand.

"Jeff, please," she says quietly, causing him to freeze on the spot and turn back to look at her. She leans over and reaches for his hand again, pulling him back to sit next to her on the bed. "I don't care what they think. I care what you think. Do you think I'm some shady, lying gold digger?"

"Of course not."

"Then that's all that matters to me." He immediately tries to protest but she cuts him off. "I don't want you to be mad at your friends. That's not why I told you all this. I told you because I didn't want you to think I was hiding something. From the first conversations that we had, you've been completely open with me and I wasn't with you. I was closed off about my family, but not because I was trying to be secretive. I'm glad they're together now but it always hurts me to talk about them. They were all I ever had and when I lost them-....They're a huge part of me and if you were going to be in my life, it wasn't fair for you not to know about them."

Jeff nods slowly like he's still unsure about the whole thing but at least he's calmed his anger for now. He slips his arm around her and gently rubs her back. "Thanks for telling me."

"C'mon," she says, sliding back down the bed to be level with her pillow again. "Lie down with me."

He kicks off his flip flops and turns off the overhead light in favor of the bedside lamp before getting resituated on the bed and once he's settled and become still, Lyla scoots over to curl herself into his side, resting her head on his shoulder and her hand on his chest. The steady rise and fall of his breathing is almost enough to lull her to sleep but just before she does, his voice breaks the silence and her eyes pop back open, suddenly alert.

"Lyla?"

"Hmm?"

"Exactly how many languages do you speak?"

She cracks a smile at that. "A few."

"At least a few. I already know Swedish, English, and obviously French. What else is there?"

"Well, I've lived in a lot of different places. My parents always wanted to make sure we were getting the full experience of living in those places so we would all learn the new language when we moved. The only trouble was once we moved to a new place, we would stop using the previous languages and go on to the new one so I'm pretty rusty with a lot of them."

"And those are?"

"The ones I remember the most of are Spanish and Italian. I didn't really enjoy learning Greek even though I loved living there. German was fun but I've probably forgotten a lot of it now. I was pretty good with Russian but I didn't consider myself fluent because I could only really have a conversation, not read or write it. We only lived there for six months."

"So lemme get this straight. Not only do you know English, Swedish, and French, but also Spanish, Italian, German, Greek, and Russian?"

"Currently I don't. I wouldn't be comfortable speaking German to someone now that it's been almost six years since I used it. I purged my brain of all the Greek once we left Santorini. And I could speak Russian but that's not 'knowing' the language completely. I've used French the most and English most recently, but Swedish was always my favorite."

"You must be like a genius or something."

"Not at all," she laughs. "Languages are just kind of my thing. I always enjoyed learning them because I thought it was pretty cool that I could talk to so many different people. I worked really hard on them, spent most of my time on them actually, and my other subjects in school suffered. Well, not history really because with all the moving, I was constantly immersed in new cultures, new histories, new worlds, so I was pretty intensely into my history classes too. But I'm a complete idiot in math."

"Still, you have to admit, it's pretty impressive."

"Not nearly as impressive as it would be if I could actually maintain them all."

He makes a noncommittal noise like he disagrees but isn't going to argue and then turns his head to look down at her. He allows himself a moment to study her face-- her long lashes fanned out over her the tops of her cheeks with her eyes closed, the two lone freckles next to her nose, the ghost of a smile on her full lips. "Tell me about it," he says quietly.

Lyla opens her eyes and lifts her head from his shoulder to look at him. "About what?"

"Your life. Living in all those different places."

"What would you like to know?"

"Anything," he shrugs. "Where'd you get this?"

He lifts her arm up from his chest and carefully runs his fingertips down the jagged silvery scar that stretches from the outer side of her wrist nearly all the way to her elbow. "We were living in Greece at the time," she says, twisting her arm around to examine the scar herself before she lays her head back down against his shoulder. "It was my seventeenth birthday. We had this big barbecue at the house with all our neighbors and friends and then later that afternoon while the adults were occupied, all of us teenagers decided we were gonna go cliff jumping. It wasn't the usual place we went, it was this new spot one of the boys had found, and they let me go first since it was my birthday. My friend and I jumped together but I jumped further to the right than she did and I hit rocks. I was bleeding a lot, everyone was freaking out. Ended up getting twenty-three stitches. My mother was never more angry in her life than that day."

She raises her hand from where it's back resting on his chest and holds it up, showing off the little white splotchy scar in the fleshy part between her thumb and index finger. "This one I got when we were living in Italy."

"Sounds like you're pretty accident prone, eh?"

"Shut up," she laughs. "Those are the only two."

"What happened with this one?" he asks, grabbing her hand with his free one and running his fingers over the scar there, just like he did with the one on her arm.

"We lived right on the outskirts of this little village in Tuscany. There was this old lady who lived in the village by herself but she had like nine kids who were all married with kids of their own, and they'd all come visit and have dinner with her every Saturday night. I used to ride my bike into the village early those mornings and just sit there with her in the kitchen watching her cook all day. Eventually, she started letting me help and the very first time, I got burned. I grabbed onto a pot handle, not realizing that because it was iron, it would be just as hot as the pot itself. I was only eleven though so I guess I can blame it on that at least a little bit. Now every time I look at my hand and see this little scar, I think of Signora Rossi and all the secret family recipes she shared with me. Stuff she didn't even tell her children."

"I bet you can make a pretty good dinner then."

"I maybe could whip up a little something for you," she says playfully.

"I'd like that," he agrees. "So tell me something else."

"That's it, that's all my injuries. What else would you like to know?"

"I don't know. Tell me something about Germany."

"Germany," she repeats and then takes a moment to think about it for a moment. "Well, I had my first kiss in Germany. It was this boy who lived on my street. We would walk home from school together in the afternoons but one day instead of going straight home, we went down to the creek that ran through the little woods behind our houses and he kissed me. I was fourteen."

He knows it's stupid but he's a little jealous hearing that one so instead of lingering any longer on it, he asks her about Spain. She immediately begins telling him a story about how she learned how to swim in the Balearic Sea when she was eight years old and they were living in Barcelona and he hangs on her every word. Every time he asks her a question, she has a story to go along with it and he just keeps asking because he could listen to her talk forever. It eventually comes to the point where she can't get through a story without yawning and Jeff takes that as his cue to reach over and turn off the lamp. She leans up to press her lips to his before she settles back into his side, throwing her arm around his waist and she's asleep almost as soon as her head meets his chest.

--

Waking up alone isn't something she really expected after the hours of talking they did the night before, but when she hears clanging around in the kitchen, she figures he just must've already gotten up to make breakfast or something. She drags herself out of bed and over to her bag to get some clothes for the day and then changes out of her pajamas before leaving the bedroom. It's not Jeff in the kitchen though. Erica is standing at the stove loading her plate with eggs and Jillian is sitting at the bar already eating but their brother is nowhere to be seen.

"Morning," Erica greets as she walks around the counter to take a seat next to Jillian.

"Morning," Lyla replies. "Where's Jeff?"

The two sisters exchange glances before they go back to eating without answering and Lyla's pretty sure she knows what that means. She sighs and rakes a hand through her hair, which had dried into a wild wavy mess after her shower the night before. "Don't be mad," Erica says. "He told us what happened and that you asked him not to say anything to his friends, but he couldn't not. You're really important to him, Lyla, and he just....wanted to make sure they knew that."

That makes her heart rate accelerate a little bit but she nods her head anyway, pushing past that last comment. "How did he even know who it was?"

"He only has those three or four friends who speak French so...."

"Oh." Lyla frowns to herself as she looks away from the two girls but then she spots two duffel bags sitting in the doorway of their room a few feet down the hall from where she's standing. "Are you leaving?"

Jillian sips on her orange juice and grins. "Yeah, we're getting out of your hair."

"What? No, you guys-"

"You flew all the way up here to see him. You guys should spend some time together without us being right there every second. We're gonna go stay with some friends a few blocks down so we'll still be close if you want to hang out, but we're not going to be all up in your business."

"You really don't have to."

"Lyles, we're not stupid. We know you guys want some alone time."

"Oh," she mumbles, blushing a little. "No, it's not, um-...."

"You guys haven't yet?"

Lyla is almost a little offended at how surprised Erica sounds. "No. We've only known each other for four months. Besides, I don't know if you've noticed, but your brother is not the most forward of boys."

"Yeah, but, I mean, he likes you so much though. I just figured...."

The sound of a car door shutting outside gets all of their attention and when the front door opens, Lyla looks up to see Jeff walking in. He knows he's busted because he looks a little guilty as he makes his way down the short hall to where she's standing by the counter. Erica and Jillian go back to eating their breakfasts like they hadn't just been talking about their brother's sex life and Jeff walks over to her, sliding his arm around her shoulders. "You haven't been up long, have you?"

"Not long, no."

"So you haven't eaten breakfast yet?"

"Nope, I was about to but-"

"Good. C'mon, I wanna take you somewhere."

He retracts his arm so that he can reach down and grab her hand and then he's waving goodbye to his sisters as he pulls her back down the hall with him toward the front door.