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“I don’t know,” I tell him honestly. I really hadn’t thought much about this part. I didn’t know it would just happen like this—that it’d fall in my lap less than twenty-four hours later and leave me with only days to decide when application deadlines were months ago.
“Hi, Mom,” Emma says, coming in from the backyard. “What’s going on?”
“Your sister’s going to college like I told you. She got a scholarship.”
A scholarship? That’s what we’re going to call it?
“I brought you some mac 'n cheese, Emma. Why don’t we go eat out on the back porch? It’s hotter in here than it is out there today.”
“Okay,” Emma says, then follows her back out the screen door.
“Baby?” Ty says.
“It’s a lot to um…I need to process this,” I say
He sighs, leans back on the sofa, and stares up at the ceiling. “Okay.”
“Is it?” I ask. “Would it be okay if I did go?”
“Mel, I’m not sure what to say right now. I am trying really hard to be okay, but so much of this is not fucking okay at all, and that is not your fault. So…I’m just going to say that I love you, and I’m going to go to work now…before I say something stupid. I’ll come over when I finish.”
He kisses me on the forehead and leaves, slamming the front door a little harder than necessary.
Alone, I stare at the paperwork in my hand, trying to picture myself packing up and leaving for California this weekend, just like I always wanted.
But I never wanted any of this at all.
The screen door slamming closed snaps me out of my haze. “Your little bonfire made quite the mess in the backyard,” my mom says.
“I’m not going to apologize for that.”
“Well, you never do. I didn’t expect you to start now.”
I roll my eyes and continue flipping through the packet, looking at the perfect, happy people—the shiny buildings. I bet things like this don’t happen to them.
“He’s right, you know,” Mom tells me. “You don’t have to go, but you won’t get another chance like this either.”
“Forgive me, but I’m having a difficult time seeing this as an opportunity.”
“But that’s what it is, isn’t it? This is what you wanted—”
“This is not what I wanted,” I snap.
“You know what I mean. You want to get out of Lost Hollow, right? You want to move to the city, you want to go to college? You want a career—you don’t want to struggle like we have. That’s what you want?”
I refuse to give her the satisfaction of answering in the affirmative even though, yes, that is exactly what I want.
“You want your own family, and you want that family to have a different life. You want to succeed where you think I’ve failed.”
“Yes,” I tell her.
“Then you should go,” she says. “Whether you want to believe it or not, Amelia, I have always wanted what was best for you. If you stay, you’ll have a home here, but you know what your life will look like—it’ll look just like this. And if that isn’t enough to convince you, then if you stay, you’ll stay with him, too, until he’s done with whatever he’s doing. And it’s a small town, baby girl; you know how small it is. Are you prepared to see him on the streets or sitting across from you at our restaurants and bars? To run into him at the lake with friends? For whatever people decide to say about what happened, knowing that those papers you signed means you can never tell them the truth?”
I swallow hard. That was an angle I hadn’t considered. I’d been so focused on the house—on getting away from the scene of the crime and erasing that staircase from my mind—that I hadn’t considered that I wouldn’t be able to get away from the person who did this to me.
I hadn’t considered that maybe he really would be there—in the café or wherever I ended up—and I’d be stuck pouring his coffee with a smile to keep my fiancé out of jail.
“I’m going to my room,” I tell her.
