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“No thanks, Heather,” Lisa says. “We’re good.”
Heather?
I look up at my former frenemy; her cheeks flush with embarrassment as she leaves the table.
“What’s Heather doing here?” I ask.
“She dropped out after our freshman year. She missed home.”
Good. I haven’t forgotten the way she treated me before I left, or how she said I’d spend the rest of my life trapped in Lost Hollow, serving her food until I die.
My how the tables have turned. I smile just a little.
“Don’t,” Lisa says.
“Don’t what?”
“You’re not better than her,” she reminds me. And she’s right; it could just as easily be me.
“I know,” I say.
She shakes her head and throws back another shot. “You know what? I was so worried about you…after everything that happened. But then the more that time passed, I started to wonder if you ever really cared about any of us at all or if we were just…convenient accessories that you used until you found something better.”
“Lisa, that’s not true at all.” I plead with my eyes for her to believe me. “I cared; I loved you. I still love you.”
“Then how could you do it? How could you just walk away and never come back?”
“It’s not that I don’t love you…or him or Emma or anyone else. I didn’t walk away, Lisa. I crawled. Because I didn’t know how to get back up. I kept trying, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. Not without just…cutting it all out and pretending none of it ever happened.”
“And that included me?”
I nod. “I was in so much pain, Lisa. And I knew—I could feel it in the pit of my stomach—that I’d made the wrong choice, and I couldn’t deal with it; I couldn’t cope. So I just…stepped into a life where none of it ever happened. I didn’t realize what I was doing until it was too late to undo it.”
“What are you going to do now?” she asks.
“I just want to talk to him.”
“Mel, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?” I ask. “I just…I think I need to know if there’s anything there, then I’ll really be able to move on. If he loves her, then that’s okay. I’ll be okay—I want him to be happy.”
“And what are you going to do if he tells you he wants to be with you?”
“Do you think he will?” I ask. “Do you think he still has feelings for me?”
“I wouldn’t,” she says. “But that’s not the point. If you get him, what the hell are you going to do with him? Are you going to move back to Lost Hollow and help him raise someone else’s baby?”
“I don’t—”
“Do you think Ty is going to move to San Francisco? Can you even imagine Ty in San Francisco? He still refuses to carry a cell phone; he thinks he’s too cool for it or something.”
I laugh through the tears. “Yeah, that sounds like him. He is too cool for it.”
“And on top of that, if you take him to San Francisco, you’re taking someone’s father away from him. Is that something you’re comfortable with?”
“No…”
“You say you crawled away from this place because you didn’t know how to get up. But you did it, Mel, and that in itself is admirable. It’s a fucking miracle; I don’t know if I could have done it. And look at you—you’ve done a damn good job.”
