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You were never the kind of girl who ran away from anything.
Fuck him. Fuck him for believing I had any other option.
How dare he try to make me feel bad about the choice I’d been forced to make? There was no other option for me. Did he expect me to stay here and endure all that was coming my way?
All I felt now was regret.
Regret that I didn’t tell him precisely what I thought about his stupid opinions of me. He thought he knew me well enough to make assumptions about the kind of girl I was, but he didn’t know me well enough to know that I was beyond devastated by what happened to my friends?
Yeah. Fuck him.
Because he might not have believed I was the girl he thought I was, but it was just as clear that he wasn’t the man I thought he was, either.
The real Jesse I knew all those years ago wouldn’t have treated me the way he did today. That Jesse would have listened to me. He would have comforted me.
Mostly, he wouldn’t have made me regret coming back here.
It was on that thought that my emotions started bubbling to the surface. Anger and bitterness were fading while sadness and despair took hold.
I had nobody.
There was not a single soul on my side, except for my mother.
Coming to that realization was nothing short of devastating. On some level, I guess I knew it all along, but somewhere in the deepest corners of my mind, I had convinced myself that time would have healed some wounds. That I’d be able to come back and see Jesse and things would be okay.
I was wrong.
I was a fool.
And I should have stayed away.
At the very least, I should have pulled out of the Harper Security Ops parking lot and gotten right back on the road to somewhere else. Anywhere other than Steel Ridge.
I didn’t do that.
Instead, I drove to my mom’s house.
Somehow, despite all the heartbreak I was feeling, I successfully made it to the front door without breaking down.
But the minute that door opened, and I saw my mom’s stunned expression, I lost it. I burst into tears the moment she said my name.
And after she put her arms around me and ushered me inside, I continued to cry.
It took some time, but I finally managed to settle myself down. My mom led me into the living room, and the moment we both sat down, she asked, “Are you okay? What are you doing here?”
It was no surprise she was shocked.
I hadn’t been back here even once since I’d left. My mom had come to visit me down in Maryland, but those were the only times we saw one another.
So, I understood part of the reason why she had such an edge of disbelief in her tone. Of course, that disbelief was also mixed with loads of concern.
That’s where I was stuck.
If my encounter with Jesse had gone better than it had, I might have been more willing to share the full truth about what I was doing here.
But now, I wasn’t so sure that was a wise idea. My mom didn’t know Jesse very well, but she had met him once when we were both still in high school. I’d introduced him at that point as Faye’s cousin.
Of course, I’d gotten those letters from him when he was off at boot camp to become a Marine. She never said she suspected anything was going on between us, but that might have been because I insisted we were just friends.
