“What did she do?”

“She gave me a photo album. I didn’t want to take it, but she shoved it in my arms and left.” I stopped drawing for a second. “The photo album had pictures of Ryan, Luke, and Ethan seated around a bonfire. Tents were behind them. They held beer bottles. And several girls, wearing only bikinis, were sprawled over them.”

“Oh shit.”

“The pictures changed location. The edge of a lake, beside a tree, the bed of a truck, in a canoe, but they were always there. The guys and the girls. The last one, though, the last one killed me. It was Caryn, lying on what looked like a mattress inside a tent. And Ryan was beside her.”

“Oh shit,” Kristin said again. “That must have been terrible.”

I nodded to my empty room. I remembered it as if it were yesterday. I had dropped the album as if it had burned me. I couldn’t believe what Ryan had done to me, and I couldn’t believe I had fallen for him. I knew him. I knew he wasn’t a one-girl-only kind of guy. I knew he would never be a one-girl-only kind of guy. But he had flirted openly, earning a few joking punches from my brother. He had chased me; he had insisted and persisted for over a month. That was probably a record for him. Then after we kissed, he spent all his free time with me. I was sure he was falling for me too. Slowly, but he was. Or so I thought.

“I didn’t go to school that day, and I didn’t go home. I walked around town, avoiding places where I knew friends or family could be. I kept my mind blank, because if I thought about it, if I allowed myself to feel it, I would break down. And I didn’t want to break down.”

“I’m so sorry, Jess. I know how much it hurts to have your heart broken,” Kristin said, her tone forlorn. “After that, you left home and came to Cleveland? How did your parents allow that?”

“The story isn’t done.”

“No?”

“Nope.” I inhaled deeply, gathering strength to continue. “I went home after school hours, otherwise my mama would send the cavalry after me. I stayed buried in my bedroom until Mama knocked on my door, asking me to hurry or we would be late for the fair. I had totally forgotten about the fair in the square. She had a pie and cake stand, and I had promised I would help her with it. Instead of wallowing in my own shit, I put on a brave face and focused on the fair.” It was better than letting the panic and rage and despair take over. “Everyone in town loved her pies and cakes, so Mama had a big stand. Aunt Cadence and Lindsey had already set up by the time we got there, and the square was filling up fast. For the first half hour, we were so busy, I barely thought of Ryan and Caryn. Until Ryan appeared in front of the stand.”

“Oh crap.”

Crap indeed. “He wanted to talk, to explain. I tried getting away from him, and ended up bumping into Jason and Luke.” And I had almost punched both of them. Jason might not have been on that last fishing trip, but he knew about it. They all knew about it. “Jason and Luke noticed I was trying to get away from Ryan and wanted to know what was going on. Our little group started gathering attention from the people at the fair. Ryan started to say something like ‘after all we did, after having slept with me, you’re just gonna shut me out,’ when Papa stepped between us.” I almost went on, but I remembered Kristin didn’t know Papa.

“You see, Papa is very conservative, authoritarian, and old school. If it depended on him, I would always wear pants and baggy shirts, I wouldn’t go out until I was twenty-one, and I would marry a virgin, preferably after I was thirty-five. He also tried to control Jason, but was much less successful. To him, Jason was going through a rebellious phase. Papa hated Jason’s fascination for motorcycles, and he hated Ryan and Ethan. He thought they were bad influences.” I dropped the sketchpad in my lap. “Papa flipped out when he heard I had slept with one of those bad influences. He advanced on Ryan, but Jason and Luke stopped him, then he advanced on me. We argued in front of everyone at the fair. The anger I had been feeling toward Ryan, Jason, Luke, Caryn, and now Papa exploded, and I yelled at him, telling him he couldn’t control me. I told him that I could sleep with whomever I wanted. It was none of his business. Then he slapped me. Hard. I fell on the pavement, hitting my shoulder.”

“Oh my God.”

“The next few moments were a blur. Papa called me a slut. Ryan yelled at him, trying to disentangle himself from Jason and Luke, who were holding him back. Mama cried, and a huge crowd had gathered around us, gawking and whispering. Papa was about to grab me or hit me again when I woke up from my stupor. I crawled back, stood, and ran. I ran like never before.”

I had run the several blocks home. I had packed a duffel bag with the essentials, and what I had saved from my allowance. I ran to the nearest taxi point, and the driver drove to the train station in Columbia. I bought the first ticket out of town. The train left ten minutes later and took me to Charleston, West Virginia. From there, I took another train to Cleveland, Ohio.

“And that’s how you ended up in Cleveland.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yup.”

“By the time I got to my grandma’s house, my mother had already called her in a panic, saying I was missing. She had been expecting me. During the first month, she tried talking to me about forgiving my father, or at least talking to him, about going home to my family. When I threatened to leave and disappear from her life too, she stopped. She accepted me and my conditions: I wouldn’t talk about my family; I wouldn’t talk to my family.”

“Shit, this is … I’m sorry, Jess. Now I know why you haven’t gone back to Lexington in four years. Gosh. How are you holding up?”

I let out a half-chuckle, half-snort. “I’ve been better.”

“I bet. Hm, you mentioned running into Caryn. That probably didn’t help.”

“No, it didn’t. It was this afternoon.” I retold her the events of the entire afternoon, including Noah’s unwelcomed flirting, Caryn’s encounter, and then Ryan escorting me away from her.

“Well, I guess you knew you would run into your past.”

“I honestly thought I could hide from it.” I let out a deep breath. “Apparently, Ryan went through something after I left. I asked my brother about it, but he says I should ask Ryan.”

“Like finding some closure.”

A sarcastic chuckle escaped my lips. “That’s what my friends here say.”

“See? All of us can’t be wrong.” She paused. “You need to talk to him.”

“As if that was easy.”

“Nobody said it would be easy. It won’t. But if you want peace, while you’re there and while you’re here, you need closure. He probably needs it too.”

I snorted. “Right.”

“Why not?”

“I told you everything that happened, Kristin. You know he was playing with me. I was just another notch on his bedpost.”

“Maybe, maybe not. You’ll only know after you talk to him.”

Could it be? No, no. I didn’t want to go down that path again. My heart was shielded from him, and it would remain that way. If I were going to talk to him, it wouldn’t be to find out if I had meant something or not. It would be to get closure, to put some dots on the Is and move on.

But could I do it? Could I go after him and talk to him? My initiative? I seriously doubted it.

“You need to talk to him, Jess, and hopefully then you’ll have less weight on your shoulders.”

I was about to answer her with something like ‘I’ll think about it,’ even though I didn’t really mean it, but then I looked down at the sketchpad in my lap and gasped. Without realizing it, I had drawn the Main Square. More specifically, the exact spot where Ryan and I first kissed. The exact spot where I had last seen him before I left.

Chapter Twelve

Jessica

“She never changed,” Sophie said, picking up the pillows from my bed.