“Honey.” Mama tried holding me, but I slapped her hands away. “Ryan is not—”

“Don’t say his name!” I interrupted her. “Don’t ever say his name again.”

Aunt Cadence held Mama’s hand. “Give the girl some time, Corrine,” she said, pulling Mama back. She gestured to me. “Let her be. It’s her problem. It’s her way of solving things.”

Solving things? Was she really talking about solving things? I wanted everything to explode. Jesus, I shouldn’t have come. I really shouldn’t. How the hell was I supposed to support Mama if everything around me was messed up?

I ran upstairs and entered my room. Without meaning to, I slammed the door on Luna’s face, and she whined.

My heart squeezed and I fell on my knees.

While trying to run away from the problems downstairs, I had encountered another. My bedroom.

The white and lilac wallpaper, the purple comforter and pillows, the notebooks, the sketches on the corkboards on the wall, the photos in the picture frames. Everything was filled with memories, a few good ones, a lot of bad ones.

I crawled to the bookshelf, picked up all the portraits, and shoved them inside a drawer. Then I took down all the sketches of people and friends, balled them in my fist, and threw them in the trash can beside my desk. Next, I ripped down the photos without frames. I hated portraits. I hated pictures. I hated photo albums.

Exhausted, I inched to my bed and lay down, hugging my pillow.

Impossible. It still smelled of him. I buried my nose in it and took a deep breath. Very faint, but it was still there. His scent on my bed.

His scent …

I remembered him opening the window in the middle of the night and crawling in bed with me. The first time he did it, I screamed, thinking it was a burglar or something. He had to hide under my bed when Papa and Jason barged in my bedroom. I lied I had a nightmare, but it was all okay now. As soon as they closed the door behind them, he slipped under my covers and pressed his warm body against mine.

“Sorry,” I whispered, burying my face in his neck and savoring his intoxicating scent.

“That’s okay.” He chuckled. “At least I had time to hide before they got here.”

I laughed, a hand pressed over my mouth to contain the sound. “Sorry.”

He rolled over me, positioning his wonderfully heavy body over mine, pressing against me in the right places. I gasped. “Stop apologizing and kiss me.”

Somehow, I found the strength to pull myself out of that memory. Like I had done on the plane, I pushed it to the back of my mind, but I knew, I just knew, it was going to be harder and harder to keep them away.

I threw the pillow to the floor, hugged my knees to my chest, and cried.

Chapter Four

Jessica

My eyelids would need surgery of some kind to shrink back to their normal size. After crying in the afternoon, I cried again before sleeping.

I washed my face several times with cold water, hoping it would do the trick. Then I put on gray yoga pants, a white tank top, white running shoes, pulled my hair into a tight ponytail, and descended the stairs.

Mama was in the kitchen, baking two cakes and some butter cookies, Luna at her feet.

I leaned in the doorway. “Did you open a bakery again?”

Luna ran to me and circled my legs.

“Hi, honey.” Mama turned, wearing a sweet smile, with her hand filled with dough. “Good morning. I hope you don’t mind preparing your own breakfast. I’m busy.”

I caressed Luna’s ears and walked in.

“I can see that.” I grabbed milk from the fridge and a slice of the sweet homemade bread, then sat on the chair at the table in the center of the kitchen. “You didn’t answer. Did you open a bakery again?”

Mama had sold her bakery when I was twelve because she was stressing over it more than enjoying cooking, which was her primary purpose. But Mama never stopped cooking or baking cakes for close friends and family. It was what she liked to do and what she was good at.

“No, but I’ve been accepting more orders than usual.” She pushed hard against the dough. Cakes didn’t need that kind of beating. Perhaps Mama was making more bread. “It helps keep me busy.” I thought I heard a sob coming from her direction. “And I need to do something. I’ll have too much time on my own after …”

She didn’t finish. She didn’t need to.

I stood, approached Mama, turned her around, and embraced her tightly.

Mama resisted crying at first, and then she let it go and sobbed like a child on my shoulder. Luna whined beside us.

“I’m not ready for this,” she whispered. “I’m not ready to say goodbye to your father.” Gently, I pulled away. I empathized with Mama, but not with my father. Not anymore. Not for the last four years. “I’m sorry. I know you resent him, but I honestly hope you can forgive him.” She put her hand over her mouth. “You can’t let him die without forgiving him.”

“Mama,” I started. I didn’t really know what to say. “I can’t forgive someone who doesn’t want to be forgiven.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Did he ever tell you otherwise?”

“No—”

“See.”

“But you know your father. He never says too much.”

“Oh, he does. He said a lot that night.”

Mama washed her hands under the sink faucet. “Oh, honey. If we could go back in time, things would have been different.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think they would.” Because I knew I wouldn’t have acted differently. And one thing led to another, ending with me moving away to live with my grandma in Cleveland and never speaking to my family again. Until now.

“Well.” Mama wiped the tears from her eyes. “We have time. Your classes start again in three months. Until then, you can stay here. I won’t give up hope.”

That made one of us.

***

Ryan

I was late for my community service. Again.

At this rate, I would end up before the judge much earlier than expected. Damn it.

I accelerated my Mustang through the streets, careful with the spots I knew cops could be hiding, just waiting for the opportunity to jump on careless drivers. When I was younger, I had been caught once or twice … or ten times. Jason and Luke had been with me most of those times. Then later Ethan joined the gang.

Thinking of them, I remembered Luke’s call yesterday morning.

“She’s here,” Luke told me.

The first thing on my mind was if she was still beautiful, but I pushed her image away. “And?”

Luke tsked. “She kicked me out of her house. Said I should stay away while she’s in town.”

“Sorry, man.” It was the only thing I could say.

Furious with myself, I punched the wheel. I entered West Main Street and slowed down considerably. This place was the cops preferred hangout.

From a distance, I saw someone running on the shoulder of the road, a golden dog alongside her. What an odd thing. I had lived here for twenty-three years and had never seen anyone running along this road in the middle of the morning. The girl looked hot, wearing low-rise pants, a cropped white top, and her long hair in a ponytail. As I drove closer, a band tightened in my chest. I knew that dog and I knew that girl. She looked not only hot, but also incredibly beautiful.

The sun filtered through the trees over her head, and her hair shone. The natural golden highlights glittered among her dark blond mane, the same ones everyone had teased weren’t natural. But I knew they were.

I sucked in air, too warm on my lungs, and, almost without thinking, reduced my speed even more. Swallowing hard, I turned my gaze back to the traffic. That didn’t last three seconds. My eyes went back to her, and I could do nothing to stop staring at her.