They might have stolen my life from me in one sense of the word, but maybe in another, they were giving it back to me.
I would finally be free of them.
I rubbed the spot at my throat where my necklace was missing. The one Fallon had given me.
I nearly lost it then, wishing I had at least that small piece of him to carry with me over the rest of my senior year.
If I was going to make anything of myself, I was damn well determined to do it without the fools sitting in front of me, masquerading as my caring parents.
I could handle the next year of school alone.
I would excel.
And on the day I graduated, I would walk out the doors a fully independent woman, and then head right back to Chickasaw Ridge and track down Fallon Gentry.
We had a life to get started on, and the next few months I was away would just be a small roadblock in our path to happiness. The love Fallon and I had could withstand it. We could withstand anything.
Besides, the only person I knew who was more stubborn than me was Fallon Gentry. He’d move heaven and earth to find out where I was. And when he did, he’d come track me down and steal me away from whatever this god-awful place was they were sending me.
My friends would start calling. Surely, I could write letters. It’d get back to Fallon at some point that I was in Mississippi, and then it would only be a matter of time before he found his way to me.
Little did I know then that the nightmare was just beginning.
It was what came after that ended up unraveling me, one swift thread at a time.
EIGHTEEN
Fallon
“I cried myself to sleep for months,” she whispered, eyes trained on the lines of the freeway blurring out the windshield. “It was unreal. I didn’t think I had so many tears.”
I couldn’t even begin to form words, her story far more fucked-up than I’d thought.
“And then I wrote you a million letters. Three a day for the first few weeks.” She shook her head as if she was embarrassed by the silly girl she’d been.
“I wish like hell I’d gotten those letters.” My eyes met hers across the cab of my truck. “I woulda come for you. I wouldn’t have been able to help myself.” I gripped the wheel, so much regret flooding my body. “Your parents were gone for months, out on their boat, I heard later. Everyone wondered where you went. It was the talk of the town for so fucking long. And then whenever I walked into the corner store, the bar, my goddamn cousin’s auto shop, everyone in the room would hush, eyes following my every move as if I knew where you were. As if I’d done something to you.” I took a quiet breath. “They looked at me like they wondered if I’d killed you.”
She bundled herself up a little tighter in my heavy flannel jacket, sucking in a ragged breath before unbuckling her seat belt and sliding across the bench seat until our thighs were touching.
I breathed a little easier then, havin’ her close.
Like the slow burn of warm whiskey down the back of my throat, tingles left on my lips, and surrender in my tired muscles, touching Augusta Belle Branson had been the only crutch I’d needed to get through some of the hardest revelations of my life.
I’d constructed some sort of story in my head about what’d happened the day she left, but it hadn’t been anything like what’d really transpired.
I slung my arm around her shoulders, hugging her a little closer to me as we drove on toward Tupelo, leaving our pasts behind and confronting something new every mile along the way.
“Hell, Augusta Belle,” I breathed her sweet name from my lips, the sensation it left an intoxicating one. “There was a time I wondered if you were dead.” I shook my head, remembering so many sleepless nights, her on my mind. “Those letters woulda been a game changer.”
She snuggled into the crook of my arm, one of her little hands resting on the rough denim of my thigh. “I kept them for a long time. Years. I didn’t throw them away until I left college. I used to read them on the bad days, but at some point, it was all just too much. I couldn’t keep reliving it.”
I nodded slowly, for the first time wishing I hadn’t been so hard to find. If I woulda parked my ass in Nashville and kept on with the high-profile life, it woulda been easier for her to find me. But that life… I just couldn’t keep fakin’ it anymore.
“So what was it like there? Your senior year at a school for rich kids who sneak out and kiss kids from the wrong side of the tracks?”
Her grin split her face. “It was an all-girls’ school, for starters, with a heavy emphasis on daily routine and discipline. And you weren’t there, so that’s three strikes.”
I laughed, easing the tension inside the cab for the first time in the two hours since we’d left Memphis and hit Highway 22.
