Chapter 1
Liv
It wasa butt dial that changed everything—stunning me awake from some obscure unsettling dream—scattering it into a kaleidoscope of colors and emotions. My eyes snapped open, my breath sucking back into my throat so violently fast my lungs almost burst.
An icy layer of sweat broke out across my skin as I clawed senselessly at the tangled sheets around my legs. For a moment, I sat, panting, stomach twisting sickly, peering into the dark, wondering where I was.
A sliver of pale yellow light poured in from the window, falling softly against my desk. My eyes traced its path to my cell phone just under its glow, buzzing with lights and sounds.
I ran my hands over my face and took a slow deep breath. Cursing, I climbed to my feet and staggered over the soft rug, my hands fumbling for the phone.
My mother’s face popped up on screen.
“Hello?” I said, quickly answering the call, stomach rising to my throat.
A blur of noise and music spiraled out from three hundred and two point eight miles away.
“Hello?” I asked, louder. “Mom?”
On the other end, glasses clinked together, and my mother’s voice muttered incoherently about tequila and the greatest love of her life. Someone laughed deeply and answered her. Muffled voices in the background cheered and someone asked for a cigarette as my mother slurred a sad rendition of what she always thought should have been her wedding song.
“Mom? Hello?”
She was still singing.
I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it, exhausted and angry.
My mother was drunk. Drunk—in some crowded bar mumbling unintelligibly to some poor sap about how much she still loved my father—a man neither of us had seen in years.
“Mom!” I shouted into the phone.
She slurred the chorus to the song, mixing up the words pitifully.
“Mom?” I said more softly, squeezing the phone against my ear. “Mom,pleasego home.”
Memories ricocheted through foggy fragments of my childhood—playing all the same images—a broken story that was once my life. Olivia Rhys was a mistake born to a sixteen-year-old with two drinks in her hand and the older boy who broke her heart. The greatest love story that never got finished, she would tell me, her breath the flavor of cheap tequila. It was a love that was so consuming, you couldn’t tell where he ended and she began. Except, he ended it by leaving her withme, and she never began anything, but another bottle of whatever she could get her hands on.
Maybe she was right about love, who knew? I certainly didn’t.
“Mom?” I asked into the phone again.
Someone answered her song with some drunk pearl of wisdom that had something to do with a fish and a telephone pole. I sighed heavily and cut off the call.
My mother and I were as emotionally distant as the miles we put between us. For the last few years I’d been gone, we’d seen each other less than a handful of times, each visit ending in tears.
I was probably the worst daughter in the world. But I figured it would equal out in the end somehow, since I practically raised myself, and the mostly unconscious woman hovering over the toilet every night.
The dim colors in my room blurred, dissolving into a teary darkness. Something with her always tugged at my insides. No matter what the past was and how much I’d tried to forget my lonely childhood, I couldn’t shake the fact that something was always pulling me back home.
That, and her ass called me four more times.
She always needed someone to take care of her. She always made the wrong choices and never worried about consequences for anything. What she really needed was a full time babysitter.
Guilt kept me up for the rest of the night—it took over my body—my mind. My arms and legs became puppet limbs, packing an over night bag, dragging my exhausted body down the steps of my apartment, and into the car. Five hours and four spilled coffees later, I found myself walking up the overgrown pathway to my childhood home wishing I’d just stayed in my own damn bed. This was supposed to be my winter recess from work. For twelve days, the schools were closed, and I planned a staycation that included books, parties, and sex with strange men. Yet, there I was, back at my horrible childhood home on a guilt trip for one.
I hesitated at the bottom step, hands wrapped around the rusted railing, tired eyes squinting into the bright morning sun.Why was I even there?Thinking I could do anything there to make a difference was absurd. I’d spent my childhood trying; it was never good enough. She loved her broken heart and her sad life more than she ever loved me.
My insides knotted with nerves, fighting the urge to turn around and drive all the way back home. Surprise visits never ended well in the Rhys house. Trying to calm the tension in my shoulders, I leaned back against the rail and took in a slow deep breath. It puffed back out in a pale mist; the air tasted like sea salt and filth, New York style. From the porch, I could hear Jamaica Bay a few blocks away, dark and violent, beating at the sand with its high tide.
