Hope and Ellie McCallum had never co-existed.
Until three years ago.
Now today I was going to, for the very first time, have everything I’d ever wanted.
A chance at happiness.
Even if the direction my tiny car was headed towards was the last place I had ever wanted to be again, I still felt the bubbling, tentative joy deep in my gut.
Three years was a long time to be gone.
Maybe too long.
Maybe not long enough.
I hadn’t stepped foot in West Virginia since I had made the decision to attend the College of Baltimore. I had needed to cut ties and let myself fly free.
I had been terrified. Scared that I’d crash and burn.
Aside from my stint in Juvenile Detention, I had lived in Wellston, West Virginia my entire life. It was my dysfunctional safety net. It’s all that I knew.
Then Flynn Hendrick, the boy I had bullied and terrorized who later grew up to become someone so much more than that had shown me that there was a great big world out there waiting for me. Even if he was, for the most part, terrified to venture out into it.
He had convinced me that I deserved more than to work at JAC’s Quick Stop and dodge the law for the rest of my life.
He had given me something to reach for.
So I had left.
And he had stayed behind. Putting down roots and making a home that he hoped I’d come back to when the time came.
He never doubted that at the end, I’d come back. He had believed it with an unwavering certainty. A certainty I hadn’t always shared.
Leaving Flynn was the hardest thing I had ever done. I wasn’t sure when I had decided to pack my meager belongings and leave the town where I had spent my entire life, whether there would be anusat the end of my long, twisted road.
Being with Flynn had never been easy. And we were so new when I had let that my worries threatened to eat a hole through our fledgling relationship.
He wouldn’t come with me. No matter how many times I had begged. I knew that asking him to pick up and follow me was about my happiness and not his.
And that wasn’t fair.
So Flynn had stayed in Wellston, and I had left. I had stayed away all that time, seeing Flynn only when we’d meet somewhere half way. Our interludes were never long enough and sometimes ended in disaster. Maintaining our connection during that time had been more than difficult.
Despite my nagging doubts about the solidity of our relationship, I could never drive my car across the Wellston town limits.
I stayed away.
As long as I was able to. Until the time came and I no longer had an excuse. Because Flynn wasthere. And if I loved him as much as I professed to, then there couldn’t be any other option.
The truth was I hadn’t allowed myself to think about what it would mean for me to pack my bags all over again and go back.
I had thought briefly about using my shiny new English degree and apply for jobs somewhere—anywhereelse.
But anywhere else wasn’t where Flynn was.
He was in Wellston, teaching art courses at Black River Community College. He was settled. He was entrenched. He wasn’t going to leave.
And if that was where he was, then that was where I belonged.
