“Yes and no. But mostly yes.”
“Honey…”
My eyes sting. When Laine’s worried, or feeling extra emotional toward me, she calls me pet names usually reserved for lovers.Babe, sweetie, my love. It makes me miss her more.
It’s not just her I miss. It’s the way things were before my mom died, when I could continue living blindly, pretending my childhood didn’t exist.
“I’m going through the house. My room first. Then I’ll move on to her stuff.”
“I’m sorry you have to deal with all that.”
I walk back down the hall and into my room, where it looks as though a tornado has ripped through. “It had to happen sometime.”
“You could come back here, you know? Do everything from afar?”
“And what would I do about this house? All her things?”
“There are people for that.”
I laugh. When you have money, like Laine does, there are people for everything.
Forgetting for a moment that I’m broke, I imagine hopping on the next plane with my tail between my legs. In just a few short hours I could be back in Dallas, curled up on the couch with Laine and watching something mindless.
But no.
“Laine, I need to rewrite history.”
“And how are you going to go about doing that?”
“I’m still figuring that out. But I can’t let this place define me any longer. Or control me.”
“So don’t.”
I laugh derisively. “Just like that, huh?”
“Have you been to the church?”
Her subject change is because she has about as much of an idea of how to rewrite history as I do.
I tell her about Wilma and Elliot, and Pastor Thomas.
“Elliot reminds me of myself. She was wearing this cute hat and—”
“When are you going to tell me?”
I sigh. “Tell you what?” I know what she’s getting at, but I’m putting it off.
“When are you going to tell me about Finn and Brady?”
I sink down on the bed. The mirror above my dresser is crammed with pictures, stuffed in the tiny space between the frame and the glass. Some are group shots, taken during church camp, but most of them are of me and my guys.Brady and Finn.The boys who saved me. The men who ruined me for any chance at falling in love with someone who isn’t them.
I’ve dated, but not much. I’ve slept with two of the men I’ve dated, but only because I knew, after a certain time period, it was expected of me. I could have taken a stand, made a different choice, but it was so much easier not to, and anyway, each time I went to bed with them, I lay down thinking that maybe this time would be the time I would start to love my guys a little less. But, no. I guess something like that couldn’t happen because my heart wasn’t really there. It was elsewhere; half of it in Chicago, the other half in California.
“Finn and Brady are good, Laine. They are men now. It’s... shocking.” I laugh softly. “You know what I mean.”
“Sure do,” Laine agrees, and I know she’s referring to her high school boyfriend. She ran into him last year and, despite having a boyfriend of her own, it took Laine a few days to recover from seeing the grown-up version of the boy who stole her teenage heart.
“So,” she continues, “did all the feelings come rushing back?”
