“Why?” Olive asked. She’d taken her phone out from under her legs, flipped it around in her hand. “She’s our mother.”
“Who left.”
“It doesn’t change who she is.”
“Yes, it does.” Ramona’s voice was loud. Louder than she meant it to be, but she needed to put this to rest.
An unbearable sadness fell over her. An emptiness.
“Yes, it does,” she said again, quieter this time. “She left. She gave up. She gaveusup. I’m here, Olive. I’m the one who…”
But she stopped herself, not sure how to even finish that sentence. She didn’t want credit. She didn’t want praise or acknowledgment. She didn’t even want a fucking thank-you for all she’d given up.
She just wanted to protect Olive.
And she wanted to protect herself.
She felt on edge now, her chest tight, her throat aching. “I need to go check on Dylan.”
Olive just nodded, her eyes glazed, focused on nothing in front of her.
Ramona stood up and kissed her sister’s forehead, then left the room before she lost it completely. But when she got to her room and crawled back into bed next to a sleeping Dylan, who roused when Ramona burrowed under her arms, she pressed her face against Dylan’s neck and let everything go.
Because she could here.
She was safe.
“Baby,” Dylan said, her voice muzzy with sleep. But she didn’t say anything else. Didn’t ask what was wrong. Didn’t pry. She just held Ramona and kissed the top of her head, whispering, “It’ll be okay,” as Ramona cried.
And goddammit, Ramona believed her.
Chapter
Thirty
Later that morning,Dylan headed back to her house to change and face the proverbial music. She walked, taking shortcuts through the woods she remembered from last week when she’d sprinted to Ramona’s house after the first pictures of them appeared online.
She smiled as she passed by Nugget’s yard, not even sparing him a glance as he barked once at her and then simply watched her go by.
Ramona.
Her smile broadened, making her cheeks ache. She didn’t even feel panicked as she thought about all the texts and missed calls waiting for her when she got home. Both Laurel and Rayna were probably blowing up her phone, but it all slid off her back, at least for now. For this moment, walking through the sunshine on a June morning, the lake glittering in the distance, all she wanted to think about was Ramona.
Dylan couldn’t put it into words, what she was feeling. This fluttery, nervous, happy feeling. Or rather, shecould, but the word was ridiculous, way too fast, so she just let herself feel all the word-defying feelings as she walked.
When she got to her house, though, all those feelings popped like bubbles in flat champagne.
A car she didn’t recognize sat in the driveway, Massachusetts plates. A rental, most likely, and from the bright red color and two-door convertible style, it had to be her parents’. Laurel used her firm’s car service here, and no one else Dylan knew would drive such an ostentatious vehicle through small-town America.
She stopped at the bottom of the porch stairs, staring at the front door. She knew she had to go in, but she needed a plan first.
Ignorance.
Now that word wasn’t ridiculous at all. It was perfect. She’d walk in, say a bright hello, gather her things and claim she had to get to the set, which was true. La-di-da. Nothing the matter here!
Except when she walked in, a fake smile already in place, the first thing she saw was her mother, perched primly on the edge of the couch, a glass of water in her hand.
She was just…sitting there.
