I should feel lucky. Most days, I convince myself I do.
One evening we sit on the tailgate near the river, his shoulder warm against mine, the sunset bleeding pink into the water. The air smells like mud and honeysuckle and whateverthe town dumps upstream and pretends not to. I let myself lean into the normalcy of it. No engines rumbling in the distance. No club girls whispering in corners. No wives watching with knives behind their smiles. Just us and the chirp of crickets like the world’s still capable of being ordinary.
“You look happy,” Elijah says quietly.
“I feel happy,” I answer, and it ain’t entirely a lie.
When he kisses me, it’s soft and earnest and unhurried. Nothing like the tension that used to hum between me and a man who never even touched me properly. There’s no danger in Elijah’s mouth. No claim. No heat that threatens to consume something it can’t keep.
Safe.
Safe feels good. Safe also feels like a dress I’m trying on in a mirror, turning side to side, wondering if I’m fooling myself.
Daddy still doesn’t come home.
At first I tell myself it’s normal. Truckers run long hauls. Weather delays things. Paperwork gets held up. I leave the porch light on anyway, because habits don’t die easy and neither does hope, no matter how stupid it makes you.
Then the call comes.
Missouri. That’s where he is. There’s a woman in the background when he talks, laughing at something he says that ain’t meant for me. Her laugh is bright and easy, like she belongs there. Like she’s been there long enough to get comfortable.
“I met someone,” he tells me, voice too careful. “Didn’t plan on it, but… well. Things happen.”
Things happen.
I grip the kitchen counter so hard my fingers go numb, staring at the cheap laminate like I can press my anger straight through it. I think about all the times I made excuses for him. All the times I told myself he was doing his best, that he loved me in the only way he knew how. That he’d come home and it would be the same.
“I sold the house,” he continues, like he’s discussing the weather. “Paperwork’s done. You’ll have thirty days.”
Thirty days.
“You didn’t even ask me,” I whisper.
“You’re grown, Brittany,” he says, as if that absolves him. “You’ll land on your feet.”
Land. Like I jumped.
When the line goes dead, I stand there a long time staring at the wall where Mama’s old clock used to hang before Daddy pawned it during a bad year. The space is still lighter than the rest of the paint, like the house remembers what got taken.
I don’t cry. I just go hollow.
The house doesn’t feel like mine anymore. The couch. The kitchen table. The dent in the hallway where I ran into it when I was six. The squeak on the third step that always gave me away when I tried sneaking past bedtime. All of it already belongs to somebody else, and I’m the last one to know.
I pack nothing. I tell no one. Pride is a mean thing in a small town.
Instead I spend more time at the pawn shop.
Lottie doesn’t ask why I’m lingering. She just hands me Mason and lets me carry him around while he babbles abouttrucks and crackers and the important things in a two-year-old’s world. There’s something grounding about his weight on my hip, the way he trusts I’ll hold him without question. He doesn’t care about rumors. He doesn’t care about clubs or cults or who’s watching. He just wants his snack and his toy and somebody safe.
Becki watches me the way she watches storms rolling in, chin tipped like she’s reading the clouds.
“You look like somebody kicked your dog,” she says one afternoon. Her voice is rough, but it ain’t unkind.
“I’m fine,” I reply, because I’ve been practicing that word for weeks now like it’s a prayer I can say enough times to make true.
Elijah notices something’s wrong too, but he mistakes it for missing Oaks. That would be simpler. It ain’t Oaks that makes my chest ache at night.
It’s the house.
