Erica
I stand at the curb and stare at the house like it’s a stranger.
Or maybe I’m the stranger now.
Same porch. Same sloping front walk with the crack Dad keeps saying he’ll patch “next weekend.” Same sagging screen door that sticks when it’s humid. The hydrangeas along the steps are half dead because I forgot to water them yesterday—because yesterday wasn’t my life.
The car Nico sent me home in has already pulled away. The driver got out, opened my door, and was supposed to wait until I got inside, but I sent him away. What did I tell him? I needed to water the grass first?
Lies. I just can’t make myself go inside yet.
My stomach is churning with how stupid I’ve been lately.
Yesterday, I left here in a car sent to deliver me to that hotel. But there were no plans to give me a ride home. That should’ve been my tip-off that none of them cared what happened to me by morning, after the money changed hands, after the “special guest” stopped being special.
The ride there was part of the product. The ride back was never included.
But Nico did exactly what he said he’d intended to do last night: put me in a car and send me home.
Now I’m standing here in the extra clothes I brought—jeans, a hoodie, sneakers—and my backpack feels like it weighs a hundred pounds.
It’s cash.
Seventy thousand fucking dollars in my backpack.
Just like that.
Well, not just like that.
My fingers tighten around the strap anyway, like it could evaporate if I loosen my grip. Like I’ll blink and find myself still in that suite with the smooth sheets and the too-wide bed and the ache between my thighs that won’t let me forget what I did. What happened to me. What I let happen. What my body did while my mind tried to pretend it wasn’t mine.
A breeze pushes through the street, carrying the scent of cut grass and someone’s grill starting up early. The neighborhood is waking up. A dog barks two houses down. Somewhere, a lawn sprinkler ticks like a metronome.
Normal.
My house is normal.
This is the house I grew up in. The only house I remember. It’s small, not sad-small, but cramped in the way a place gets when there’s not enough money and too many years of making do. White siding that’s faded more on the sun side. A shallow roofline. One big front window with curtains I’ve washed a thousand times. The porch light Dad insists on leaving on all night, “just in case.”
It was always just him and me. As far back as my memory goes, it’s Dad cooking dinner, Dad signing permission slips, Dad sitting in the bleachers cheering my name. Daniel Crawford has been the only constant in my life.
My mom is nothing but a story. She died too long ago for me to remember her voice. I know her from a framed photo on the hallway table—her smile, the shape of her cheekbones, the way Dad’s eyes soften when he looks at it.
He never got remarried.
Two years ago, I left this porch with a couple of suitcases and a grin so wide it almost hurt. Rutgers University. Campus. Independence. A roommate.
Maddy.
She was messy where I was neat, loud where I was quiet, fearless where I planned every step. She dragged me into her world. We were both there on scholarships, both trying to prove we deserved the spot we’d been given.
Mine was athletic—women’s soccer—and I’d spent my whole life running until my lungs burned and my legs turned to jelly because running had always felt like control. Like if I kept moving, nothing could catch me.
I can still remember the first time I walked into the Rutgers training facility and saw the field under the lights and thought, I did it.
Less than two years later, Dad got sick.
He tried to hide it at first. He tried to keep being the same man who never asked for help. But sickness has its own timeline, andit doesn’t care about pride. It doesn’t care about schedules or plans or scholarships.
