She perches on the edge the same way Jolene perched on the porch chair yesterday—the posture of a woman bracing for whatever the hell is about to come her way.
I don't sit. I stand at the bar cart with my bourbon and look at her.
Twenty-one years.
She's not the girl I remember.
The girl was barely an adult, skinny, sharp-elbowed, with hair that fell past her shoulders and a way of looking at me like I was the most interesting thing she'd ever seen.
The girl smelled like the bar—beer and grease and the cheap vanilla lotion she kept in her apron pocket.
The girl had hands that shook when she cleaned my blood but never fumbled. Steady where it mattered.
The woman in my living room is thirty-nine.
The hair is the same color. That deep auburn that catches light like it's got fire trapped inside it —but it's different. Fuller. The face is different too.
The sharpness has softened into something more settled, more certain.
She's got lines around her eyes that weren't there before.
Freckles I remember scattered across a nose that's the same nose but on a different person.
She's beautiful.
That's the part I hate.
She's more beautiful now than she was at eighteen, and I resent the hell out of it because it would be easier to have this conversation if looking at her didn't make my chest crack open.
She's got curves she didn't have then. Hips. Weight that life put on her—pregnancy and age and grief and the kind of living that marks a body.
She's not the girl. She's what the girl became when the girl grew up without me and married someone else and built a life I wasn't part of.
I take a drink and set the glass down.
"Start talking."
She clasps her hands in her lap and her knuckles are white. "What do you want to know?"
"Everything. Start with the day you left and don't stop until I tell you to."
She flinches.
Not visibly. It’s a micro-movement, a tightening around the eyes that most people would miss.
I don't miss anything. I haven't missed anything in thirty years, except apparently the fact that I had a daughter growing up in another city with another man's name.
"You ended it," she says. "You sat me down on your tailgate and told me I was too young. Too good. That you'd ruin me." Her voice is quiet. Controlled. The voice of a woman who's rehearsed this, who knew this conversation was coming the second she turned her car toward Sharp. "You told me to go. So, I went."
"And you were pregnant."
"I didn't know that when I left."
"When did you know?"
"Two months later."
"Two months." I let the number sit in the air. "You found out you were carrying my child two months after you left, and your first thought was—what exactly? Don't tell him?"
