The phone on the bedside table rang, and Calisa jumped.
She’d forgotten there was a phone. Her moms. They’d been intent on giving her space, waiting until she reached out to them so that they wouldn’t intrude on her time here. In fact, they’d showed impressive self-restraint. So why were they calling now? Did they know about Auntie Zee? They couldn’t—there was no one here who’d think to tell them. Had something happened at home? Were they okay? Calisa hurried across the room.
She picked up the phone. “Hello? What’s wrong?”
A familiar male voice said, “You aren’t here. That’s what’s wrong.”
Ethan.
She felt a lurch. Her knees bent, and suddenly she was sitting on the edge of the bed. She felt catapulted back into her old life more forcefully than walking through a portal. “Ethan.”
“It’s good to hear your voice, Cali.” He was the only one who’d ever called her that.
“Why are you calling?” she asked. “How did you get this number?”
“Charm,” he said. “Pleading. Patheticness. Please, Cali, just hear me out. It took me days to work up the courage to call and hours to figure out what I wanted to say.”
Half of her wanted to hang up the phone. But her fingers curled around the receiver, and she couldn’t seem to make herself move.
“I’m going to assume you’re still there, because I haven’t heard any kind of click. Okay, here goes: I am calling to say that I know I screwed up, I’m sorry, and I want you back. Whatever you need me to do, I’ll do it. Grovel—I’ll grovel like no one has ever groveled before. Public apology—I will buy a billboard if that’s what it takes. I made a colossal mistake, and I am begging you to forgive me.”
Well.
Wow.
This was it, the apology she’d so desperately wanted to hear but thought she never would. She never expected he’d so much as offer up a cavalier “my bad” much less a full-on monologue. “Did you write that out?”
There was a beat of silence. “Yes?”
“Did someone else write it for you?”
“I may have had some help. But it’s my feelings, Cali love. All my heart.”
She wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse. He’d cared enough to enlist help—was that nice? “Who helped you?” It better not have been Jocelyn Pullman….
“Crystal.”
She sucked in air, feeling as if her heart stuttered. Crystal? Her best friend Crystal? She could guess now who had given him the phone number. She must have gotten it from Mom-Elise.
She thinks this is what I want.
It had been what she wanted. Before coming to Vermont, she’d had countless daydreams of Ethan begging her forgiveness, wanting her back—
“Why?” Calisa asked.
“Because you’re the one for me,” Ethan said. “I can see thatnow.”
“You cheated on me, multiple times with multiple girls, according to, well, everyone. That was a choice—a choice you kept making over and over. It wasn’t an accident or an out-of-control moment. It was a pattern of behavior, and you’ve now changed?”
“People change. Hey, you’ve probably gotten all crunchy granola up in Vermont. Made friends with bears and stuff. Are you dating a lumberJack? Is that why you’re being so cold tome?”
Nowshe was going to hang up.
But his voice softened. “Cali, I screwed up. You didn’t deserve it, and it was never about you. It was all me and my ego.”
That was exactly what Crystal had said, when Calisa first went crying to her after catching Ethan and listening to his flimsy excuses. Clearly he wasn’t lying about talking to Crystal, which was a surprise—first because he’d never liked Calisa’s friends, and second because Crystal usually didn’t put up withbullshit. But the greater surprise was that he’d actually listened to her. He sounded sincere…. Then again, this was also the boy who’d deceived her for months and she’d been blithely unaware, completely swallowing every one of his lies about where he’d been, whom he’d been with, and what he’d done. “How do you expect me to trust you?” she asked, gripping the phone so hard that her hand started to sweat.
“I’ll make it up to you,” Ethan promised. “Whatever you need me to do or say…If you want to check my texts…If you want to hire a random kid to spy on me…Whatever it takes.”
