by Maisey Yates
But the problem was, she could also see this house.
And she could see Josh.
She could see him standing there, waiting for her to come back.
Waiting for her to come home.
28
I’ve gotten myself in trouble. That’s what Sam says, that I did it to myself. Women are supposed to know how to prevent these things, but I didn’t know. He says it will ruin everything. He says it ruined me.
Ava Moore’s diary, 1924
Hannah
Hannah was just about to hide when her niece and nephew burst through the front door and ran up the stairs, blocking her access to her bedroom before her sister walked into the room and saw her face, blotchy and red from crying like a child.
“What happened?” Avery asked.
“Nothing,” Hannah said, wanting nothing more than to drown in her own misery.
Was this what all these years of restraint had earned her? Josh had pulled a foundational Jenga brick out of her tower and now she was crumbled. Reduced in her living room.
At least he wasn’t here anymore.
“I’ll make some tea,” Avery said.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“We spent way too much time not talking in this family,” Avery said. “I’m getting quilt squares and tea, and we are going to sew and you can tell me why that bastard made you cry.”
“It wasn’t him,” Hannah said, scratchy.
“I had a run-in with David tonight,” Avery said conversationally as she walked into the kitchen. Hannah craned her neck from her position on the couch.
“Did he do anything to you?”
“He was...” Avery appeared in the doorway. “I don’t love him. I’m glad I got to see him. Because that was... That was clarifying. It’s like now that I see everything I can’t go back to how I saw them before. And it’s good. I’m glad of that. Because part of me felt so conflicted, and now I just don’t. I’m scared. Don’t get me wrong. And I’m far from happy. Or joyous, I guess. But I know that I can’t go back there. I cannot go back to that life I was living. I just see it too clearly now.”
“That’s good,” Hannah said, knowing she sounded miserable.
“Tell me what’s going on?”
“It’s stupid,” Hannah said. “Because you’re going through something that’s real. And I’m mad that I didn’t get the position that I want in the orchestra.”
“And that’s why you’re crying on the night you had a surprise date with your ex-boyfriend?”
“It’s part of it.”
“Tell me. As long as you still want tea.”
And Hannah knew that she had an out. She could pretend that this conversation hadn’t begun. But as she sat there holding the book, she felt that for some reason she shouldn’t. That for some reason, she should sit with her sister, and talk. Talk for the first time.
“Something happened,” Hannah said. She looked up and met Avery’s eyes. “To me.”
Phrasing it that way felt strange. And when she told the story about Marc, her sister’s face stayed smooth. As if she knew that what Hannah needed was an impassive listener, who would offer neither judgment nor sympathy. Or anger.
Because telling the story, listening to it, paying attention to how it made her feel... That was what she needed.
To hear her own story come from her mouth, to experience it not as a seventeen-year-old girl who felt wise in the ways of the world and filled with ambition, but a thirty-six-year-old woman, who knew quite how young seventeen was, and was well aware of all the life experience the girl she’d been hadn’t had.
And when she was finished, she just sat for a moment.
“Did Josh get angry at you?” Avery asked softly.
Hannah shook her head. “No. He said it wasn’t my fault.”
“And what do you think?”
“I don’t know. I feel closer to knowing something now. But... I don’t know.”
“I had a confrontation with David tonight, like I said. And there was something... Something kind of magical that happened. I realize that I am a victim. And you’re the one who told me I was, Hannah, with all the conviction of someone standing outside the situation. But it hurts to hear that. Because to me a victim is someone who’s weak. But that’s not how it works. I’m not a victim because I’m weak, I’m a victim because a person that I trusted very much took advantage of that trust. Abused it. Broke it. And recognizing that I’m a victim lifts an immense burden off of me. And it doesn’t mean sitting here and feeling that forever, but it does mean finding a way to take it and use it. To use that label, to use that feeling.”
“I didn’t say no,” Hannah said.
“And I stayed with David. But sometimes you’re so deep in a situation you can’t see it for what it is.” Avery looked at her. “It takes someone outside of it to see it for you. You did that for me. Can I do it for you?”
“But you didn’t... I mean, this was years ago.”
“Does it hurt still? Is it why you didn’t feel like you could take what Josh was offering you tonight?”
“I always felt like I took what he gave me and destroyed it in a really kind of awful way. I think we probably would have broken up anyway, I think we had to. I had to get out there in the world and see what else there was.” Her mind went blank then, her emotions blank. And it was good. It was like seeing everything impartially. Clearly.
“I think I stayed in Boston, with the symphony, longer and with more single-mindedness because I felt like I paid for it. And I had to... I couldn’t turn back.”
“You earned it,” Avery said. “You wouldn’t have done what you did for all these years if you hadn’t earned it. You can’t let what he did reduce your success to you... Paying for with your body. It isn’t fair. If it was so right why does it hurt all this time later? If you wanted it, why are you so ashamed?”
It was so different, sitting across from Avery and having this conversation. Because Avery was strong, she wasn’t weak. And Hannah realized... She had been yelling at herself, when she had yelled at her sister, defending the person who had hurt her. Screaming at that girl from long ago who had pretended everything was fine. Who had been too afraid to say no, because the consequences might have meant her not getting her dream.
That was why she was so angry.
She was angry at herself.
Because she had spent so many years convincing herself that every choice she’d made had been hers. That she was strong enough to move through anything, even if it was unpleasant. That it didn’t touch her. But the ends were always worth the means.
That she had been a seventeen-year-old girl who had acted with clarity of mind, and made a trade. That she could handle being a whore because she’d gotten what she wanted.
“If I’m just a girl whose music teacher held a letter of recommendation over her head based on whether or not she would sleep with him... Maybe I’m not good,” she whispered. “Maybe I’m not special. I had to believe that I was, Avery. I really did. Because I was distant from all of you, because I worked, because I broke up with the only person that I have ever been in love with to pursue this. And I had to believe that it would work out, but now it’s all falling apart. I didn’t get the position that I felt like was guaranteed. And the reason I believed in it was because I bought into my own self-delusion, all those things that he said to me, about how I was special and I had to do these things to prove that I was worthy of that specialness. And you know, he couldn’t help himself when it came to me because I was just... So unique. But that’s not it, is it? He has probably stripped a hundred teenage girls naked and said exactly the same thing to each of them. It was a casting couch. And in the end, I happened to get a scholarship out of it. So maybe I’m the lucky one in one hundred who got what was promised along with it. But it was never about my music. It was about my bo
dy and the fact that he was a predator. I just never wanted to believe that.”
“Both of those things can be true, you know. He can be awful, and you can still be special.”
“But I don’t have what I wanted. And you know what? I don’t even know if I’m happy? I don’t know if I’ve been happy for a long time. I’m obsessed. I’m obsessed with trying to take this broken piece of my life and make it mean something. And I just don’t know how anymore. I don’t know if I belong there anymore. But I sure as hell don’t belong here. Because before I left here, before Marc, I believed a lot of things. I believed in love, and I believed in fate. I didn’t know how to reconcile the fact that I loved Josh with what I felt was my fate to be this violinist, because he felt like fate too. And I went away and I did it, and I have done it for all these years. And there was just one next thing. And now it’s out of my reach again and I have to keep working toward it, and I just don’t know if I want to. And I don’t know who that makes me.”
Avery reached out and took her sister’s hand. “I never wanted to be sitting here,” Avery said. “Facing divorce. Facing the fact that my marriage is broken. That my husband is broken. But I’m not. And neither are you. We might be a little bit banged up, but we get to choose. That’s the thing. We get to choose where we go from here. And you’re not stuck on a path. You’re not.” Hannah looked down at the diary still in her hands.
“I guess I should get some tea,” Avery said. “Since I promised it to you.”
“Why don’t we read?” She held up the diary. “I love that fabric for the quilt. I want to know more about the person who wore the dress.”
“Okay. I’ll go get Anabeth’s journal. We can read together.”
And Hannah suddenly felt like she had been stitched together with her sister, in a way she never had been before. Felt like they maybe weren’t so different. And like she wasn’t so alone.
Special had meant being singular. And it had meant isolating herself, too. And she was done with that. Tired of it. She opened up the diary and started to read.
He asked me to marry him...
29
I am home. I keep telling myself that. When you are not home, even in your own heart, where can you go? I gave her away to save myself. But there is nothing of me left to save.
Dot’s diary, March 1945
Lark
Today Lark felt hungry. For Gram’s face. Her smile. Her smell. For cigarettes and perfume and her laugh.
After being with Ben she felt...she felt good but also so...shaken. Like her world had been tilted on its axis and she wasn’t sure which way was up.
The door opened, and she hoped that it was Ben.
She wanted more of him. His touch. His kiss.
But it wasn’t Ben. It was Taylor, looking wide-eyed and upset.
“Taylor,” Lark said. “What’s the matter?”
Lark and Ben were proceeding with caution. They’d slept together a couple of times, both times at the garage, since that first time, but as far as she knew Taylor had no idea anything had happened between them, so she hadn’t been expecting a visit filled with teenage drama.
“She’s here,” Taylor said.
“Who?”
“My mother. She’s back in town.”
Fear twisted Lark’s heart. “Oh,” she said.
“I don’t want her here. I... I can tell my dad likes you. A lot.” Well, so much for subtlety, but she and Ben had been around Taylor a few times together and it wasn’t like they were actors. And maybe Ben had said some things about her. And she tried not to let that warm her. Besides, it wasn’t the point. “I like that you’re both happy and I was happy.”
Lark tried to keep her expression neutral. “Has your dad seen her?”
“No,” Taylor said. “He’s at work. She came by the house. I yelled at her. And then I...ran away and came here.”
Lark wanted to yell at Keira too. For everything. For hurting Ben, for being part of something that had hurt her, for hurting Taylor. For coming back.
But Keira was Taylor’s mother, and no matter how much Lark didn’t want her around because it complicated everything, she also couldn’t... She couldn’t deny the fact that she was Taylor’s mother. That she had loved a woman who had also abandoned her daughter, and who hadn’t been able to make it right with her before it was too late.
This was Keira’s daughter. And no matter what Lark thought about anything, no matter how she had been hurt, from the past until now, no matter what she hoped for with Ben, Keira had been her friend. And Lark was the keeper of her own complicated decisions.
“Did she say what she wanted?”
“To see me. She wants to see me.”
“Are you going to be angry at her forever?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
Lark sighed. “I... I don’t think that I’m the right person to talk to you about this, but I’m here. I cared about your mom a lot when we were teenagers. We were all friends, and I hate that she hurt your dad. But I don’t know why she left. She’s a person, like me. Which means that...she has reasons for her mistake, or she thinks she does.”
“But she left me. She left him.”
She paused. “Do you know who else left her family?”
“No.”
“Addie. My grandmother. She left my mom when she was just a little girl. Left her husband with three kids.”
“She did?”
“Yes. And my mom never got over it. Addie came back, and when she did, my mom made sure that we had a relationship with her, but she never really did. I don’t blame her. I don’t think she was wrong for that. Not really.”
Her breath caught. “There are some wounds that only time can heal. But some wounds are so deep there isn’t enough time. Not for time alone to do the job. And Addie died before they could ever... Before they could ever talk. Right now, my family is untangling a lot of unsaid things. And what I can tell you is this. The same woman who worked in this candy store is the same woman who left her husband and children behind. The same woman who was a wonderful grandmother for me, who supported me and loved me and influenced me in the decisions that I made in my life was the same woman who hurt my mother deeply and desperately. Who hurt the grandfather that I loved so very much, made him bitter about love to his dying day. She had both things in her.”
Lark looked down at her hands. “There are certainly things about me that your mom doesn’t know about. Wounds that I have, burdens that I carry. I’m certain that she has her own. And I don’t know... It was wrong of her to leave you. It doesn’t change that. It was wrong of my grandma to abandon her husband and children. But it doesn’t mean they’re all bad. You’ve seen that. And I guess it’s up to you to decide if you want to try and find the good things. It’s not fair. It means you have to be more mature than she is. And you’re only fifteen. It’s not fair. And you don’t have to do it now.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“At the very least you should go back and yell at her more. Say what needs to be said. Say what hurts. Because I think in the end the unspoken things can create hurts that never needed to be there in the first place. I thought my mother would disapprove of something that I did, and I never told anyone because I was ashamed. Because I thought I knew how it would go. She never talked to her mother, because she didn’t think there was any fixing it. And maybe there wasn’t. That’s the thing. Maybe we were both right. Maybe telling wouldn’t have been better. But you know, there’s something definite in it. And in the end, it’s really awful to be left with a lot of what ifs. And I think it leaves more space. For bitterness, for wondering. For everything. A whole lot of things that hurt a whole lot worse.”
Lark forced a smile. “And the only reason that I’m giving you any advice at all is that it’s about the only use you can get out of pain. You can try to use it to help someone else. Yo
u can try to use it to build yourself something new. Otherwise it’s just pain.”
But if Ben wanted to be back with Keira, she didn’t know how she would survive that a second time.
Well, maybe you go say something? Maybe you quit assuming that you know how it’s going to go, and stop being passive.
“You should go talk to your dad. Give him a heads-up. I mean, I can, but...”
“I will. For all I know she’s there. Trying to talk to him.”
“Well. Let me know.”
“Okay.”
When you get a chance, I want to talk to you. Face-to-face. You can come here or I’ll go there.
She hit Send. And then she put her phone away.
She wasn’t going to drift off. Not this time. She was ready to fight if she had to. She was ready to be a little emotional, a little reckless.
Because he was worth it.
They were worth it.
30
We married as soon as we arrived in Oregon City. There is more travel ahead, to get to a newly incorporated town called Bear Creek, where John’s land is. I have written to the school to let them know they will need to find a new teacher. Bear Creek has need of one, and I will teach there.
Anabeth Dowell’s diary, 1864
Avery
It was her third day at her new job, and she was finally feeling less... Well, like less of an idiot. At first the whole register situation, which was just an attachment and a stand on a tablet, had made her feel about hundred and fifty years old, and completely incompetent. But it was beginning to make sense to her. She was starting to learn a little bit about the stock, and actually remember some prices and information. It was a quirky place full of handmade, artisan goods, and she really liked all of it, plus all the people.
And she had taken off her wedding ring. She had also found a lawyer, one of the women at her kids’ school, to represent her when the divorce proceedings started. And she was overall feeling pretty positive.