by Kelli Warner
“I don’t want to talk to you either,” I say. “I want to be left alone.”
“I don’t really care what you want,” Jay says, surprisingly calm despite the hard look on his face. “You’re not calling the shots anymore, Paige.”
“When have I ever called the shots around here?” I ask, confounded by his choice of words. Jay crosses his arms over his chest. As his eyes bore into me, my instinct is to look away. But my fierce stubbornness refuses to bend, so I hold his gaze and cross my arms, mirroring his stance.
“You and I seem to have a communication problem,” he says. We have a lot of problems. If he wants to label them individually, who am I to stop him? “In case you’ve forgotten, you are grounded. That means you come straight home after work.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” I say, stretching my arms out to my sides.
“And where were you earlier? Because you certainly weren’t at the bookstore. Were you?” My arms slowly lower as a new realization surfaces. Jay holds up a hand. “No more lies, Paige. I know you were at the university.”
“How did—? How did you know that?”
Jay’s eyes drift to my cell phone laying on the bed.
“You’re tracking my phone? So now you’re spying on me?” Astonishment collides with betrayal inside me and my stomach twists.
“I’m trying to keep you safe, Paige. But that’s hard to do when you insist on being reckless. Like driving to Eugene without telling anyone where you were going. What if something had happened to you?”
Forget astonishment and make way for fury. It shoots through me, welling my hands into fists at my sides. “You don’t trust me.”
“I want to,” he says. “But you’ve made that pretty difficult. Sneaking around with Cade Matthews? Running off to God-knows-where when we think you’re working? What else have you been doing?” I grit my teeth and stare at the floor.
Jay runs his hands through the top of his hair and releases a slow, labored breath. “Do you have any idea what it took on Connie’s part for you to come live here?”
Here we go again. Jay isn’t interested in anything I have to say. This is going to be a lecture. One more to add to the day’s inventory.
“She had no right to go through my things,” I say, waving the shoes. They’re crushed satin, beaten into submission by my own hands to get them to fit just right, and then from all the hours I’ve spent wearing them. I cross to the dresser, yank open the top drawer and shove them in, slamming the drawer shut. When I turn back, and we lock eyes once again, Jay’s expression hasn’t wavered.
“You have no idea the painful memories she relives every time she looks at you.”
Is he for real? How is this all of a sudden about Connie? I’m the one who’s lost everything. She fixed up the guest room, cooked me a few dinners, big deal. How did my uprooting become such an inconvenience to her? I’m not amused.
“I didn’t ask her to let me come here,” I remind him. “I never wanted to be here in the first place. You should have just left me in San Diego; we all would’ve been better off.” I’ve wanted to say that for so long. There’s no sense in faking diplomacy anymore.
“Be. Quiet,” Jay warns, his face pale, his green eyes darker than I’ve ever seen them. Any ounce of sympathy or patience he’d pretended to show me over the last several months is long gone, replaced with disgust. Jay Chapman has a limit to what he’s willing to take, and I know I’m about to push it. I take the cue and press my lips together.
Jay crosses to the window, leans a hand against the frame and stares out through the glass. He keeps his back to me for a long time, and the air humming up through the heating vents in the floor is the only sound in the space between us.
I wait, studying a copy of Us Weekly magazine resting atop the dresser. Who are the best and worst dressed celebs? I’m about to compare Beyoncé’s red leather number with Taylor Swift’s metallic mini when Jay turns his attention back to me. I draw a deep breath. Jay inhales one also.
“I wasn’t sure I wanted to bring you here at all,” he finally says.
Oh, that’s good. Bring out the big guns and try to make me feel worse than I already have for months. I suppress my urge to interrupt, although that’s most likely what Jay expects me to do. Instead, I decide to let him finish his speech, his miscalculated attempt to try to make me loathe myself for not giving his precious wife a chance.
“When the lawyer called me—let’s just say I didn’t know what to think. Shocked is an understatement. I had a teenage daughter I never knew existed.” Jay walks around my room as he talks. “Suddenly, she’s mine, and I’m her sole guardian. And because of her mother’s final wishes, I’m to take responsibility for her?” Jay dissects the story as if he’s talking to no one in particular. When he finally stops, turning his eyes back to me, he’s ashen. “Are you kidding me?” Jay all but shouts. He takes another deep, labored breath, trying to regain some composure. “I’ll tell you, Paige, that scared the hell out of me. I mean, you didn’t know me from Adam. I had no clue who you were or how you’d been raised for seventeen years. I had no trouble convincing myself that bringing you here would be the worst thing I could ever do.”
Thank you! He’s finally making sense. I never wanted to come here. I knew it was a bad idea from the start, too. If only he’d followed his gut, we wouldn’t even be having this horrible conversation—
“But,” he says, interrupting my silent tirade, “it was Connie who convinced me to step up and accept the terms of Abby’s will.”
My eyes narrow and I see red. Connie’s the one! She’s the one who’d opened her big mouth and convinced Jay to mess with my entire world. Connie is to blame for me having to leave my home, being separated from the only life I’ve ever known. That’s perfect. Just. Freaking. Perfect.
“There’s something you don’t know about her.”
“I don’t want to know,” I begin, but he cuts me off with a sharp wave of his hand.
“You’re not going anywhere until you hear this. I want you to understand what she gave up for you.”
What could Connie possibly have sacrificed so I could become an outcast in her family? I wait to see which ridiculous words are next to fall out of Jay’s mouth.
“Connie and I had a little boy.”
“Yeah, Tanner. I’ve met him,” I say in an attempt to hurry the storytelling along.
Jay’s stern tone returns with less patience than before. “Sit down. And be quiet.” I sink onto the edge of the bed. “Not Tanner,” Jay corrects. “His name was Nathan. Nathan James Chapman.” There’s a sad longing in his voice. “Not too many people know what I’m about to tell you. It happened before we moved here.”
I sit stiffly, my hands tightly clasped in my lap. Jay rubs at the back of his neck and clears his throat with a cough.
“We were living in Seaside. I’d just finished college, and I was teaching at the high school there. Connie and Nathan were coming home from her mother’s house in Astoria. They’d gone there to visit for the weekend.” He coughs again, as if trying to coax out his next words. “They were just about home when a trucker fell asleep on the highway and crossed the center line.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I’m immediately aware that Jay is as still as the fixtures in the room and my insides feel as if they are suddenly melting. “They were trapped in the mangled car for two hours while the paramedics worked to free them.”
No. No. No, no, no.
“I don’t know how, but miraculously, Connie had only a few broken bones.” His voice cracks like plaster and an odd sound escapes from the back of his throat.
I’m spinning, like clothes in a dryer, and before I can fully grasp the sensations that are swirling through me, I’m falling—plummeting into my own memories. They come at me fast and furious, pulling me under in a wicked riptide. The empty halls of the hospital. The cold waiting room. My hands clutching desperately to Aunt Faye as we prayed. Each memory is a crystal of ice piling up inside me an
d freezing me into place.
I should never have loosened the lock on my memories and shared them with Cade. I’d kept them shut away for so long for a reason, and now, because I trusted him, because I unhinged the latch and let him in, they are so fresh under my skin that they close in all around me, squeezing me so tight I can’t breathe. Despair stabs viciously at every nerve in my brain, shooting down my spine and directly and unmistakably into my heart.
“Nathan?” I ask, my voice barely audible.
Jay’s eyes brim with tears, and he shakes his head. “He was only a year old.”
In that split second, my entire body is alive with panic, like I hit a trip wire and I’m about to implode. I need to get out of this room any way I possibly can. “I didn’t know,” I hear myself say.
“You didn’t care to know,” Jay says quietly. “When Connie looks at you, she sees what you’ve lost. She feels it. That mother-child connection is powerful. Taking it away is like losing a limb, and she feels that, too. Every day, Paige.”
I want to correct him, tell him it’s like losing your heart, your soul and your purpose all in one awful, unforgettable moment, but I can’t seem to find my voice. It evaporates as my skin prickles and a sheen of perspiration forms across my forehead.
“We’re trying to make this work. We want to make this work.” Jay looks me right in the eyes when he says that. And that’s when I manage to retrieve my voice.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “You don’t.”
“What did you say?”
“You don’t want this to work,” I repeat. “You may think you do, but you never wanted me in the first place, and it had nothing to do with Connie.”
“Paige,” Jay says, but I cut him off.
“You never wanted my mother or me.”
“That’s not true.” Jay steps toward me, but I lunge off the bed and out of his reach. “Your mother never told me about you.”
“You’re right, she didn’t,” I agree. “But you didn’t stick around long enough to give her the chance.”
Confusion washes over Jay’s features. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“If you loved my mother so much, how could you possibly have left her?” I demand, a new sensation welling inside me. This one pushes down the hurt that was there before. This one is scalding hot, growing out of the glowing embers of anger still alive deep in my core.
“We’ve been through this.” Jay sighs. “Abby and I were seventeen. We were kids who didn’t even know what life was all about yet. I had to leave so she could have a chance at reconciling with her father. I didn’t want to be the one to stand in the way of that.”
“But you said you loved her.”
“I did,” he softly says. “I honestly did.”
“People who love each other don’t leave,” I accuse. “Unless there’s something they want more.” The anger now bubbles inside me, unleashing something new: courage. At that moment, I’m strong enough to tell Jay that I know everything, to shout in deafening volume that he can’t hide behind the lies anymore and accuse me of not being honest with him. He’s been misleading me all along.
“You’re not making any sense.”
“I believed you,” I say. “I actually believed you when you told me you left my mom for the right reasons. It sounded good, almost noble. But that’s not what happened.”
“Paige, please. You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, stepping toward me. “I left for your mother’s sake.”
“You’re a liar!” I yell, shoving him away. “You left because my grandfather paid you to leave!” It all spills out then—the bitterness, the rejection and the heartache that has pooled together for so long inside me. “He wrote you a big, fat check to get out of my mother’s life for good. Isn’t that right?”
Jay goes white, panic filling his eyes. “How did you know about that?”
I stalk over to the nightstand and wrench open the drawer. I scoop up the journals, the last, tangible connection I have to my mother, and I hug them close. Scrunching my eyes tight, I finger the smooth leather. I love you, Mom. Spinning on my toes, I slam the journals into Jay’s chest. His arms fly up to catch them. “I know because my mother told me!”
I storm out of my room and down the stairs. Slamming the door to my car, I turn the key and the engine roars to life. Without a second thought, I back out of the driveway and barrel down the street. The look in Jay’s eyes as my last words hit him are burned into my brain. He’ll read the journals. Of course he will. He won’t have a choice, and then he will know how much my mother loved him and how much it had killed her when he left. He will see his betrayal in her words. With every stroke of her pen, he will finally be exposed to the hurt she’d lived with for so many years.
As for me? I don’t know where to go. Everything is so screwed up. In less than twelve hours, nearly every semblance of a relationship that’s been instrumental to my existence here has been severed. What’s left now? I could go to Quinn’s, but honestly, I don’t want to rehash my whole afternoon with her, and I’m not interested in any advice she’s sure to give me. The bookstore is closed now, and while a part of me wants to see Macy, to cry on her shoulder, I can’t tell her about my fight with Cade. It’s too personal, and it hurts to think about how he walked away from me.
There’s no way I can possibly call Aunt Faye. I’m too ashamed and still too angry over my fight with Tyler. Besides, I’m sure he will tell her soon enough. The fact that she hasn’t called or texted me yet is a pretty good indication that he hasn’t contacted her. But I know he will; it’s just a matter of time.
There isn’t much light left in the sky. I drive all the way to the edge of town before I finally know where I want to go—where I need to go. A place where I can be alone, just me and my miserable, wretched thoughts.
I put the car into Park and stare up at the trailhead in front of me. The parking area is deserted, and it will be dark in no time at all. Cade’s words of warning not to hike up there alone echo in my head, but I dismiss them quickly. Just like he’d dismissed me.
Climbing out of the car, I grab the flashlight Jay put in the glove box for emergencies. Zipping up my hoodie, I survey the forested hillside. There’s something up there I desperately need—clarity. Up there, everything is somehow unobstructed and uncomplicated. I can breathe in a way that I can’t down here.
I move quickly, climbing up the main trail. There’s no one on the path, and that’s both comforting and slightly unnerving at the same time. Darkness falls beneath the canopy of trees, but I’m not afraid. The idea of being alone calms me. There are no prying eyes here to condemn me for my outbursts, no one to chastise me for my selfish thoughts. But it’s nearly nightfall, which explains why no one is coming up or down the trail. Everyone else is probably smart enough to know that hiking at night is dangerous. But I forge ahead, quickening my pace.
The cold air burns in my lungs with the increasing incline, but I’m more determined than ever to continue. The problem is, I can’t quite remember where Cade took me from here. We’d broken off from the main trail, that much I recall, but as I glance to my left and to my right, shining my flashlight on my surroundings, there’s so much overgrowth, I can’t tell for sure where this alternate path begins. Closing my eyes, I listen for the distant sound of the ocean. Trusting my instincts, I veer into the black tree line on my left with only the small, white glow of light to guide me. I manage to find the weak indentations of a pathway and fall in step with it, hoping that I’m going in the right direction.
When I woke up this morning, all I’d hoped for was a quiet day at work with Macy. Never in my wildest nightmares had I suspected that my world would unravel stitch by stitch. But it had. So incredibly quickly.
I push through the last branches and, to my great relief, step out onto the familiar outcropping. I found it! All by myself, with no help from anyone. I inhale a deep, victorious breath and peer out at the now-dark ocean spilling out for mi
les below me. The last rays of sunshine have evaporated, taking with them the mesmerizing glow I’d hoped to see ringing the skyline. This time, things are different up here. It’s colder, for one, the midday temperatures falling away with the light. I wrap my arms around myself as I step toward the ledge, careful not to get too close. I stare down at the ominous, rolling waves, the perfect arc of the black water chased by the fluid surf crashing onto the beaches below.
I inhale the cold, salty air and it hangs in the back of my throat before pulsing down into my chest. As I slowly exhale, I concentrate on banishing all the hurt and despair of the day from my body. I imagine it leaching away and dissolving into the night air. Below me to my left, cars wind up and down the highway in glowing red and white dots. All of them have somewhere to go—and I don’t. The wind rustles my hair, sending a chill down my spine and unleashing goose bumps over me like a second skin.
The last time I came up here, I had Cade to keep me warm, and this space offered me the freedom I desperately needed. But something’s changed. This once wide-open space is undeniably empty. I close my eyes, willing my nerves to release the grip they have on me. As I tilt my head skyward, I hold my arms out wide, ready to embrace what it is I want, but the tranquility I’m searching for isn’t here.
I shift my weight from one foot to the other and take another cleansing breath, opening my lungs wide to the offerings of the night air, trying again to purge all the hurt and disappointment that is tightly binding my insides. If I’m going to survive this and pull myself together, I have to find a way to separate myself from everything that just happened, to disengage at least long enough for me to formulate a plan. If I can’t find a way to leave it all behind, high up on this cliff where it can’t follow me back down, then I’m sunk.
I try as hard as I can to find my center, to clear my mind, to push aside any thoughts of this horrible day. Complete stillness consumes me as I wait to see if the night will comply with my wishes.