“I love you, Scarlett. I’ve loved you since the day Sutton brought you home for me to clean that cut on your cheek from the tree in the woods.”
I keep my head down. “We both know it wasn’t from a tree.”
She squeezes tighter. “I hated every second of watching what you went through, but I promised I wouldn’t intervene unless it got to be too bad. I hope you don’t hate me for it one day.”
I pull my face up and look at her. Her eyes are wet with unshed tears. “Hate you? I could never hate you. This family has been everything to me.”
“I’m going to do everything I can tomorrow to help you.”
“Tomorrow?”
“I’m coming with you to your mom’s arraignment. I have a plan, and I need you to trust me. Can you do that?”
“Of course.”
“Good, now let’s go eat. You know how I get… I cooked enough food to feed an army.”
***
“How does your client plead to the DUI charge?”
“Guilty.”
“How does your client plead to the theft charge?”
“Guilty, Your Honor.”
Mrs. Vera and I are sitting in the courtroom, watching my mother’s arraignment unfold like a television show. The bailiff escorted her in, handcuffed and in an orange jumpsuit. Her once beautiful hair is thinning, matted, and dull. Lines and creases mark through her skin. Her steps were slow and measured. I’m not sure if this is due to soreness from the crash or from alcohol withdrawals.
“As this is the third DUI charge, we have two options. Jail or ninety days in a treatment facility.”
“Your Honor, my client has a long standing abusive relationship with alcohol. We both feel a treatment facility is in her best interest.”
“I can’t pay for that,” my mother pipes up. Mrs. Landry gives her a firm look.
“Can you cook?” the judge asks. “Wash dishes? Change bed sheets?” My mother nods. “There are plenty of treatment centers around the state that will let you work off your payment.”
He flips through the papers on his desk and then pulls the glasses off his face. “Now, there is the matter of your client’s daughter. She needs to be placed in alternate care for the next three months, if not longer, while Ms. Cook is in treatment. What are our options?”
“Temporary guardianship has been filed for by Dr. and Mrs. Winters.”
I gasp and look at Mrs. Vera. She gives me a smile and turns her head back to the front of the courtroom.
“The Winters family has been caring for Scarlett since Ms. Cook and her daughter moved in across the street from them six years ago. Dr. Winters is Scarlett’s pediatrician and Ms. Winters often takes care of Scarlett’s personal needs.”
“Ms. Cook? How do you feel about this?”
My mother’s eyes scan the back of the room until they land on the two of us, huddled together on one of the bench seats. She tears up at the sight and turns back to the judge. Instead of a verbal response she simply nods her head.
“Dr. and Mrs. Winters will be granted temporary custody of Scarlett Cook until Ms. Cook completes her treatment or Scarlett turns eighteen, whichever occurs first. Ms. Cook, you will be released from jail to a treatment facility as soon as we can find one that has an opening for you.” With a bang of his gavel, court is dismissed, my mother is led away, and my temporary guardian walks me out to the car.
My mother never looks back.
Chapter Thirteen
The last nine weeks have been difficult. I’m living across the street with Easton and his family, sleeping in Sutton’s old bedroom. My mother didn’t get into a treatment center right away, so she had to spend several weeks in jail. Doc and Mrs. Vera encouraged me to go visit, but I refused and they never pushed. Once she made it to New Hope, the facility where she’ll be staying until her therapists feel she’s recovered, she calls once a week asking me to come to one of her sessions. Again, I refuse. I’m not ready to face her. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to. She has a lot to make up for, but I’m not in any state to listen to her drivel.
I’m spread across Sutton’s bed, books surrounding me, but everything I’m reading might as well be written in a foreign language. My phone is next to my side, and I’ve been waiting for it to ring for the last several hours. He promised to call. He always promises, but he rarely does anymore.
Finally, when I’m about to call it a night, my phone vibrates.
“Hello?”
“Sorry,” he says in lieu of a greeting. This has become our new normal. He’s always apologizing.
“How was your day?”
“Alright. These classes are kicking my ass, Squirt. UCLA is no joke.”
I smile at the hint of the old Sutton in his voice. “Did you get your project turned in?”
“Yeah. I finished it at the last-,” he starts, but someone calls his name and he stops talking. Even though he puts his hand over the receiver I can still hear him saying, “I’ll be there in a second.”
“Who was that?” I try to keep the accusation out of my voice, but it’s hard when he’s been blowing me off.
“Some friends from school. They want to go out.”
“Don’t you have a test in the morning?” I regret my words when they come out. The nagging girlfriend bit doesn’t help our situation.
His harsh breaths can be heard through the phone. I close my eyes and I can picture him running his hand through that messy brown hair. “I’ve got to get out of here. You don’t know how it is, Scarlett, being in this house. Everywhere I look I’m surrounded by memories. Shit, you know exactly what that’s like. I’m sorry. This is hard. Harder than I thought it would be. He’s gone, I’m away from you, I, uh, I just need some time.”
My blood freezes. “What do you mean?”
The seconds tick by, passing like hours.
“That didn’t come out right. I don’t need time from you. The entire situation over here is fucked up.”
He’s scaring me. I know how he feels, I know what it’s like to lose someone, but I don’t know why he’s talking like this. If only I could see him, reassure him that this will all pass.
“Sutton, tell me what to do. I’ll do anything for you.”
“I know you will.” He waits a few beats. “You’re too damn good for me, Scarlett Cook. I love you.”
“How much?” I tease.
“A lot.”
“How much?”
“More than a little. I gotta go, but I’ll call you later.”
“Be safe, Sutton.”
“Always.”
I’m still bothered over that phone call two days later when I walk in from school and Sutton is sitting at his kitchen table. He looks terrible, and I immediately rush to him and wrap my arms around him. His eyes are bloodshot, he hasn’t shaven in days, and he’s lost a bit of weight.
“I fucked up,” he mumbles into my shoulder.
“It’s alright,” I tell him, rubbing my hands up and down his back. His father clears his throat and I lift my head up. His parents don’t look much better than he does. Mrs. Vera’s face is puffy and red and Doc’s is set in stone, completely unreadable.
“Why don’t the two of you go talk?” she says, her bottom lip quivering.
Sutton tucks a stray piece of hair behind my ear and gives me a wary smile. “Can we go for a walk?”
“Of course,” I whisper.
We get up from the table and walk in silence to our spot in the woods. Scenarios are running rampant through my head. I need for him to tell me what he’s so upset about so that we can fix it.
“Sit with me,” he says when we get to the benches around my fire pit. There’s a chill in the air, just like we always get right around Easter, so he pulls out the box of matches we have stashed here and makes a small fire to keep us warm.
Minutes pass, painfully slow, and he stares at the fire in silence. The longer we sit here, the more I think that this is bigger than what I originally thought. My first presumpt
ions were that he lost his scholarship or got kicked out of school, but now I don’t think that’s the case.
“Sutton,” I finally whisper into the darkness. At first I don’t think he hears me, but he eventually moves his gaze from the flames to me. The look on his face is heartbreaking.
“I made you a lot of promises, Scarlett. I had every intention of keeping them all.” He takes my hand and I want to pull away, but something tells me this may be the last time we sit here like this. “Grief is a funny thing. I was so upset the week my grandpa died. A few of my friends convinced me to go to a party. Easton came with me but left early.”
I know the night he’s referring to. We spoke on the phone, and I was sure he was drunk. He promised he wasn’t.
“I smoked some weed, thinking it would take my mind off things for a few hours. When it did, I smoked more when it started to wear off. I don’t know if it was laced with something, or if I just can’t handle doing shit like that, but,” He stops his story and stands up, moving closer to the fire. His profile is lit up, dancing in the flames. When he turns to me his features twist and my stomach clenches. “I don’t know how to do this, so I’m just going to tell you.”
“I don’t want to know,” I tell him. It’s stupid, but I want to remain blissfully naïve. Things can go back to how they were before, and I can be oblivious to his transgressions.
“This is not something I can keep from you,” he tells me with a shake of his head. “Scarlett, I slept with someone that night. Not that it makes a difference, but it meant nothing. She means nothing.”
I knew it was coming, but his words feel like shards of glass scraping along my skin. He takes a step toward me, but I put my hands up. I don’t want him near me right now.
“Would you listen to yourself? You’re just like her.”
“It’s not like that.” His voice is pained, when clearly I’m the only one who should be hurting from this conversation.
“You used and you hurt me.” My voice cracks and I have a hard time pushing the words out- words that are so difficult to say. “You did exactly what my mother does.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose and the breath he releases is so heavy I can almost see it hanging between us. “She’s pregnant.”
“No,” I dispute with a shake of my head, like that will make this whole thing just disappear. Iron fingers are gripping around my throat, making it nearly impossible to swallow, to breathe.
“Scarlett, I need you to listen to me.” I don’t want to listen anymore. The urge to run is strong, but I stay put, frozen by the unbelievable notion that Sutton is about to become a father- a father to a child that isn’t mine. “She wanted to get rid of the baby,” he continues. “I can’t let that happen. Her parents found out about the pregnancy, found out about her plan, and threatened to cut off her finances if she didn’t have it. She’s not willing to give up her lifestyle so she’s keeping the baby. I’m going to help raise my child. I can’t just turn my back on my child or risk her screwing up. I don’t trust her.”
“Jesus, Sutton, what have you done?”
He laughs, but it’s a bitter, ugly laugh. There are tears glistening in his eyes. “I’m sorry. I fucked up, but I have to take responsibility. Do you know what I was thinking about when she was telling me about the baby? When I saw how disconnected she was? You and your mother. I thought, ‘There’s no way I can let this girl raise my child when she doesn’t even want it in the first place. I can’t let my child grow up with a mother like Amy Cook.’ I regret what I did to you, I will for the rest of my life, but I won’t regret my child.”
He tries again to touch me, but I jump up and move away. “Don’t touch me, Sutton.”
“This doesn’t have to be the end of us,” he says, desperation bleeding through.
He can’t be serious. “I can’t be with you anymore. You betrayed me.”
“I’m sorry,” he tells me, like those two little words will take it all away. “Scarlett, I love you.”
“No,” I scream into the night air. “You don’t get to say that anymore.”
“You can’t take that away from me. I love you,” he tells me again, his voice overflowing with pain.
“Stop saying it.” I put my hands over my ears, but he’s right behind me. If he loved me, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. He wouldn’t have touched that girl in the first place.
“Ask me how much.”
“Please stop,” I cry.
“Ask me how much.” He’s against my back. I want to turn and throw myself at him, weep in his arms, but I can’t.
Sutton Winters has destroyed me.
“I don’t want to know.” I can barely get the words out. I do want to know- so badly.
He kisses me on the back of the head. “I love you more than the stars. I love you more than anything else in this universe. I’ll love you for the rest of my life.”
I wait, wordlessly, tears rolling down my cheeks, until I hear him leave our spot in the woods. My eyes stay trained on the fire burning in front of me. I want the fire to take away all of this… the trees, the treehouse, the conversation we just had, the pain that’s radiating from my heart, everything. I look from the fire to the house, where all my beloved envelopes are. Papers and trinkets that once brought me so much happiness, but now I realize are nothing but lies. I storm in and grab the box, deciding that giving them to the flames may make some of this hurt go away.
The addition of my love letters to the fire causes it to shoot up, hiss, and crackle. Smoke billows up and makes its way to the stars. My eyes follow the wispy trail, and they flood with tears as I watch. I’ll never look at the night sky the same again. He’s taken everything from me.
It took time for me to fall in love with Sutton Winters… a few years of talking, smiling, laughing, and star gazing for him to steal my heart. It only took a few moments for him to hand my heart back to me, completely wrecked and ruined.
Chapter Fourteen
After.
I used to refer to time as before and after in regards to the death of my father. Now I think of my life as the time I spent with Sutton and the time after he wrecked me. I suppose I was already on the path to ruin with everything else I’d endured, but the blow he dealt with the news of his impending fatherhood changed me.
I was so stupid and naïve to believe all of his lies and promises and talks of love. Even though my childhood was shit, I held out hope that there was still goodness in the world, and that Sutton Winters was part of that goodness. Despite all of the vile things that my mother put me through, I never imagined that he could hurt me like her.
I was right.
What he did was so much worse.
Shortly after Sutton broke my heart and went back to California, my mother- newly sober and a born again Christian- came back home. Mrs. Vera was adamant about me remaining at her house for the duration of high school, but I couldn’t imagine living there with reminders of her son everywhere. Just hearing his name was enough to send me over the edge. It was bad enough that my best friend was his brother. Every time I looked at Easton I wanted to die. His smile, his hair, his body, they were all harsh reminders of what I’d lost. I left the Winters’ house as soon as Mom got her walking papers, and I tried my best to avoid going back. My mother attempted to repair our relationship, using every quote from the Bible she could throw at me to gain my forgiveness, but I was done. I stayed locked away in my room and barely managed to graduate from high school.
Emily stuck with our original plan and went to California. Despite the fact that she was in my corner and pissed at her cousin for what he did to me, she wasn’t stupid enough to turn down a scholarship to UCLA. I lost my funding, but managed to secure some grants to a small college a few hours from home. Evidently the federal government likes to throw money at kids that have one dead parent and another who is a convicted felon.
Junior year is just starting and I’m still floundering, completely unsure of what I want to do with my life
. Bartending is a nice distraction, but I can’t imagine doing this forever. I’m simply going through the motions… eating, breathing, sleeping, going to class, working.
I’m not living.
Easton slides onto a bar stool and hits me with a smile that still makes me ache. Time should have taken care of this feeling by now, but it hasn’t. I can’t look at him without seeing his older brother.
“You almost ready?”
“I just need to cash out. You want a beer while you wait?”
“Nah,” he says, looking around.
I finish wiping down the bar and close out the last of the tabs. My few lingering customers leave, and Easton locks up behind them so I can go in the office and stick the money in the safe. This has become our routine over the last few years. I stopped telling him it wasn’t necessary. He doesn’t listen. He hasn’t left my side since he found me in the woods the day Sutton broke the news about the baby, and I suppose it’ll stay that way for a while. I know he came to school here with me instead of joining his brother and cousin in Santa Monica so he could keep an eye on me, but I never asked and he never willingly told me.
“Have you talked to Em lately?” he asks, breaking the silence of the walk home from the bar. Easton doesn’t often bring up his family. That usually turns into a fight.
“She texted my earlier, but I was too busy to look at it.” It’s a lie. I don’t want to get into my reasons for not looking at the message. Sometimes I can’t stomach hearing about her perfect life at the perfect school in the perfect state of California.
“She’s coming home this weekend for a quick visit.” He slows down. “You should take a ride with me. Mom’s been asking about you.”
“I have to work.” It’s been my excuse since the two of us moved up here three years ago.
“You know someone would cover your shifts. Come on, Scarlett. It’s just for a weekend.”
“I can’t.”
“You won’t.”
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