“Seriously, Mom, it’s like Edison’s invented the lightbulb and we’re insisting on using candles.”
“Camilla, you are talking to me on a magic radio while I am in my car! It hardly needs four hundred thousand apps and a touch screen to make it a miracle.”
“Yeah, but there’s a flashlight app—can you imagine how handy that could be if there was a zombie invasion?”
“Are you kidding? Zombies go toward the light. Everyone knows that. There would be nothing more foolish in the event of a zombie invasion than for you to use your phone as a flashlight. Thank God you don’t have one!”
She groaned.
“So are you set for the night?” I asked. “Have everything you need?”
“I’ve spent a lot of time with Nan, Mom. I think I can survive here.”
“Well, if you can’t, you can come home,” I said, a little wistfully. “I can tell Rick we’ll go out another time.”
“Um, he’s only been talking about this date of yours for days now,” she said. It was sad when my fifteen-year-old was more mature than I was. “And Amy said he’s totally exited about it. It would crush him if you canceled. Anyway, Nan and I are watching I Am Legend.”
“Ohh.” I sucked the air in through my teeth. “So she doesn’t know about the dog in that.”
She laughed. “No way, she’d never watch it then. I’ve gotta run, Ma. I’m supposed to call Phillip before we put the movie on.”
“Who?”
“I don’t think I’ve told you about him yet. I’ll tell you tomorrow!”
I didn’t have time to say anything else before she clicked off.
Who the hell was Phillip?
So far she’d never been on a one-on-one date, but I knew it was coming and I was dreading it. As long as they stayed in groups—and, hell, even as long as they had to sneak to be alone, thereby preventing them from spending too much time doing so—she probably couldn’t get too serious with a guy before she was ready.
I really didn’t want her to make the same mistake I had.
It’s hard to prevent a whole individual from making her own errors, of course, but it’s not unheard-of for someone to heed good advice now and then.
I hoped Camilla would trust me on that one.
The idea of her grieving away what should be her happy, carefree teenage years—of her living a half-life of faked smiles, secret tears, and a distracted heart and mind—was untenable to me. I remembered beautiful blue-sky summer days when I felt like I was looking at the world from behind thick glass, unable to feel the easy optimism and simple pleasures that my friends did, going to the lake, the pool, the county fair, whatever.
After my breakup with Nate in high school, had my mother had any idea at all how I was crumbling on the inside? How, in that delicate brief place between childhood and adulthood, I had literally wanted to die rather than to surge forward into the rest of my life? Had anyone picked up on the depth of my anguish at all? Maybe not. Maybe not even Theresa and Jordan had realized how desperate the despair had been, how many times I’d stood at the precipice, looking over the edge and thinking how much better it might be to just…not exist anymore.
These were the memories that made me want to lock Camilla away in her room until she was old enough to really handle the fallout from a broken heart.
But when would that be?
We can understand the science of what makes a heart beat, but we can never stop it from breaking.
And some of us just never stop breaking.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Epilogue
Preview: When in Doubt, Add Butter
Preview: Always Something There to Remind Me
Hope in a Jar Page 29