Chapter 17 #2
I turned and walked out of the den, Ella behind me as I climbed the stairs. The duffel knocked against my hip with each step, and the higher I got, the more the house seemed to press in on something I’d spent the whole drive down trying to hold together.
I pushed open the door to our old room and went still in the doorway.
The room I remembered, the one I’d braced myself for, wasn’t here. Every trace of my past, the trophies, the tattered band posters that used to cling to our walls, everything I’d left behind, was gone. In their place stood a room as clean and as curated as the rest of this house.
The two twin beds with mismatched comforters that we’d slept on all our lives were replaced by a single queen in the middle of the room.
It should have made me laugh, that Ella had finally gotten the room she’d always wanted, the one she used to beg my parents for when she wanted me to move to the guest room so she could have her own. But instead, something inside me twisted hard.
I set my bag down and looked around, searching for any trace of me in the room, but the walls had been painted the palest shade of blue and the shelves were covered in framed photos of Ella at graduation, Ella at the beach, and Ella and Dean at what looked like a wedding.
“Oh! I forgot to tell you.” Ella walked in behind me and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Mom and I fixed the guest room up for you.” She must have caught the look in my eye because her gaze flicked away from me and took in the room.
“I know it’s different, but you know I’ve been living here since I’ve been back. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
“No. It’s fine,” I said, and walked to the window. The old pull was already there, that reflex to smooth things over for her, to make it easy. I stood there a second, fingers moving against my thigh, then turned back around. “Where’s my stuff?”
“I boxed most of it up.” Ella smiled like she’d done me a favor. “Dean moved everything to the attic for me.”
I looked around one more time, pretending I wasn’t a grown woman who was hurt by seeing her childhood packed up and stored like it was nothing. “You didn’t have to do that.” I shook my head, and God, I just wanted to leave.
Ella shrugged. “I thought it might be nice to start over. A blank slate, you know?” But her eyes darted to the window, like she didn’t quite believe herself.
“When are you and Dean moving in together?”
She glanced up at me, and I caught the flicker of something in her expression before she forced a smile. “After the wedding.” She twisted the engagement ring on her finger. “His current lease is almost up, and his parents are super traditional. No living together until after the wedding.”
I tracked the movement of her fingers as she fidgeted with her ring. The diamond was huge, blinding in the low light, but it looked heavy on her hand.
“Speaking of.” She stopped messing with her ring and put her hands down beside her on the bed as if she were bracing for what she was about to say.
I recognized that look. It was the look she wore when she had to tell me that Mom and Dad were fighting again, that she’d wrecked my bike in middle school and broke the handlebars, and when she decided that she was leaving me in Tennessee despite everything we’d planned.
“I need to talk to you about the bakery.”
My stomach dropped, and every muscle in my body stopped. “What about it?”
I perched on the lip of the windowsill, my hands gripping the ledge like I could steady myself against whatever she was about to say.
She tilted her head, studying me, and I wondered how long she’d been waiting to bring this up.
She drew in a slow breath, lips pressed tight in a way that looked so much like our mom.
“I know you’ve been busy, and I know it’s been hard,” she started, and my mind immediately ran through all the possible ways this conversation could go.
“I…talked to Dean,” she said, and her voice quivered the slightest bit.
“And with the wedding and us looking to buy a house, I had to get a lot of paperwork together and…” She trailed off, looking away from me and picking at a loose thread on the comforter. “I got some advice.”
“What kind of advice?” My chest heaved. I’m sure she’d already talked all this through with Dean and probably Mom and Dad before she ever had this conversation with me.
She straightened her spine, the way she always did when she’d made up her mind, and her eyes finally locked back on to mine. “I need to get my name off the mortgage as a guarantor for the bakery,” she said. “It’s making things a little difficult with us buying a house.”
Her words didn’t make sense at first, like maybe I’d misheard her.
“What?” My voice shook.
“I’m sorry, Mags. I know it’s fast, but I need to be off the loan before the wedding.
The housing market is crazy, and it doesn’t make sense for me to be on it anyway.
” Her words were rushed like she’d rehearsed this already.
“So this guy Dean works with suggested maybe you could refinance and take me off. Then the bakery would be just yours.”
My breath came out in a rush, but the rest of my body didn’t move. Inside, something shattered, splintering into a hundred jagged pieces I couldn’t pick up, but on the outside, I was frozen.
Just mine.
She said it like she was doing me a favor.
I tried to suck in a breath while I thought about the way the morning light fell across the tile in the bakery and how the warmth from the ovens could make the air shimmer on a freezing Tennessee day.
I thought about how I’d built it from nothing, how I’d scrubbed every inch of it clean night after night, how I’d stayed late painting the chalkboard signs myself because I couldn’t afford to pay anyone else.
It had been our plan, and the only thing Ella had ever done was cosign on that loan with me.
That was it. One trip to the bank, a signature, and her name on the paperwork.
She’d never baked before dawn for a month straight. Never worked the floor till her feet throbbed hard enough to make her curse every step back up to our apartment. The apartment that I’d paid for.
She hadn’t thought twice about it when she’d left Tennessee, had never once made a loan payment, and she hadn’t cared whether I could or not when she left.
I gripped the edge of the windowsill so hard my fingers went numb, but it was the only thing keeping me from flying out of my skin.
I could hear her on the bed, waiting for me to say something, but I couldn’t.
Not here. Not now. Not with the weight of this room already pressing down on my shoulders like it could break me.
She smoothed her palms along the comforter, voice going soft, careful. “You’ll be able to make the payments, right? I don’t want you to feel like I’m pushing you out. I just…It seems like the right time, Mags. You love that place, and I don’t.”
I scoffed and her back straightened.
“You don’t have to decide right now.”
“But I have to figure it out before the wedding? The wedding that’s weeks away.
” There was no chance of me keeping the anger out of my voice.
“It’s not as simple as just putting everything in my name.
I’m not sure if I have the collateral and cash flow to do it by myself.
” The words tumbled out of me before I could stop them.
“Ask Dad.” Her voice was careful, practiced. “I know he would do it.”
There was no air in the room, only the faint scent of my mother’s perfume that lingered everywhere in this house.
I stared at my sister and tried to see the girl I once worshipped, the one who taught me how to French braid my hair, and snuck us beers out to the trampoline where we’d planned our life away from this place under the stars.
But it was like looking at a stranger.
I wanted to say something that would wound her, wanted to tell her that I’d never forgiven her for leaving me in Tennessee, and that I’d never forgive her for taking Hunter when she’d known how I’d felt about him.
She’d known, but she did it anyway.
The anger drained out of me, leaving something far worse in its place. She knew exactly what we’d left behind when we went to Tennessee. She knew what it had taken to get out from under it all, our parents, our dad, the whole suffocating life that came with them.
She knew that our father’s version of love was a thing you owed, not something you got for free, but still she was asking me to walk back through that door and hand him the keys to the one thing I’d built for myself.
The one thing I loved.
I clenched my fists so hard the nails bit into my palms, the pain grounding me before I said something I’d regret. I wanted to grab my keys and run straight back to Tennessee. To the bakery, to my apartment, and fuck, to Hunter.
I wanted to go to him and let him burn the world down with his hands until none of this mattered anymore.
But that was the trap, wasn’t it?
The need for him, the way it hollowed me out and filled me up at the same time, always just enough to keep me running back.
I hated how perfectly I fit into his arms, how at home I felt when I was with him, how my body had already memorized his touch.
I hated that every day since the rodeo, it was getting hard to remember why I shouldn’t just let myself fall.
But even that was a lie. Of course, I remembered.
I remembered it every time Ella called, every time I pictured our parents’ faces if they knew the truth, every time I stood behind the bakery counter and wondered if everyone in Willow Grove could see right through me, if they knew I was the type of woman who would fuck her sister’s ex without a care of who it would hurt.
I remembered it every time Brody texted me something sweet and sincere and all I could think about was Hunter.
Standing here, I realized that I was already so far gone that there was no version of the future in which I came out with my pride, my heart, and my sister intact.
Ella finding out would be the end of us, I’d known that since the first time Hunter had looked at me like maybe he’d wanted more.
I’d always thought that was the line, the one thing I could not survive losing.
Only now, looking at Ella’s face and the way she waited for me to say something, I saw that what I was really afraid of was losing myself. Not the version of me that made everyone else comfortable, but the one that was mine alone.
I could feel Hunter’s hands all over me, even though he was hours and a state line away.
I could feel the ghost of his grip on my hips, the echo of his laugh in my mind, the dizzy heat of the way he’d look at me like I was the first sunrise after a long winter.
I could feel how easy it would be to call him, how natural it would be to let him in, how desperately I wanted to be wanted.
I wanted him more than I had ever wanted anything, and I was terrified of what that meant.
“I’ll figure it out,” I said as I stood and walked across the room to grab my duffel. “It’s fine.”
But nothing was fine.