17. Chapter 17
seventeen
Isink to the floor, pull my knees to my chest, and cry the way I haven’t cried in ten years. I’m back on the tailgate of his truck, the sunset bleeding gold across his face. I remember it like it’s been pressed between the pages of a book I never opened but never threw away.
We sat still, the sky gold and then softer, and I kept my hands folded in my lap because if I touched him, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to leave.
And I had to leave.
He kept pretending he was watching the horizon, but I felt him watching me. Saw him grinding his jaw. He always saw me too clearly.
“You don’t have to go.” His voice was low, steady, like he was trying not to scare off the last bit of hope we both had left.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. My throat felt tight, and my chest felt worse.
“We’re going to Tarleton, remember? We have a plan.”
“I know,” I whispered, and it sounded like an apology I didn’t know how to make right.
He turned toward me then, and the look on his face… I still feel it, so many years later. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t even confused. He was just breaking, quietly, the way he always did everything.
“We can figure it out. We’ll get married. I’ll work. You’ll go to school.”
I think my mouth fell open a bit. It had been a fantasy. Us married. And he’d just said it—but I knew fantasies weren’t real. Daddy would never permit it.
“Calder…” was all I managed.
He looked away. He drove me home in deafening silence.
I was numb. Would I marry him? Yes, God, yes. Could I marry him? No.
My heart ached, knowing the future chosen for me meant losing the one I wanted.
When he pulled up to my house, we still sat in silence. He didn’t even look at me. He leaned into the steering wheel, arms folded on top, staring through the windshield, not seeing anything outside the glass.
I opened the door slowly, maybe hoping he’d stop me.
But he didn’t.
I stepped out, turned back, leaned in to kiss him because we never ever hadn’t kissed goodbye, but he looked at me with cold eyes and shook his head. Just once. “Go.”
It was the softest word he’d ever said to me, and it cut the deepest.
I nodded because I didn’t trust my voice, and I walked toward the porch without looking back. If I looked back, I wouldn’t go. And I had no choice. I had to go.
I felt him watching me the whole way. I felt something inside me tear. And I kept walking anyway.