Chapter 2 Brynn #2
“They won’t trust you. Don’t you see? That’s the problem. Now, whatever you say, they’ll just think it’s an act.”
I shook my head. “No, they won’t.”
“They will , Brynn. Because you just told them it was.”
Tears sprang to my eyes again, but I refused to let them fall this time.
I blinked rapidly and turned away from him so I could fan my face with my hands.
He was right, of course. He was absolutely right.
No matter how insincere viewers now believed me to be, it was going to be nearly impossible to convince them that I had been anything less than completely truthful in that accidental moment.
That moment when I told them I didn’t have the natural personality, warmth, and glow of a thousand suns (and that they were all stupid for ever believing that
I did).
“Okay, then...” I turned back to face him. “There’s a way to make lemonade out of this situation. We can talk about the
pressures placed on successful women of my generation. On all women. Of any generation. Maybe I go away for a little while. Get some rest... do some work on myself...”
“What are you suggesting? That we send you to rehab?”
“Sure! I’m good with rehab!”
Colton chuckled again, and this time there did actually seem to be a bit of humor behind it. Yeah. This was all hilarious .
He pulled his phone from his pocket and quickly clicked around before reading aloud. “‘Does anyone else feel like they woke
up this morning to discover what big teeth their granny has? At least the wolf was already in Granny’s house when Little Red
Riding Hood got there. I guess we viewers are pathetic, like she said. We invited the wolf in. #firebrynncornell. There are
thousands upon thousands of posts just like that. Or worse.” He sighed. “Brynn, if there’s a quick and easy fix here, I’m
not seeing it. And I’m sure you understand that I can’t let you sit on that couch until this dies down. If this dies down.”
I looked down at my toes and muttered under my breath as the sting of tears and the pressure of keeping them from falling
began to shoot bursts of pain through my head.
Colton leaned forward. “I’m sorry, what?”
I cleared my throat and tried to ignore the single tear that had just landed on my canary-yellow Saint Laurent pumps. “I never said the viewers were pathetic.”
Just my hometown.
And there it was. The problem. The solution. All wrapped up in 0.925 square miles of beautiful middle-of-nowhere. Adelaide
Springs, Colorado—0.925 square miles I hadn’t stepped foot into for nearly twenty years; 0.925 square miles I’d sworn to never
return to.
Resolve and refusal fought against each other as they each pulsated through my body, warming me and making me queasy, all
at the same time. Warmth and queasiness. Yep. That was the dichotomy of home everyone hoped for.
“Do you mind if I...?” Colton asked, a rectangular box in his hands and fatherly concern in his eyes, if I wasn’t mistaken.
It was similar to the depth that had been evident in his eyes as he talked about his daughters. It was unlike anything I had
ever seen in the eyes of adults in the home I grew up in. And in that moment, when my thoughts were stuck in memories void
of parental love and kindness, it confused me.
“If you what? What’s that?”
“They’re called tissues, Brynn. Kleenex.” He pulled one from the top and held it out in front of him as he threw the box on
the couch. “They’re really good for wiping tears. Blowing noses. Squashing the occasional spider. That sort of thing.” The
left corner of his mouth rose as he dabbed the tissue on my cheek. “It’s just that right now you resemble a really creepy
goth clown.” He pulled back the tissue to show me, and sure enough it had turned black—Tom Ford Ultra Raven, to be exact.
At least I was a creepy clown with impeccable taste in cosmetics. And I was a creepy clown with a plan that I knew would work.
“Send me to my hometown, Colton.”
He was halfway to the trash bin with the mascara-smeared tissue when he stopped in his tracks. He looked back over his shoulder at me. “What are you talking about?”
“You’re right. No one’s going to trust me. Those people—the ones saying I should be fired and that they never should have
let me into their living rooms every morning—nothing I say will change their minds. But if they see that the people I insulted
the most have forgiven me...”
He dropped the tissue into the trash and walked back to me. “But will they forgive you? The people in your hometown. Surely they won’t be super happy to see you after all this. Do you even know
anyone there anymore? How long’s it been since you’ve been home?”
How many people could name every single person in their high school graduating class? Their middle names. The names of their
parents. What they wanted to be when they grew up. Their favorite song. Their best subjects in school. Whether or not they’d
had braces. What they liked on their pizza.
I could.
My senior class was made up of Addie Atwater, Laila Olivet, Wes Hobbes, Cole Kimball, and me. That was it. For the first seventeen
years of my life, I’d known everything about each one of them. Laila and Cole had been best friends since birth, Addie and
Wes had been in love nearly as long, and I was the fifth wheel. Except I wasn’t. We were a well-tuned five-wheeled machine,
each wheel dependent on the others. They were my family. The only family I’d ever had, really.
And I hadn’t told a single one of them that I was leaving Adelaide Springs and never coming back. I hadn’t spoken to a single
one of them since.
Now, I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know if they still lived there, if they were married, if they had kids of their own. And statistics would lead us to believe at least one of them had to be gluten-free or lactose intolerant, right? Did they even eat pizza anymore?
“It’s been a lifetime since I’ve been there. A literal lifetime. I don’t know who’s there now.”
They’d all had plans to get out and go on to bigger and better things, but that town had a way of sinking its teeth into you
if you let it. It was like there was a window of opportunity, and if you didn’t leave when the window was open, you’d die
there. The majority of people—the older generations—seemed perfectly fine with that. Why would they ever want to live or die
anywhere else? The five of us had always wondered if the older people were different from us or if they’d just missed their
window and somewhere along the line forgotten they’d ever had different dreams. Was that what would become of us if we stuck
around?
When my chance to get out came along, I hadn’t even turned back long enough to see if the window had closed behind me.
Colton took a deep breath and fell back onto the sofa. “I can’t deny it would make for good television, so I don’t think I’d
have any trouble selling it to Bob. But it would be risky, Brynn. For you, I mean. If it didn’t work... If viewers didn’t
buy it...”
I nodded. “I know. That would be it.”
My mother—the woman who raised me, if that’s what you could call it—had predicted I would never amount to anything. That’s
what she’d said, right? Over and over she’d drilled that into me. She’d been dead for a decade now, but there could be little
doubt that her impact and reminders of a life I’d worked hard to forget would still linger there. In that town. In those people.
But she didn’t get the last word. She didn’t get to whisper “I told you so” or “I knew it” from beyond the grave.
I looked up and met his eyes, already making a mental list of all I needed to do to prepare. At the very top was swinging by the Tom Ford store on Madison Avenue to see if Ultra Raven came in waterproof.
“Set it up, Colton. If I have to go back there in order to escape that town, once and for all, that’s what I’m going to do.”