Chapter 25
Miles
Thursday
The day before had been the day of our graduation. The event was held on the high school football field. There was a grand stage and rows of folding chairs. Students in caps and gowns walked alphabetically toward rising applause. Ella was asked to speak. Flashes from cameras lit up the day.
“You haven’t decided yet” was all that echoed in my head.
University of Cadence was eight hours away from Evermere. Eight hours.
June 3rd started by disguising itself as just another normal day.
Ella and I spent the morning at the beach and the early afternoon wandering through the aisles of the local market.
Both our mothers had made “to buy” lists — hers was substantially longer than mine — and we were spending our Thursday talking over fresh lettuce, debating her brother’s favorite dairy, investigating where she might have forgotten her purse that morning, and much more that kept us entertained for about two hours.
There was just one important topic I didn’t touch.
As I drove past the playground and turned onto my street, my brain remembered the onions. Spending so much time with Ella had made me distracted. Maybe distraction was contagious. But I had left the onions behind, on the market shelf. She had left her purse somewhere, she still didn’t know where.
I laughed to myself, alone in the car, but that laugh quickly vanished as I watched a familiar man walk out of my gate.
It was my stepfather. Or he used to be. Ben. Someone I hadn’t seen in the last nine months.
Ben had always been a broad-shouldered, strong man with a muscular frame, like all my mom’s boyfriends before him. But right there, he seemed thinner, not so robust. He looked a little… shrunken.
And the second he glanced into the car window, he recognized me.
“Miles!” he called, approaching the car. I didn’t return his smile.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, pushing the car door open. I hadn’t planned on ever seeing him again. And I certainly had no intention of pretending I forgave him for ordering my mom out of his house, without much of a goodbye to my face.
“Man, you’ve grown up this last year,” he said, smiling weakly, looking at me with his proud eyes.
“You came to apologize to her?” I barked at him.
“What?” he asked, confused. And I didn’t answer him. So he went on. “Miles, I notice you’re coming at me guns blazing—”
“Yeah, you expect me to hug you hello after leaving me and my mom and showing up from nowhere almost one year later?” I snapped at him.
“Leaving you?” He raised one hand and closed his eyes.
“Miles,” he took a deep breath, and this time I let him continue, “I did not leave you. I believe your mother should be the one telling you this, but…” he paused for a second, looking into my eyes.
“You two left me. When I came home that Thursday night, you two were gone. I never got an explanation larger than the paragraph your mother wrote in a note to me. I love you both so much. And suddenly life turned upside down. And you left. I didn’t get a phone number, an address, or a reason… ”
He looked at the ground, his head hanging down. He seemed defeated.
My heart was racing. I couldn’t respond. I had heard a completely different story. And for almost an entire year, I had believed I should hate him for it.
But now… I wasn’t so sure.
Did I believe him?
Ben and I sat on the ground, resting against a wall, in the shade of a pine tree.
He told me about trying to find me by contacting my old school, but they hadn’t given him any information.
He shared it with their couple friends, but no one knew where we had gone or saw the situation coming.
He spoke to the neighbors in his building to see if anyone knew where we might have driven off to.
But there were no clues, no trail.
It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that he ran into one of my mother’s colleagues from her old fitness club, and she revealed something about a piece of land in Evermere that my mother had once brought up to her in a conversation.
“I didn’t know if I should keep looking for you,” he said. “But I couldn’t give up without having a conversation. That’s not me.”
“Then come,” I smiled at him and started to stand up. “Let’s go inside. Let’s have a conversation, the three of us.”
He stood still, giving me a compassionate smile that felt almost apologetic.
“I have to go, Miles.”
“But—”
“Your mom and I had our final conversation before you came home,” he said calmly, gesturing for me to sit back down where I was, next to him. “She wants to part ways. I’m going back to Wayneth, and you’re both staying here. It’s what she wants.”
“But why?” I couldn’t understand it. Everything was spinning so fast. My hands were numb.
He gave me another weak smile. “Sometimes, you won’t understand what a woman wants. You don’t have to understand everything she wishes for, but you always have to respect it.”
I was not used to crying, whether alone or with company. I wrote music, played instruments. That was an expression of sadness. When I was with others, I would sit quiet and let the feeling fade away.
But at this precise moment, my throat tightened, my eyes pricked with tears, I felt my hands again. Ben was saying goodbye to the hope that built inside me. The hope of the three of us together again, as a family.
He got up from the ground and held out a hand to help me up. My legs felt unstable. I knew I could beg him to stay. But he wouldn’t.
“I have to go now,” he said, offering me a quiet smile, his gaze tracing my face, as if he was trying to etch it into memory. “You take care of yourself, Miles.”
He gave me one last hug, patting my back. And when he let go of my shoulders, he turned around.
“Wait!”
He stopped and looked back at me.
“Do you have any idea what it was? What changed?” I had to ask him.
He stood frozen. His lips unmoving for a few seconds. His brain was trying to get there too. To the reason.
“Maybe…” He stopped. Nothing else came out. The words had left him. Disappeared. “Never mind,” he finally added. “Your mother doesn’t want me in your life anymore. And I need to respect it. I have to go, Miles.”
He stayed in place, smiled at me weakly, once again, and raised an arm to wave goodbye before getting in his car and driving away.
“Mom?” I entered the living room, steady but calm, and gave her a chance to explain it to me. “Why was Ben outside, Mom?”
She looked at me from the couch. Her eyes perplexed. Disoriented. “It’s adult stuff, Miles. You’re not to ask such things about our private conversations.”
She sounded so serious, but her words did not make sense to me.
“What do you mean? What things?” I didn’t need her to explain everything. I just needed her to explain something.
Why had Ben just told me the opposite of what she had been telling me?
“It’s not of your concern,” my mom said.
She was being cold to me, like my emotions about all of it didn’t matter.
“Mom, he told me,” I said. She stood, very serious. “You’ve been so sad these last few months… Why did you lie about him throwing us out of his house?”
“You talked to him?” She insinuated as if it were a betrayal.
“Yes, I talked to him. I’ve been so angry at him all this time for making you suffer, for leaving us just like that. I never wanted to see him again! But now I’m not so sure what really happened back in Wayneth.”
“It’s between me and him!” She snapped.
“Why are you being like this? And why did you lie to me? You told me he wanted nothing to do with us anymore! We just left! And he didn’t want us to! You know he didn’t want us to leave!”
She inhaled deeply. “But we did, Miles.” She exhaled. “And it is what it is.”
“Explain it to me!” I begged her.
“Why can’t you just accept it?!”
“Because I missed him!” I blurted out. “And I’m mad that you broke things the way they were.” He had driven away, he left us, he left me. And I realized I missed the closest thing to a father figure I ever remember having. “And I don’t understand why you didn’t even tell me the true story.”
“You’re being childish.”
I stood there, looking at her. But she didn’t meet my eyes. “You’re being cruel,” I said.
My mom had no more words.
She got up and exited the fight, like she had always done.
One moment we were firing our disagreements at each other, the next moment, she was getting up and giving up.
It had always been like that. Turns out, my stepfather wanted to stay, I wanted to stay, but she didn’t allow us to. She never stayed.
And suddenly, I didn’t want any more of that instability.
She left me alone in the living room.
I left her alone at the house.
I walked for 15 minutes to get to the town’s main street. Hands buried in my pockets. Jaw tight. My brain was asking questions. My anger wasn’t subsiding. I felt like screaming. Frustrated. Confused. Desperate.
I saw my destination on the horizon: CIC’s pink flowers covering the wall by the gate.
When I got there, I asked if Ella was around. But no one had seen her.
I stepped outside again. My thoughts kept looping back to the fight, to the things my mother didn’t say, to the way she walked away, to my stepfather standing there, delivering a different version of events.
I needed to talk to Ella. She would say something I probably needed to hear. She wouldn’t walk away. She would stay.
My leg bounced as I stood by the entrance, scanning the street like she might appear if I wanted it badly enough.
But she didn’t.
I wandered through the streets with no real direction.
After a while, I passed the Village Oven and slowed down.
I spotted Ella just as she was stepping outside, laughing as she waved goodbye to a group from our school, the ones she got along with but only ever spent time with during or between classes, never outside of them.
The “popular ones”, I heard a girl call them that the other day.
The ones who thrived on being talked about, who seemed to enjoy the whispers and rumors that followed them, wearing them like a badge of importance.