Chapter 21
She never left.
How is it that three little words could have so much of an impact?
I lift my head, staring across the stretch of green, to the booth tucked beneath strands of twinkle lights. People move between us, unaware, bargaining, laughing, living their ordinary lives, while mine screeches to a halt.
I thought she was gone.
I thought she had disappeared like she always said she would.
I can hear her now, all full of that teenage fire. I would never stay in Rosehill.
“Di,” Clara says gently, her fingers closing around my arm as worry fills her voice. “Do you want to sit down? I know this is… a lot.”
The weight of her presses down on me until I feel like I can’t breathe. Almost forty years.
Forty years of coping mechanisms, of the breathing exercises, and now every bit of it threatens to crumble at the sight of her.
“I thought she left,” I say through my abruptly dry mouth. “Clara, I thought she never came back. She always said she would leave Rosehill. I thought—”
“I know,” she murmurs, rubbing her hand up and down my arm in an attempt to soothe me. “Maybe we should go home and think about things. Maybe you could—”
I don’t give Clara a chance to finish her sentence before I start toward Lily.
Oh my god.
Lily.
If I could, I would run, but my joints protest.
As I get closer to her, enough to see how beautiful she still is, I’m painfully aware of my own body.
How softness has settled around my hips.
My arms have filled out, and so has my stomach.
My hands that were once young and pretty have aged over time.
Have held four babies and cooked countless meals.
Still, in this moment, they tremble.
The closer I get, the more of her I can take in. The gray braid with a hint of her old ginger hair entwined through it. Her freckles are still there. Her pale skin turned a shade of pink with the start of a sunburn. And of course, she’s wearing overalls.
With paint smudged on them.
She laughs at something a customer says, and that sound alone threatens to bring me to my knees.
She’s older, there’s no doubt about it. We both are. There are lines around her eyes now, and around her mouth. But there has never been a thing about Lily Price that wasn’t breathtakingly beautiful.
Shame crawls across my skin. I want to pull at my shirt, adjust my posture, hide the parts of me that point out how I’ve changed. It’s been so long now that I can’t even remember what I looked like in my youth.
It didn’t feel important.
Standing here now, watching Lily, vibrant and alive, and if anything, more lovely than she’s ever been, that’s no longer the case. I want her to see the version of me that…
Don’t think about that.
When I reach her booth, she doesn’t immediately notice me, and for that, I am grateful. It allows me to watch her in her element, to take her in for the first time in private.
She eventually does turn her head in my direction, meeting my eyes with a smile and a greeting on her tongue.
And then she freezes.
Shock flickers across her features. Real, raw shock, widening her eyes, much like my own reaction the moment I saw her.
Then something happens.
The softness drains from her face. Her posture straightens, and her jaw sets with a practiced control. She puts her walls up easy as breathing.
“Lily,” I breathe out anyway, and I know her name feels too intimate coming from my mouth, but I can’t hold it back.
Lily doesn’t have the same problem. “Diana,” she says, nowhere near as warm, but I can’t bring myself to care. Hearing my name in her voice again after all this time has me on the verge of tears.
I smile because I don’t know what else to do, my lips trembling. “I missed you.”
She doesn’t say it back.
Instead, her gaze flicks over me once, quick, assessing. My cheeks burn along with everywhere her eyes land. I don’t want to see her reaction, to know how far I fall short of who I used to be in her eyes.
She shifts her weight and glances past my shoulder, toward the growing line.
“You visiting?” she asks, neutral to anyone else. But to me… so distant.
That’s all she has to say to me.
Are you visiting?
Like we’re old classmates. Like we didn’t spend every second together as children. Like we didn’t spend half of that last summer tangled in each other.
“No, I… I’m back. I’m staying with Clara at the old house.”
Her mouth purses, and I try not to stare at the little dimples at the corners of her lips.
“Huh.”
I fight the ache threatening to take over, curling my fingertips at my sides to stop their trembling. Lily has always been grumpy, I have to remind myself. But as I search her face for even the smallest glimpse of the girl who once looked at me like I was the most precious thing in her world…
I can’t find her this time.
So I reach toward her booth, because I need something. Some way to connect.
“These are beautiful,” I say, steadying my voice. This part is easy. It was never hard for me to compliment her art. “Truly, Lily. They’re… stunning.”
She shrugs her freckled shoulders. “They pay the bills.”
When a customer steps around me, Lily turns toward him, her face warming with easy friendliness, wrapping a mug with steady hands.
It’s natural.
When the young man leaves, Lily looks back at me, cool and composed. “Did you want to buy something, Diana?” The formal tone feels like a door slamming in my face that I had no idea was ever going to be shut.
I nod too quickly, praying she can’t see the tears threatening my eyes. “I… y-yes. The blue bowl. If that’s okay.”
“It’s fine.” She selects the bowl from the table, and I can’t help but watch the movements of her hands. The scar on her knuckle is still there. I was there when she got it.
I kissed it to make her feel better.
She turns away from me to wrap my purchase, but I can see the crease between her eyebrows, focusing intently on a task that she should be able to do in her sleep.
When she hands me the bag, she’s careful not to let our fingers touch.
“Thank you,” I whisper, but she doesn’t hear me.
A young woman with long dark hair and brown skin has entered the booth from the side, and all of Lily’s attention is on her. “Sorry I’m late, Nate was being so…”
I stand there like a fool for one humiliating second longer, my mind screaming for her to pay attention to me.
But Lily doesn’t look my way again, so I turn away before my face can betray anything. The world blurring through my eyes.
Everyone carries on, having a nice summer day, all while my heart feels like it’s been cracked in half.
When I return to Clara, her eyes search my face desperately.
I swallow hard, clutching the painted bag to my chest, and force my lips into a smile. “Ready to go?”
Clara’s face softens in that way it always does with me lately. “If you are.”
I nod, because that’s the thing I’ve always done. Move forward. Make the sensible choice. Don’t make a big deal about things. Never be angry. Or sad.
Never have thoughts or feelings at all.
My legs feel wobbly as we walk. The noise of the market fading into nothing but a low hum, all happening underwater. I keep my fingers tight around the bag, digging my nails into my palm.
Clara unlocks the car.
I don’t remember how I got inside. But the second she slides into the driver’s side, it all bubbles up, too much to contain.
Clara knows. She doesn’t start the car. Instead, she angles her body to face me. “Let’s talk.”
I laugh.
It doesn’t sound like me.
“You knew she was back.”
Clara closes her eyes. “Di…”
“You knew she was back,” I repeat, the only thing going through my head. “How long?”
Clara pauses, bracing for my reaction. “Years. She came back shortly after you moved to Atlanta.”
I stare at her.
That can’t be right.
“After I moved to…” The words don’t make sense.
The betrayal. Forty years. They knew.
“You finally seemed… okay,” Clara says, interrupting my spiral. “You were starting to be happy in Atlanta. You were stable. And I tried to bring it up to Mom and Dad, that it wasn’t right to not tell you, but they said it would reopen everything. That it would only disrupt your happiness.”
“And I wanted you to be happy.”
“Disrupt things,” I echo. “Right. Because god forbid I have feelings. God forbid, I miss my best friend who up and vanished!” I would feel bad for raising my voice at my little sister if I weren’t so angry.
“Hey,” Clara says, reaching for my hand. “That’s not fair.”
“No,” I respond quietly, squeezing her hand anyway. “What’s not fair is that an hour ago I thought Lily Price, my best friend, vanished off the face of the earth, and all of you just… let me believe it.”
The truth of what happened is almost too much. My entire family conspired against me to never see her again. I knew they didn’t approve of our friendship, but wow.
My brain is rewriting every memory of my parents after that summer. My older brothers, even Clara.
We never had another holiday in Rosehill. They never asked me to visit. If I brought it up, they would always somehow twist it into a visit to Atlanta.
I thought they were being kind. Understanding. They knew the idea of going back home, to a Rosehill without Lily, was hard for me.
But a Rosehill without Lily never existed.
“She wouldn’t even talk to me,” I whisper, my voice cracking as I can’t hold back my tears anymore. “She hates me, and I don’t even know what I did.”
Clara wipes my face with her thumb. “Lily doesn’t hate you,” she murmurs. “I’m sure seeing you was hard for her, too. It’s been so long.”
I look back out the window at the town square, where I know Lily is, right now.
I know where she is.
I’m angry, and I’m hurt, and the magnitude of what my family did to keep us apart hasn’t fully sunk in yet.
But for the first time in a long time, I think I feel alive.
“I want us to be okay,” I say, turning back to face her. “I want to be friends again.”
Clara nods, pulling me into a hug.
“I think one day you will be.”