by Lisa Sorbe
Copyright © 2018 Lisa Sorbe
All rights reserved.
This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover Design and Formatting: Indie Solutions by Murphy Rae & Allusion Graphics
ISBN-13: 978-0-9993480-7-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-9993480-6-2 (e-book)
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Epilogue
Also by Lisa Sorbe
About the Author
I remember the snow.
I remember the way his chest felt against my back. How the strong beat of his heart pulsed through our layers, our bodies, until our very centers throbbed as one.
I remember the way he smelled, mint and fresh pine with an undercurrent of something sweet, like citrus, the scent made all the more potent in the crisp night air.
I remember the stars, like diamonds in the sky. An upturned bowl filled with flickering lights.
And I remember the moon. The way it turned everything silver—his hair, his face, his lips.
The temperature had dropped to single digits earlier that day, and by the time the sun collapsed behind the horizon and we’d pulled the old sled from storage, all of northern Minnesota had dipped below zero. But my body was so fevered I felt like crawling out of my coat, my skin. And when the snow started to fall, I swore I could hear it sizzle as it died against my cheeks.
The past was our tether; it snaked around the present, binding us to a future I both wanted and didn’t want.
I wanted him. But I didn’t want this town. This street. This life.
I didn’t want to die here. And I would die, inside, if I stayed.
I wanted the world outside of Wolf Lake. Not the one in it.
Even if this one did have Weston Brooks.
Mostly because it had Weston Brooks.
My survival depended on his pain.
But the night gave us a clean slate. And the snow, a canvas.
I had planned to tell him then. That once the snow melted, I was leaving…for good. But I didn’t. I held onto my words, swallowed them as easily as I swallowed him. As easily as I slipped my gloved hand into his and followed him inside.
We all do things against our better judgment. When the roar of desire thunders in our ears, it drowns out our logical minds, our common sense. We become lost to everything but the moment.
That night, desire pushed my plan aside. The list I created when I was fourteen that detailed all of the things I would need to do in order to escape this place, slipped completely from my mind. I’d faithfully checked off numbered bullet points for years, the most recent one earlier that day: Scholarship to ASU.
For almost four years I had worked tirelessly, executing every item on that list to absolute perfection, all with one goal in mind. But that night, the night West showed up at my door, cheeks red from the cold and a cocky grin turning up his lips, I lost myself. I gave in to that desire, strayed from my path.
It was just for a moment, just for a night, and though it was beautiful, it almost ruined everything.
I won’t make that mistake again.
Some people let go of the past as easily as clipping a loose thread off a new pair of jeans. One clean snip. No fuss, no muss.
And then there are others, the ones who cling to Life’s loose strands, leaving them to pull and twist and snag, slowly unraveling until there’s a big gaping hole where there shouldn’t be. It eats away at their souls until, eventually, there’s nothing left.
My mother was the latter.
As for me? I have no use for the past.
At first glance, it would appear that the two-story craftsman I grew up in hasn’t changed one bit since the day I left twelve years ago. But if you look closely—and, believe me, I’m trying very hard not to—you can see the changes. Notice the way the green paint is slightly splotchy, faded from years spent under the Midwest’s blazing summer sun. And then there’s the way the white paint on the railing is slowly being eaten up by corrosion, leaving mottled rust-colored spots that look diseased. There are more cracks in the sidewalk leading up to the front porch than I remember there being, and even more fissures cut through the driveway’s oil-stained concrete. My dad used to caulk them, but he’s been gone nearly twenty years now, and these new lines have turned into gaping crevices, the cement pulling apart and jutting up like wounds.
You wouldn’t notice these things if you were just driving by, flying fast down the hill that makes up a small portion of the 2600 block of Vining Drive. But if you stop and look—if you remember what everything was like before—you can tell.
Time hasn’t been kind to my childhood home. My mother, I suppose, did what she could. Or perhaps she didn’t even notice these things, these sorry imperfections that have taken hold of the old house and spun it into this current state of decline. When you live with something day in and day out, especially for years and years the way she did, you tend to become blind to the changes, the way things fold and wrinkle, crack and peel.
Not that I was around to help. I got the hell out of dodge right after high school.
I’m sure my mother would call it charming, this time-worn version of our once happy home. Point out the way the overgrown oak in the front yard has grown since she and my father planted it the year they moved in, not noticing the way it desperately needs to be trimmed and shaped, the branches hanging low over the roof and probably causing damage to the tiles. And then there’s the chunk of house missing from the overhang above the garage, a perfect half circle where I threw a wild pitch one day when I was nine and just learning to throw a ball; the lobbed pitch veered too high and tore through the wood as easily as if it was butter. My dad never got around to fixing it and, after he was gone, my mother never wanted to. In her mind, if it was a part of the house, it was a part of us. She clung to the past like a drowning person clings to the last remaining piece of driftwood in a storm-swept sea.
This house was her life preserver, and I refused to stick around and let it become mine. I drea
med of a life far away from my hometown, my street, and spent hours upon hours holed up in my room or the library, reading and studying until my vision blurred. When the letter from Arizona State arrived, I remember feeling a sense of relief, like the breath that had been stuck in my chest since the day I found my dad collapsed on the floor of our garage due to a bad heart when I was eleven had finally been released. My chest didn’t feel swollen with pride, accomplishment. Instead, if felt hollow. Blissfully empty. I didn’t even look in the rearview mirror as I drove away months later, heading for a new life halfway across the country.
So yeah. Knowing my sentimental mother the way I did, I’m quite sure she found all this—the beaten wood, the overgrown fauna, the cracked cement and sagging roof and splotched railing—meaningful, beautiful. Like a living photo album of sorts, a nostalgic nod to the past she loved so much.
I just call it decrepit.
Still, the sight of it does something weird to my chest, pulls at the muscles of my throat. But my eyes remain dry behind my sunglasses, which I leave on as I step out of the Jeep Compass I rented a mere thirty minutes ago and make my way around it. I give the surrounding houses a quick glimpse as I go, noting that not much has changed in the old neighborhood, either. But I don’t allow my eyes to linger, just press my thumb into the lock-release on the key fob and, like I always do, focus instead on the task at hand.
Lifting the hatch, I pull out my luggage, throw the strap of my travel tote over my shoulder, and snap the handle of the suitcase into place. This is all done sharply, crisply, the way I’m used to doing things. I pluck my laptop case from the cargo haul along with my purse and shut the door. Firm, methodical, efficient.
Life is a checklist, and if you continue to cross out tasks, one after another, you’ll end up where you want to be.
Too many people leave their lives to chance, too wishy washy in their desires to ever make a move. Or, even worse, too lost to their addictions, their vices, to even try. They let life run them, nothing but numb-downed pieces on a chess board, giving up control to whatever unseen hands they believe are manipulating them from above.
I’m not one of those people.
Lord, do with me what you will, my mother used to say.
Lord, I’d like to see you try, is my motto.
To further that motto, I keep extensive lists. Lists of things to do for work, for home, for health and beauty and relationships. I even keep a list of my lists, something I check every once in a while, just to make sure there aren’t any areas of my life I’m leaving out. Areas that aren’t under my complete control.
I don’t leave things up to chance.
This may sound crude, so forgive me. I promise I’m usually more couth than this but… Fate? That bitch can suck my dick. If, of course, I had one.
Something, as a matter of reference, most of the people at the law firm where I work think I do.
I take it as a compliment.
And dealing with my mother’s death, cleaning up her house and putting it on the market to rid myself of it once and for all, is the very next thing on my list.
My heels click as I make my way up the walk, the sound satisfying, reminding me that this is just an item with an empty box next to it. I’m giving myself one week to check it off, hop a plane, and get back to Phoenix, back to work.
Back to my life.
I stride up the sidewalk, a new purpose in my step as I remember this will be the last time I’ll ever have to come here—to this house, this town, this state.
I once heard someone joke that you can take the girl out of the Midwest, but you can’t take Midwest out of the girl. Well, I’m not that girl. Phoenix suits me just fine, thank you very much.
I tug the screen door open and prop it against my hip as I dip my hand into the pocket of my coat—a gorgeous Burberry trench that I splurged on with my holiday bonus last year and have only worn once during a business trip to New York. The length hits just below my knees, slighter longer than the pencil skirt I’m wearing, and I feel it scratch across my nylons as I fumble around in my pocket for my old set of keys. Keys I had to fish out from a box nestled in the back corner of the bottom drawer of my dresser before I left this morning.
Aside from today, I haven’t held these keys in my hand since I sold my first car eight years ago.
Dangling from the ring is a simple letter E along with two keys—the spare for my old Honda and the one for this house. I fumble with them now, my hands dry and numb from the cold. There’s no snow on the ground, but Minnesota is currently going through one last cold spell and it wouldn’t be unheard of to see snow fall in May.
Then again, tomorrow could be in the upper seventies.
That’s the Midwest for you.
I disentangle the keys, push the right one into the lock. It sticks, or maybe it’s just me. For some reason I can’t seem to make the muscles in my arm, my wrist, move. My fingers slip against the metal, my skin suddenly slick with sweat.
“Damn it, Elena,” I mutter. “Get a goddamned grip, for Christ’s sake.”
Literally and figuratively, apparently, because something is keeping me from turning the key and unlocking this door to my past.
I grit my teeth, the squeak of enamel and bone sounding like nails on a chalkboard and making me wince. But the extra pressure works, and the lock pops with a sharp snap. It’s a release of sorts, the sound both satisfying and daunting, like the time I visited a chiropractor when I was suffering from a popped rib joint the summer before eighth grade. The crackling of my bones under his hand felt wonderful and terrible at the same time.
A sudden breeze whips my dark locks into a frenzy, fills my ears with a hollow echo that turns into a high-pitched roar. The onset is sudden, quickening, and the wind rails around me like a phantom newly unleashed from its grave. It whistles and shrieks, calling to me in a name I haven’t gone by in years.
“Laney…”
The voice is a ghost from the past, a shout muffled by the wind, and for one crazy moment I wonder if I’ve unlocked a portal rather than the front door to my mother’s home. A time-warp, where yesterday is today and today was a lifetime ago.
I take a step back, and then another, my ankles wobbling slightly in my heels. But the door is just a door, the same slab of stained oak that’s held entrance to this house for as far back as I can remember.
“Laney Everhart?”
Okay. So that was most definitely not the wind.
My eyes close as my back stiffens. On the outside, I appear calm, cool, collected. On the inside, though, I’m a raging sea, a tsunami of emotions, the blood rushing to my head and knocking against my skull like tumultuous waves battering against some faraway shore.
I pull the corners of my mouth up into a smile, the close-lipped one I use in the courtroom. In the animal kingdom, bearing one’s teeth can be considered a sign of weakness. And from my own personal experience, I tend to agree. Which is why I rarely show mine.
I shift to the balls of my feet and turn, hear the grit crunch under my soles as I do. At the last minute, I remember to open my eyes.
I wish I’d kept them closed.
I have to remind myself that the figure standing at the end of my mother’s driveway is no longer a boy. Not the boy I knew, anyway. Not the same one I took my first steps with, learned to swim and ride a bike with, shared my first kiss with.
Lost my…
Nope. We don’t need to go there.
Despite the distance between us, the changes in Weston Brooks are obvious. Unlike the shifts in my mother’s house, the kind you only notice when you get up close and personal, the way time has altered my childhood friend is glaringly apparent.
Weston Brooks is all man.
“Holy shit.”
His voice is deeper than it used to be; there’s an edge to the roughness, like the sound a serrated blade makes when cutting through the coarse bark of a tree. There’s something else there, too. Something that sounds a lot like an accusation.
Like I don’t have the right to be here.
“Weston Brooks.” I lift my chin as I study him, taking in his worn jeans, his flannel jacket, the sandy-colored hair that just brushes the tips of his high cheekbones. His jaw is more defined, more grimly set than I remember it being the last time I laid eyes on him, back when we were seventeen and I…
Well, that’s neither here nor there.
He was always gorgeous, from being an adorable toddler with flaxen ringlets to a cute pre-teen with a crooked smile that matched an endearing overbite…and finally evolving into a hot teenager who grew into his skin better than any other guy in our graduating class.
When we were kids, though, I was the only one who could see the light in him, who knew how special he was. And for those early years, I had West all to myself. But there was a brief time, during high school, when we were worlds apart in popularity, in social circles. He was the boy next door but he might as well have lived on the other side of the moon; too far away to touch during the day. But we found companionship in the night, always meeting back here on this street, usually on this very porch.
For a moment, we don’t say anything, just continue to stare at each other. The gray sky throws a shadow over his face, clouds the sky-blue of his eyes. Or maybe I’m the one darkening his gaze. I remember the time I drowned in those luminous pools, feeling both lost and found as we rocked against each other, that long-ago night when we left our youth behind.
But now… He doesn’t look happy to see me, that’s for sure.
Then again, why would he?
And why do I even care?
He looks down, rubs a hand over the back of his neck, propping the other on his hip. A few seconds pass like this before he peers up at me, squinting. “I was wondering if you’d even come back.”
I can keep my cool in practically any situation. On the softball field when I was young, I thrived under the pressure of a full count. During finals week in college, I was the only one of my friends who didn’t breakdown at least once or twice, sobbing into their ramen noodles. When I sat for the LSATs, I didn’t even break a sweat. And these days, when I’m in the courtroom and cross-examining a particularly sticky witness, my cheeks don’t flush with frustration.
