Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Reid had arranged everything. One phone call from the prom parking lot, Katy rigid in his passenger seat with mascara on her face she didn’t remember putting on, and within forty-eight hours she’d had a bus ticket, a prepaid phone, and an address in Rhode Island. The Jamieson family foundation funded the farm. Reid’s grandmother had started it thirty years ago as a workforce development program. Nobody there knew Katy’s last name, and nobody asked.
The rows kept her sane. Six to two, weeding, watering, deadheading, harvesting. The work was physical and repetitive and required exactly enough attention to keep her brain from circling back to the gymnasium doorway, to the charcoal suit and her sister’s hand on his arm, and when it circled back anyway she pulled another weed and another and another until her fingers were stained green and her back ached and the image faded to a thing she could hold without her hands clenching.
Amy got a call once a week from the prepaid. Short conversations. “I’m okay, Mom.” “I know, baby.” Amy didn’t push. Amy understood disappearing. Amy had done her own version of it, years ago, with chemicals instead of geography, and she recognized in her daughter the animal need to go somewhere quiet and bleed in private.
Reid called every few days. Never long. “You eating?” “Yes.” “Sleeping?” “Some.” “Need anything?” “No.” He didn’t ask about Julian. He didn’t ask when she was coming back. He asked about the flowers, and she told him about the dahlias, how they grew from tubers that resembled dead things and turned into blooms so vivid it hurt to face them, and he listened, and the listening was enough.
The tears didn’t come for the first two weeks. They finally arrived on day fifteen, in the shower, standing under lukewarm water with her forehead against the tile, and once they started they didn’t stop for forty minutes. She sat on the shower floor and cried with her arms around her knees and her face hidden and no one to hear it.
After that, the crying came in waves. Unpredictable. She’d be harvesting zinnias and the orange of the petals would catch the afternoon light and turn copper and the copper would remind her of his voice, and she’d have to stop and put her hands on her thighs and wait until it passed.
And she missed him. That was the part she couldn’t forgive herself for. After everything he’d done, the destruction speech and the fixation and the prom and her own sister on his arm, she still missed him. Not the cruelty. The other thing. The man underneath the cruelty, the one who’d asked her to walk with him and gone rigid when he touched her and put his forehead on her shoulder and stayed there like someone who’d been lost for a very long time and had just found the only place that felt like home. She missed that man. She hated that she missed him. She missed him anyway.
On day twenty-six, she was kneeling in the sweet pea row, tying tendrils to the trellis, when she heard a car on the dirt road.
Cars came down the dirt road twice a day: Marguerite at six, the delivery driver at noon. It was three o’clock. The light was golden and the sweet peas smelled like sugar and the air was warm and still, and the car slowed, and stopped, and a door opened and closed.
Footsteps on gravel. Heavy. Male.
Her hands kept working, tying a tendril to the wire, and her heart was doing something she couldn’t name because it was too early and too impossible and her brain refused to process what her body already knew.
“Katy.”
His voice.
Her eyes closed. Her hands stopped. The sweet pea tendril she’d been tying curled around her finger, delicate and green, and she held onto it like it was the only thing keeping her tethered to the ground.
“Katy. Please.”
When she opened her eyes, Julian Ventura was standing at the end of the sweet pea row in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled and dirt on his shoes that hadn’t been there when he’d gotten out of the car. His eyes were bloodshot. His face was thinner than she remembered, the bones sharper, and he carried himself like a man who hadn’t slept or eaten properly in a month. His hands were at his sides, and they were shaking.
Not the rigid, white-knuckled grip she’d come to associate with him fighting himself. Shaking. Open. Visible.
She stood up, brushed the dirt off her knees, and pulled her gardening gloves off one finger at a time and set them on the trellis wire. She did these things with care, because the alternative was running to him or running from him and she was not going to do either.
“How did you find me?” she asked.