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.”
Chapter 3
Sebastian
Friday, March 18
8:45 a.m. Mountain Daylight Time
Sebastian Sudworth rolled out on his mechanic’s dolly from underneath Andi’s Dodge pickup truck with flourish, pushing his heel off the cement at the last second to add in a 360-degree spin.
“You sure look like you know what you’re doing. That should count for something,” Andi teased.
“It really should,” Sebastian agreed. He stayed on his back and used his motor oil–covered hand as a visor as he squinted up at her, standing directly between him and the early-morning sun. “Having said that, I’d strongly recommend you have Roland swing by and double-check my handiwork.”
“Aww, Seb. Don’t worry.” She threw a towel at him as he stood. “I always do.”
He chuckled and wiped off his hands. Truth be told, he thought he was beginning to get the hang of the simple things—changing out fluids and filters, tightening gears, that sort of thing. Roland Cross was a good teacher. Andi Franklin was possibly an even better one, if only because she let her student get his hands dirty.
Adelaide Springs, Colorado, didn’t have any Uber or Lyft drivers, but it had Valet Forge, the car fleet Andi had taken over when her husband died of cancer a few years prior. Well, it was generous to call a 2013 Jeep Wrangler, a 2016 Chevy Silverado, and a hideous orange-and-white 1974 Ford Bronco a fleet. Most of their passengers were tourists passing through, staying there just for the night and afraid to drive on the icy mountain roads after dark. Valet Forge employed one full-time driver: Fenton Norris. No one seemed to know exactly how old Fenton was, but Sebastian had noticed he could be counted on for a “When I was your age . . .” story no matter who he was talking to—from seven-year-old regional spelling bee champ Olive Morissey to seventy-something-year-old mayor Doc Atwater.
Neil Pinkton, fresh out of high school, manned the dispatch. Neil was saving up money for college, or maybe just to move to Denver and give city life a try, but Andi would love having him there for as long as it lasted. Before he went the way of the other few Adelaide Springs residents of his generation.