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“Nope. You already watched one.”
“Why?”
“This is my time.Alone.”
She stares at me as if the concept of me wanting alone time is a foreign word to her. It is. She spends every single day with me. They have no concept of me wanting adult time. “You’re not alone. Uncle Morgan’s here.”
“And you need to go back to bed.”
She groans, flopping herself onto the floor. “Fine.” Before she runs into her room, she says something that hits me so hard. Like a bullet to the chest. “Tanner told me my mommy didn’t want me.”
I’m going to kill this Tanner boy.
And then an even harder question comes before I can answer her. “Is she ever coming back?”
For a while, I thought maybe she might, but then I realized that Amarillo and this life didn’t have anything to offer Tara. “No, probably not.” Camdyn knows more than Sev does about their mother. She knows she left, but has never seen a picture of her, and I’m not even sure she remembers her.
Morgan returns to the couch and hands me a beer, remaining quiet.
Camdyn draws in a heavy breath, too much worry on her face as she eyes the snow and then me. “Do daddies leave too?”
I lean forward and grab her into my arms and hold her close to my chest. “Not this one.”
There’s a flash of a memory. The one where Tara was holding Sev moments after her birth and crying for reasons I couldn’t understand. Maybe us Grady boys are cursed.
Women always seem to leave us.
Even navigation is drawing a blank.
KACY
When I was five years old, I used to climb up to the top of our roof from my bedroom window and then jump into our pool. I had absolutely no fear. I didn’t have a concept of it back then. I still don’t because hello, road trip on my own. So many things could go wrong, but I cared about none of it when I left.
I also remember thinking my dad was ten feet tall and could do nothing wrong. I believed, wholeheartedly, that he hung the moon and stars. His gentle hands, the soft whisper of an “I love you,” and he’d sing to me just before I fell asleep. He meant the world to me. Still does, despite his faults.
Dads are supposed to protect you from harm, and while he did, he was too caught up in his life to notice his wife was sleeping with my boyfriend.
You want to know what else he was too busy to do?
Teach me to drive in snow. And read a map because guess who doesn’t have service?
Me.
And guess what it’s doing somewhere outside Amarillo?
Snowing. I’m not even talking about a few flakes in the sky. This is a full-blown whiteout. I’ve been shaken up and put inside a real-life snow globe. All I see are flakes flying around in all different directions, like sugar being thrown at my windshield. And to top it off, the wind is insane and rocking my car from side to side, making staying on the road nearly impossible.
The damn map makes absolutely no sense to me. There’s lines and highways, but the road I’m on, it’s not on the goddamn thing.
“Well, I don’t know if I ever thought this through. I’m a little bit insane, and I think I’m going crazy. And I don’t know if I’ve been this lost!” I sing, and yes, I’m rewording “Push” to fit my current situation. I’mthatscared. Have you ever been lost on a ranch road in the middle of nowhere? Well, then you don’t get to judge me.
Fuck. Why did I take that detour to pee? And why had I never learned to read a damn map? They should really teach that in school.
Wait… they do, don’t they?
Shit. Damn it.
And while I’m on this rant, why don’t they teach people in California to drive in the snow? We need to know these things. Just in case someday we decide we’re going to abandon our lives in Cali-hell-ia.