Page 145 of Dream On, Ramona Riley

“You’re up early,” Ramona said.

Olive startled, dropping her phone to the tile floor. She bent down to pick it up, her face pale.

“You okay?” Ramona asked.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m just…” Olive trailed off, tucking her phone into her back pocket. “I didn’t think you’d be up yet on a day off.”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Ramona said, taking a mug out of the cabinet. “What about you? You and Marley have plans today?”

Olive said nothing, and that’s when Ramona noticed her duffel bag on the kitchen table, her last name and softball number from Clover Lake High monogrammed in a curly red script over the cream canvas.

“Are you going somewhere?” Ramona asked.

Olive swallowed, and Ramona’s already unsettled stomach cramped with worry.

“What’s going on, Olive? Tell me right now.”

Olive closed her eyes.

“Ollie,” Ramona said sharply. She sounded like a parent, she knew, but her panic was rising.

Olive sighed, looked down at the floor. “I found her.”

For a second, Ramona just stared at her.

Found her.

Found…her.

The words flitted around her head, trying to land.

And then they did.

Found. Her.

“Where?” Ramona asked, her voice barely a whisper.

“Brooklyn,” Olive said. “She does fashion consulting there.”

Ramona’s breath felt nonexistent, her lungs a vacuum. No sound. No light. No air.

“How long?” she asked. “How long have you known?”

Olive bit her lower lip, then lifted her head to look at Ramona. “Since April.”

Ramona blinked, trying to process the information. It all came together in bits and bursts, the last few months. “That’s who you’ve been texting with? Every time I would walk in the room and you put your phone away?”

Olive didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.

“And now you’re going to see her?” Ramona asked. She couldn’t help the hurt that tumbled through her, colliding with the hurt already there from Dylan, the hurt that had been there for eighteen years, since her mother walked out on her.

Olive looked at her. “She said she sent birthday cards.”

Ramona just stared back.

“For years,” Olive said. “And you never told me or showed them to me.”

“Forfouryears,” Ramona said. “Then they stopped. And I didn’t show you because you were a baby, and by the time you were old enough to even understand what they were, she’d stopped sending them.”