Page 27 of Now to Forever (Life on the Ledge Duet #2)

Eighteen

While every DIYing maniac on the internet made me think I’d be done with my house in a weekend, a month in and it looks worse than it did the day I moved in.

Bare floors, bare walls, no furniture. All that remains in the gutted downstairs is the woodstove, a mini fridge, and a microwave.

Other than the bathrooms I’ve decided out of sheer exhaustion to hire out, it’s a blank slate if a blank slate was wood paneled and triangular.

Even with the delays, the house will still be ready by Thanksgiving for June’s ridiculous feast and, per the weekly emails I get from Vince reminding me of all the money we’re going to make, will be listed on December first.

And yet.

The more I move forward, the more complicated my feelings get. The more I start to imagine myself here beyond a single season. Despite the lack of people in my life to fill the house, I wish I had enough money to load it onto the back of a truck and take it with me to wherever it is I end up going.

“We just scraped all that wallpaper and you want to put more up?” Wren asks with a groan, glaring at the floral printed material in my hands. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Don’t swear.”

“You swear all the time.”

“Fine, I’ll quit.” She looks at me like I can’t do it, and I give her a silent look that says watch and fucking learn.

“As I was saying, this is just a little wallpaper for that weird-shaped wall under the steps. See the greenish blue in the flowers? It will go with the paint.” I hold the paint chip out, and her neutral expression confirms my decision.

“Told you I’m clucking smart.” I grin; she rolls her eyes.

“Anyway, we should technically do the wallpaper last, but I’m worried I won’t like it—and it’s small—so let’s start there and we’ll paint the other walls after. ”

“Your pyramid, your rules,” she mutters.

A Third Eye Blind record plays as we get to work, rolling the paste on and lining up strips. “How’s school been?” I ask, holding the ladder as she smooths the paper near the top with a wide-bladed scraper.

She shrugs, her oversized sweatshirt hanging off her shoulders. “Fine. My grandma homeschooled me for the last few months of school when we moved here in the spring, so I’m still the new kid, but it’s not bad.”

“And”—I trade her scraper for another strip of wallpaper, and she works to line the pattern up—“do they know about your mom?”

“I’m not a psycho,” she says, smoothing bubbles out of the paper. “The kids at my old school knew, that’s why my dad wanted to move here. Fresh start.” She rolls her eyes. “Adults always think a fresh start is the answer.”

I almost laugh at how ironic the statement is: her here because Ford was chasing a fresh start, me leaving because I’m doing the same.

“And it isn’t?”

“My mom’s still in prison, still killed someone, still wanted to do drugs and whatever else she did more than she wanted me.” She smooths a palm along the wallpaper. “Doesn’t seem like where I live matters that much.” God, she’s smart . In my contemplative silence, she adds, “But I’m fine.”

Fine . I know that word and know it never means what it’s supposed to.

Fine is the word used to make everyone else more comfortable.

It means falling apart but hiding it. When parents choose something else—something poisonous.

When there’s loss. Heartbreak. When I watched my brother spiral like dirty dishwater draining from a kitchen sink.

Me spending the last twenty years making decisions in hopes of actually being fine.

Fine : Pretending to be someone else at the lake when I was a kid.

Fine : The desperation I felt after things fell apart and left me hollow as a dead tree trunk .

And then it hits me: Maybe I’ll never be fine. Maybe she’s right. Maybe fresh starts don’t exist for people like me. Maybe the constant red thread that’s always connected me to where I came from will never end, not a pair of scissors in the world strong enough to cut it.

And most terrifying: Maybe leaving won’t change a damn thing, just like Glory said.

I clear my throat.

“It’s okay not to be fine, you know,” I say, passing her another strip of wallpaper.

“I don’t know if anybody I trusted told me that when I was younger, and maybe you and I aren’t so different.

I acted out after . . . everything. Drank more than I should have.

Dated some real winners. And it’s taken a while for me to be fine. ”

“You’re fine now?” she asks, brows pinched in skepticism as she looks down over her shoulder.

“Of course, I am.” I hold my palms up. “Fine as a f—” She raises her eyebrows. “—isherman on a bass boat.”

She smooths the last strip. At the top, in the corner where the wall meets the ceiling, excess paper droops down. I frown. “Let me get a razor blade to clean that up.”

She holds out her hand. “I’ll do it.”

I pass her the blade; she drags it along the corner.

“Crap!” she hisses, stopping abruptly to suck her finger. “The blade slipped.”

She comes down the ladder, blood bursting at the tip of her index finger .

“Bathroom,” I command, guiding her with a hand on her shoulder down the hall.

At the sink, she rinses her finger, blood mixing with water down the drain of the puke-green sink. “I don’t think you’ll need stitches.” I try to examine the cut. “Let me look for Band-Aids.”

“It’s fine,” she says, jerking her hand away from me.

“Okay, nice try. Your dad will arrest me if I send you home bleeding. Let me look.” She tries pulling away from me, but I slide the sleeve of her sweatshirt up on her forearm, high enough it stays dry so I can get a firm grip.

“Scotty! Stop!” she yells, trying to pull her arm away again.

“Jesus, Wren. What the hell is wrong with you?” I squeeze my fingers around her arm, wrestling to still her.

Then I look in my hand and see her arm. Covered in white lines. Scars. At least a dozen.

I look at her; her black-rimmed eyes are desperate and filling with tears as they bounce back and forth between mine. Frantic.

No.

I push her sleeve all the way up, heart pounding in my chest as every tally mark of grief is revealed between her wrist and her elbow. “You’ve been cutting yourself,” I whisper. Two are newer. Red and still healing. “Jesus, Wren.”

At her other arm, I touch her skin like I’m not sure if she’s really there. Like maybe my eyes are lying. She doesn’t fight me as I slide the sleeve up revealing the same marks all the way up to her elbow. My chest feels like it’s been dug out with a shovel and filled with lead .

“Take off your pants,” I demand. I had a college roommate who cut herself. All over her inner thighs and across her stomach. “Now.”

Tears drip down her cheeks. “They aren’t anywhere else.”

“Dammit, Wren, let me see.” She pulls her leggings down, just to her knees—I see her inner thighs are clean. “Now your stomach.” She hesitates. “Now!” I shout, emotion burning my eyes and throat.

She lifts her shirt; her stomach is unmarked.

We look at each other, both quiet and unmoving.

“Okay,” I whisper. “This is all going to be okay.”

With a sharp inhale, Wren drops her face to her hands and lets out a loud cry. My response is reflexive: I wrap my arms around her, and she leans into me with all her weight, sobbing. Her screams and cries highlight the lie of fine—it never is.

We drop to the tile floor, her in my arms. “I’m so sorry, Scotty,” she sobs. Over and over and over. Her cries turn to sniffles and mix with my shhh s .

All I can think: I’m in over my head.

I have no clue what to do, how to help her, or why I’m the one sitting with her on this hideous bathroom floor. She deserves someone better. Smarter. A mother who didn’t fuck her whole life up.

Hugging her knees to her chest, she sits up, her smeared eyeliner painting her face.

“Does your dad know?” I ask, resting my back against the bathtub .

She shakes her head, sniffling. “He might suspect, but he hates when we fight. He’d never bring it up unless he knew for sure.”

I nod, shell-shocked and heartbroken.

“Are you going to tell him?” she asks with a sniff.

Once I realized she was okay, it’s the only thing I’ve been thinking of.

If I tell him, I lose her trust, which is what he wanted out of me spending time with her.

If I don’t tell him . . . I can’t even think about that.

I bite a nail. “I don’t know.” I chew until my finger bleeds then move on to the next one. “When was the last time?”

Through sniffles: “A few weeks ago.”

I’m not sure what the protocol is for this. “Why?”

“Because”—she starts to cry again—“my dad found the weed and got mad at me.” I pass her a roll of toilet paper and she blows her nose.

“And I knew about you before I met you. He told me about you. And your brother. So”—she exhales a shaky breath—“I don’t know.

” New tears follow, and she says something garbled that I can’t understand.

“And I should have just told you he was my dad, but not many people want to hang out with a cop’s kid. ”

“Especially that cop.” My joke flops; neither of us laugh.

She blows her nose again.

“Why do you do it?” I ask. “What does it feel like?”

Her eyes widen slightly, caught off guard by my directness.

“I started after my mom went to prison. A kid at school knew, called me a convict baby. Even though my dad’s a decorated cop and zoomed around Atlanta like a superhero.

” She scoffs as she shakes her head, wiping her eyes with a wad of toilet paper.

“I accidentally cut myself doing dishes on a glass that night, but instead of it hurting, I felt relief. Like I had so much pain in me it needed to be bled out. It’s just—some days I’m fine, and then all the sudden I remember my mom killed someone’s daughter, and I don’t know what to do with that. ”

I go dizzy at the visual.

“Are you mad at me?”

Despite the mental health crisis exploding in my ugly bathroom, I laugh.

“I’m the furthest thing from mad, Wren. I’m .

. . sad. Scared. Completely clueless.” I blow out a long and weighted breath.

“This is why people who read monster romance don’t have kids.

” She almost smiles. “Text your dad, tell him I’m dropping you off. ”

She punches at her watch, then stares at me.

“I don’t know,” I tell her, answering the question we’re both thinking as I stand from the bathroom floor. “What I’m going to do or not do, I just—I need time. And, if we do this—if I keep it between us—you listen to everything I say, got it?”

“Yes. I swear.” She sniffs as she stands. “Please, Scotty.”

“If I see a new cut, I’m telling him.”

She nods.

“Are you—” I swallow, scared to finish the question. “Do you want to die?”

Her eyes go as wide as baseballs. “No.”

“Okay.” I have no way of knowing if she’s telling the truth, but I hope she is. Desperately.

Then it strikes me right between the eyes how hard this is.

How royally fucked-up parenthood must be.

One minute you’re scraping wallpaper and laughing, the next you’re in an outdated bathroom, everything falling apart without a soul to tell you what to do.

Nothing to guide you but panic and a prayer that feels too small.

You inhale without a care in the world only to find your lungs collapsed on the exhale.

I’m not made for this; I don’t have a clue.

I study Wren in the Bronco, her gaze out the window, and a deluge of doubt washes over me along with a twisted feeling of confirmation. Because if I can’t handle one hard moment with a kid, I know for certain my choice not to be a mother was also my best.