“Love it,” he gushed, without a moment’s hesitation. “I’m finally living the life I always should’ve been living. I run a small business with my best friend. We live together.” He rolled his eyes a little. “We probably always will. A psychologist might saycodependent; I sayclose.” He gave me another shrug. “I get to wake up every day in the most beautiful place in the world, where I grew up, and I get to help people, in small ways. I make enough money to be comfortable, but not enough to stress!”
“Wow.” I looked at him. “You are who I want to be,” I said.
“Really?” He looked at me and raised that sexy eyebrow. “I find that hard to believe. You’re a famous, bestselling novelist.”
“But I’m also completely alone, living in an apartment that I can’t afford, with a fucking coffee table that cost more than your car, and I’m . . . I’m . . .” A stab in my gut. A hard punch. My heart kicked in my chest and suddenly I couldn’t really breathe.
“What?” he asked, leaning forward.
“I’m . . .unhappy.” I finally said the word that I think I’d known for a very long time. The word that had hung just below the surface. That had bobbed there, just out of reach of my conscious brain. The word that had followed me around for quite some time now, like an unwelcome shadow that I didn’t even know I had.
“So, be happy, then.” Mike leaned even closer to me.
“How?” I asked. I couldn’t help the tears in my eyes now. “I don’t even think I know what would make me happy anymore.”
“Writing makes you happy, doesn’t it?” he asked.
“It did. But now it just feels stressful.”
“So, don’t do it,” he said quickly.
“I can’t do that,” I whispered. “If I’m not Becca Thorne, bestseller, then who am I?”
He leaned closer to me. “Then you’re Pebecca Thorne. The girl with the wrong name, who lost her dad and who overcame a crappy childhood and a bad break-up and then rose above that all to write a book that changed people’s lives.”
I looked over at him, tears escaping my eyes now.
“Why do you have to be someone else, when beingthatperson seems perfect to me?”
My heart thumped in my chest and I gazed out the window. I felt like I couldn’t look directly at him; if I did, I might cry. Ugly cry.
“Do you ever speak to your mom?” he asked.
I shook my head. “We lost contact many years ago. Somewhere between me living with her sister and then me living with one of her cousins. I’m not sure I can forgive her for the childhood she made me have,” I said thoughtfully. I looked at the police station, and it was then that I noticed the sign that had been painted over. “Bottle store?” I pointed at the faint paint on the wall. “This used to be the bottle store?”
“I know. Nothing is really what it seems, in this place,” he said, in a mysterious tone, and, before I could turn around and say something in response, he was already out the door and walking across the parking lot.
Nothing was as it seemed, here. Everything had another side to it. Everyone and everything had a story . . .I wondered what mine was, and whether it had a happy ending?
