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“I can, and I will. Aunt Myrtle put Bernard on the road an hour and a half ago. He will be here any second to follow you to their home.”
“Uncle Bernard is going to tail me all the way to Spokane,” I said.
“He will. Once you learn to clean up your act and become the respectful and obedient daughter I know I raised—”
“Mother raised me. You had nothing to do with it.”
“Then you will be permitted to come home and take your rightful place within this family.”
I heard a car rumbling up the driveway and my stomach sank. My brothers stood in the window, their eyes dripping with anger. I turned around and saw my uncle getting out of the car, a stern expression on his face as he walked toward us.
“Are you ready?” my uncle asked me.
“Yep. I was just leaving,” I said.
I stormed off to my car as tears crested my eyes. What the fuck was happening? How the hell had things gotten so screwed up? I slammed myself into my car and waited, watching as my father and my uncle interacted briefly. My mother’s head rose from the porch, her eyes locking with mine as a redness crossed her cheeks.
I couldn’t blame her for what was going on. No matter how much the childish side of me wanted to. I knew I was going to face obstacles if I stood up to my father. I knew I was going to encounter terrible tasks I’d have to accomplish in order to be freed. And while the prospect of spending time with Aunt Myrtle terrified me, I knew I could do this.
This was the escape I had been looking for, even though it was hard to see past the hell I would be in once I got to Spokane. My aunt was a stickler for tradition. So much so that she used old school techniques to get people to fall in line. Corporal punishment was something she stirred into her morning tea, but it was almost hypocritical in a way. Everyone knew that Aunt Myrtle ran her household, even though she was “just a wife and mother.” All of my cousins had fallen in line and led perfect lives because of how she had raised them, but I knew they were all secretly terrified of her.
But getting out from underneath her meant I had already gotten out from underneath my parents. If my father was desperate enough to send me away to a house like hers, then it meant he had run out of options. In an odd way, I had defeated my parents. I had pushed them to their limits and this was their way of washing their hands of my future.
Now, all I had to do was make sure Aunt Myrtle did the same.
Twenty-Two
Travis
It has been six weeks since I had heard anything from Ava. Not that she could have called me—she had no way to—but she hadn’t come over. I ventured into town more often to see if I could run into her accidentally, but she was nowhere to be found. She wasn’t at the coffee shop she frequented, she wasn’t at the library, and after talking with an old woman there and figuring out where she lived, I figured out she was no longer at her home.
I wasn’t sure what I expected and I wasn’t sure what would have been easier to stomach. I didn’t know if I wanted the house to be deserted or if I wanted the house to be full of life. Deserted meant that she had left me like I knew she would. Just a fling for her to get her rocks off and feel like an adult for a little bit. But deserted also meant her father had swung her back into his traps, and that worried me. But if her home was full of life, that meant she was intentionally shooting me down. She was intentionally dodging me, which only reinforced the idea of my being an escape for her.
Either way, it was the same situation as before.
I drove past the massive compound Ava apparently called home in Kettle as a feeling of loneliness washed over me. I found myself in the same situation I had endured years ago and I felt my chest being crushed. Her house was completely deserted, not an ounce of life in sight. The garage was empty, the yard was eerily quiet, and there wasn’t a light on in the house to denote any sign that someone was still there.
I had been left behind by a woman who had greater intentions than me for her life. Ava had left me, deserted and alone after promising me she would come back. After telling me she would make sure to come visit me once she worked things out with her parents. Once again, a woman had promised me the world before leaving me in her dust, and it made me sick.
The property was eerily vacant. Like no one had been there to begin with.
I sped back to my cabin that same day and tried to erase all memories of her in my home. I washed all of my sheets, I vacuumed all the carpets, and I disinfected all of the surfaces I had taken her body against. I threw out the chair I had pulled up to her body that night when I feasted on the depths between her thighs and I b
leached the shower she had cleaned herself in multiple times. I had someone come in and deep-clean all my furniture to try and rid her smell from the cabin.
I even scrubbed my skin red for days, trying to remove the memory of her lips upon my skin.
Nothing, however, could rid my mind of her memory when I closed my eyes.
She was gone and there was nothing I could do about it. Just like I had stood at the altar, helpless and confused, I wandered around my cabin wallowing in my own self-pity. At least when I have been alone before, I had gotten used to it. Loneliness had become a way of life for me, and I had forced myself to make my bed in it. I had put enough time between myself and my ex-fiance for me to forget what it felt like to have someone at my side. I had nothing to compare the loneliness to, and that somehow made it easier to bear.
But having Ava in my arms, having her in my bed, having her in this cabin… it gave me something to compare it to. Gave me a juxtaposition that brought to light how lonely I had truly become. And now, her absence hurt. I laid down in my bed at night and would roll over to see if she was there, and my soul would be broken all over again. I knew it was ridiculous. I knew I was going crazy. I hardly knew anything about this woman. In the back of my mind, I knew I had only known her a few weeks at best. Maybe even a shorter time period than that. But she had touched a part of me I had allowed myself to ignore and forget for years.
And I didn’t know how to shut it off.
So, I did the only thing I knew how to do. I threw myself into work. That was what I did when I was stood up at my own wedding and that was the only thing I had now. Breathline Energies still breathed down our necks about the property we owned in Kettle, which meant I had more meetings with my lawyer to figure out what we can do. They had stopped the threats of government intervention, but they brought up valid points about the way we did business in the mountains. And they were points that had me worried.
Every year, my father wrote off our property in the mountains as a business expense. He could get away with that because we purchased it for environmental purposes and sometimes had to take a chunk of money from the company just to help with the property taxes. We took out licenses for the land and worked to get it permanently protected in the state of Washington. My father tried to get it nationally recognized as a park because the mountains held a couple of species of animals that were closely considered to being extinct.
