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Gretta’s hand fell away, and she stepped back. “Make sure that you do.”
Vivian turned and opened the driver’s door.
“What do I tell Nash when he asks after you?”
Pausing, Vivian stared across the field in the direction of his property. Did he hate her? Would he ever want to see her again? Did it even matter?
“Tell him…to have a good life.”
***
The drive back to the city took a couple of days, between making stops and finding places to stop and rest in between. The trip felt far longer going back than it had coming in. Maybe it was because with each mile she put behind her, she felt the pull to go back grow stronger.
Was she making the right decision?
She’d told herself and Gretta she was, but the truth was, she wasn’t so sure. She just knew that to stay in that town would have been a mistake.
Right?
She’d forced her way into peoples’ lives only to turn around and hurt them. It was better that she’d left. Now they could get back on with their day and forget about her.
The traffic was a nightmare. That was something Vivian hadn’t missed. Somehow, it felt even more congested and chaotic than she remembered, though. Horns honking angrily, people shouting at one another, pedestrians risking their lives darting in and out of moving traffic, cars and trucks shoving their way between lanes at the first sight of the smallest opening.
Madness.
This was what she’d once called home? It all seemed so foreign now.
I can’t stay here. After I sign those papers, I’m gone.
Just like before, she had no idea where she would go, but anywhere was better than here. Besides, she still hadn’t seen the ocean. What better excuse to leave was there if not that?
Wending down one narrow street after another, fighting the tide of relentless traffic, Vivian finally made it to the building she’d once called home. It belonged to her parents. They weren’t expecting her, but they had a fully-stocked guest room that was always available.
Pulling the nose of her car up to the gates leading to the underground garage, she pressed the button on the intercom. “Vivian Parish for Nadine and Niles Parish,” she told the invisible person listening on the other end.
There was a brief pause while they checked her name against the pre-approved visitor’s list, and then there was a buzz and click as the gates were unlocked.
“Welcome to East Grande Estates. Enjoy your stay, Ms. Parish,” came the disembodied voice.
Light gave way to dark as she pulled the car inside and circled the garage until she found the pre-approved spot her parents paid monthly to reserve for their guests. It struck her, as she parked and got out, that before she never thought twice about the kind of luxury that surrounded her. Now, she couldn’tnotnotice it.
Everything was so upper crust, so extravagant and expensive, to the point of the ridiculous. Paid parking spots and gated underground garages, apartments that cost more per month than most people made in a year, and so many people vying for it all that they became sour toward one another, resulting in the insanity she’d just waded through outside, yet no one seemed to notice the way it changed them.
Vivian noticed. She felt the changes in herself. Being outside the city had calmed her, had gotten her used to a slower pace, a simpler way of life.
If her mother could hear her thoughts right now, she’d clutch her pearls in horror, because Vivianpreferredthat simpler life over all of this.
That preference wasn’t going to go unnoticed for long. Vivian hadn’t taken time to change into the requisite clothing that was expected from her parents and those they knew. She’d driven away from Gretta’s house in a pair of blue jeans and cowgirl boots with a simple powder-blue T-shirt from a package off a drugstore shelf and, sticking with that theme, she hadn’t bothered to change into a dress and heels before her arrival.
They would just have to take her as she was because she wasn’t the woman they remembered. Everything was different now, like it or not.
The elevator shot to the fourteenth floor where her parents resided and swept to a smooth stop before settling, causing her stomach to drop and flutter. Vivian stepped off and into a gilded hallway covered in the kind of handcraftsmanship that hadn’t been duplicated since the early twenties when the building was constructed.
She could almost understand the high price tag. Almost.
As with most residents, her parents owned the entire floor, their apartment spanning in all directions. She knocked on the door and waited, rather than let herself inside.
“Vivian, how nice to see you!” Beatrice, the housekeeper from El Salvador, greeted as she opened the door. Vivian smiled at the older woman. With long, black hair that she kept tied up in a braided bun and a smile that bracketed her mouth and eyes with fine lines that bespoke her chipper attitude, unsoured by the city and its people, she was easily the most attractive woman Vivian knew, inside and out, within city limits.
