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“It’s been a rough few days. If I had just told you the truth from the start, at least about me, I might never have seen you again. I wouldn’t have been able to make up excuses to stick around.”
“You could have just asked me out.”
“I could have, but would you have said yes?”
“Yeah, probably not,” she admits, and finally, there’s a bit of a spark in her eyes again. They’re not shining golden like they usually do, but it’s a start. “I was focused on other things. But I…who knows.”
“I’m sorry that we’ll never know now. And I’m sorry that even if I had asked you on a date and we’d gotten to know each other, we’d probably still be here right now, discussing how I lied to you. But I guess it would be one less lie and slightly less deceitful. One less thing to forgive.”
“But my house would still be a wreck and infested with raccoons.”
“Yeah, that’s probably true.”
“We wouldn’t have had all that fun renovating it. And planting the flower gardens. And breaking into the meadow next door.”
“Breaking into it or breaking it in?”
The adorable pink blush on her cheeks is back, and it makes my heart leap.
“I’m sorry that Granny’s plan tonight wasn’t much of a plan at all. Maybe that was her goal all along. Maybe she thought we didn’t have time for plans or that you’d been told one thing long enough when, all this while, the opposite was true. Either way, she didn’t soften it, and I don’t want you to think she’s a hardass. We’ve kind of made her sound like she’s this tough, no-nonsense person, but she can laugh and joke with the best of us. She has a heart big enough to rise above what happened to her and conquer the whole world just because she wants to see more good in it. So, yeah. I guess the plan was just to wing it, and if I had known that, I would never have let it happen. She basically made you straight-up angry by telling the truth and broke us both apart because maybe she thought it would be easier to piece us back together that way than with softness that never got anywhere.”
Victoria chokes, then coughs into her hand. She lightly rests her fingers on her throat after that as she sighs. “That’s kind of a masterful plan. No one would have done or said anything like that. People just aren’t made that way.”
“Yeah, Granny is one of a kind. In so many ways. Not just because she’s a hacker granny or because she carries around Glocks or because…okay, you get it. She’s also got a heart that’s not like anyone else’s. There’s an endless amount of room in it, even after all the grief and pain she went through. Or maybe because of it. Sometimes people go through the fire, and they burn up, but not her. She turned into…I don’t know. A hard clay pot. I guess that’s kind of a kiln and not fire, but does it work?”
“It works. I get it.”
“Thank goodness. I’m not sure how much more explaining I can do.”
I feel a big burst of hopefulness as Victoria’s face softens. The lines ease from the corners of her mouth, and while she’s not exactly smiling, she’s not frowning anymore, either. She’s not gritting her teeth, waiting to get this conversation done and over with just because Granny said we should talk before she left and that if we spent a good long while at it, she might be able to bake a second pie by way of apology for kind of ruining the taste of the first one with a hard talk at dinner.
“Will you tell me…will you tell me how you and your brother met her?”
I wasn’t unprepared for Victoria to ask me that. Actually, if she didn’t ask, I was going to tell her. “Well, Orion and I bounced around in foster care for a long time. We were never really in good homes, but never super bad ones, either. We essentially looked after ourselves. When we were twelve, Orion got in a fight at school with this punk kid who kept bullying him for no reason. Orion kicked his ass, which was unexpected because we were pretty tall and skinny back then. The same kid kept causing problems, and Orion eventually got expelled from school for another fight. Our foster parents were pretty much just keeping us around because it meant extra cash in their pocket every month. They didn’t want to put in the time, and they were going to get Orion placed in another home. But I wasn’t going anywhere without my brother. My. Twin. Brother. We always vowed that we’d stick it out together. We’d been in the system for a long time, ever since we were six, and our mom—she was a single parent who was always on and off drugs and had an endless string of bad boyfriends—lost us for good. We were taken away when she overdosed, and that was the last time we saw her. I found out later that she tried to get clean a few times. I stopped looking her up when I was fifteen, but I hope she succeeded and found whatever she was looking for in her life.”
