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Nothing had changed, of course.
I had, though.
My hand was still fastened tightly on the handle of my suitcase. I was still standing in front of the door I’d slammed shut.
I was exhausted.
I’d been on ferries, buses, and planes for almost thirty hours, the grime of the trip and lack of sleep settling into my bones.
I hadn’t eaten in as long because my stomach was too tied up at what I was doing in that thirty hours.
More specifically, where I was going.
Home.
After a year, I was back.
I hadn’t told anyone I’d left, of course. Not until I’d landed in the AirBnb in Northern Italy.
People weren’t exactly shocked since I was Polly. The unpredictable, flaky, flighty Polly. I did things like this.
Irresponsible things.
I modeled for a life drawing class because my boyfriend was a painter.
I decided I wanted to learn Mandarin.
Then I quit when I realized how hard it was.
I went vegan.
Then went back to vegetarian because I couldn’t live without chocolate.
I dropped out of college with one semester to go because I had changed majors so much I didn’t even know what my degree would be in, other than indecision.
I married a man I’d known for less than a month.
Then I divorced that very same man when he thought that punching me in the face was the best way to resolve an argument.
Then I was involved in a drive-by shooting. That wasn’t technically to do with me, but chaos followed me everywhere. And I was with Rosie. Chaos was attached to Rosie’s freaking soul.
And after getting punched in the face, I’d gone to Rosie for a safe haven, sworn her to secrecy and she’d saved me—again—and housed me until my bruises faded. And we left the house together when that happened, carrying around our mutual chaos.
Hence the shooting.
My mind thrust in what happened after.
Heath rushing in, the concern and terror painted on his face, the pain of that expression hitting me truer than any bullet could’ve.
I would’ve preferred the bullet wound. At least that would heal. There would’ve been a scar, but it would serve only as the memory of a pain now forgotten. Of how I’d survived.
But that expression, everything after that—heck, everything before that—everything that lay beneath it was a wound that would never heal.
Festering.
Bleeding.
Something I hadn’t survived.
Something I was still struggling with.
And at the time, I couldn’t handle that.
My sorrow and pain flew under the radar at first because of kidnappings, wars with human traffickers, Rosie’s life.
And then when things quietened down, and my divorce proceedings began, my sorrow was misconstrued as heartbreak.
Which it was.
But it was also love.
The kind I couldn’t handle.
Little Polly who worked on bubblegum dreams and fairy tales couldn’t handle the truest and ugliest kind of pain otherwise known as love.
So after a year of fighting, pretending, bleeding from the inside out, I ran.
I told everyone I was ‘finding myself’ in Europe. When I’d really left all of me behind when I left him behind.
Because I was a coward.
Among other things.
My family thought this impromptu trip was to do with my then finalized divorce.
It was surely funded by it.
I hadn’t wanted a cent of my ex’s money at first.
“He made you bruise, we’re bleeding him dry,” Rosie had said.
I didn’t agree. I didn’t work that way, on revenge, on an eye for an eye. That wasn’t my nature.
But it was in Rosie’s nature. She, like the club that was otherwise known as my extended family, all but operated on revenge, on an eye for an eye.
Rosie herself was a force to be reckoned with. I could’ve fought her on it. Maybe I might’ve been able to budge her, as hard as she looked outwardly, her heart was as soft and as big as I’d ever experienced—especially now she was with the man she’d been painfully in love with pretty much her whole life. But I didn’t have the energy to fight the woman I considered a sister. I was already fighting an enormous, deadly battle with myself. And trying to hide it from everyone I loved.
So I yielded.
And Rosie was true to her word. I don’t exactly know how she did it, Craig considered his money very important. I had to sign a prenup before marrying him, not that it bothered me. I had never been concerned with money, and I would never want money to come from the breakup of a marriage.
But then again, I didn’t expect my marriage to crumble so quickly, just like that hollow love I’d convinced myself would fill me up.
There was no legal way Rosie could’ve gotten the money.
But she never exactly worked within the law. And her now-husband no longer enforced it.
It would pay for me not to know how she did it. Rosie just did things. You didn’t ask questions if you couldn’t handle the answers. And I wasn’t too proud to say I couldn’t handle the answers. I wasn’t strong like her or my sister. I couldn’t fight the world the way they did.
