AllFreeNovel
Share Us
ChapterOne
Harmony
“Where are you flying in from?” my Uber driver asks as we pull out of the maze of roads around the airport and onto the highway.
“Australia.”
She looks at me through the rearview mirror. “Did you see any koalas?”
I smile. “There was one living in the tree in front of my apartment building.”
“For real?”
“Yup. Mama and her baby.”
She lets out a low breath. “Lucky. Why did you leave?”
“It was time,” I say as I look out the window at the familiar and unfamiliar sights. We pass a McDonald’s my dad once brought me to after we dropped off my mother on a business trip. There’s a Home Depot beside it. I don’t remember that being there.
“Are you from here?” she asks, looking at me again.
Is she going to talk to me the whole trip?
I was hoping to get a quiet driver for the ride up to my new stepfather’s cabin, but I guess that’s out of the question. I was hoping to get my head straight and prepare myself before I arrived.
“Yeah, born and raised. You?”
“Same. How long were you in Australia?”
I sigh. “Two years.”
“Wow,” she says as she glances at me in the rearview mirror. “Must be excited to be arriving home for Christmas after all that time away.”
I look out the window with my stomach churning. “Yeah.”
“I don’t see any excitement on that face. What happened?”
I look at my fidgeting hands on my lap.
“We’re going to be driving together for forty-five minutes,” she says with a tilt of her head. “I’ll get it out of you one way or another, so might as well tell me now.”
I open the Uber app on my phone and quickly scroll through her reviews.
“Makayla is the BEST!!!”
“She’s the passenger whisperer. Made me late for my appointment tho.”
“A driver and a therapist! Makayla is awsome!”
I could use a therapist right now and lordy knows I can’t afford one. I take a deep breath and turn off my phone.
“I haven’t seen my mom and barely talked to her in two years,” I tell her. “My parents were happily married my whole life and then BOOM, out of the blue, my mom says she’s divorcing my dad and marrying her freaking boss!”
“No shit…” Makayla whispers under her breath. “For real?”
“Oh yeah,” I say as I take off my seatbelt and climb into the empty front seat. “She leaves my dadheartbrokenand then moves into a house with this guy who I’ve never even met and then she asks me to move in with her. I was so mad. I wanted to kill her.”
“Damn,” she whispers.
