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“Mama!”
“I said, promise me! Your education is what’s important. That should always come first.”
“There is nothing more important than getting you healthy,” I explained to her.
She squeezed my hand. “Thank you. But the doctors here will take care of that. You just worry about your grades. Let me worry about the business.”
“You say that, but what could you do from this bed?”
“More than you think,” she said with a smile.
I looked down at my mother who was covered in bruises but still thought that she could do it all. That was the woman I had grown up with. Not even driving into a forty-foot-deep ravine could stop her. I smiled and conceded.
“I’ll stay in school. But I’ll have to take a break, at least for a few days.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Mama, you’re being ridiculous.”
“Promise me,” she said softly but with more weight than any two words deserve to have.
“I promise,” I told her, knowing that she was the master of doing the impossible. Now I was going to have to figure out how to do the same.
Chapter 3
Hil
“Okay, Hil. You have to tell me where you are,” Dillon said, using the tone he implored whenever he wanted to be taken seriously.
“I told you, I’m fine,” I said, looking around Cali’s football-themed room.
“You say that, but how do I know it’s true? This is coming from the person who said they might be unavailable for a few days and then fell off the grid for more than a week. Does that sound like someone whose word I can count on?”
As much as I didn’t want to admit it, Dillon was right. It was a shitty thing for me to have done. I just took off without telling anyone where I was going or when I would be back.
I didn’t regret doing it because it was the only way I could get out. And what if my father, or even my brother contacted him. Dillon was a really bad liar. If he knew, they would know he knew and eventually get it out of him.
I was keeping Dillon safe by not telling him that I was going… even if it killed me that he no longer felt that he could trust me… and Dillon’s trust meant everything to me…
“Fine,” I said crumbling under the thought that I could lose him as a friend. “I’ll tell you where I am. But no specifics.”
“You know me, I’ll take what I can get,” Dillon said, jokingly referring to his love life.
I laughed.
“I’m currently in a hot football player’s bedroom while lying snuggly beneath his sheets.”
There was a pause on the other end followed by a piercing, “What?”
I couldn’t stop the smile that plastered across my face.
“Yeah. I’m staring at all of his football equipment right now,” I said, looking at the sports gear that had been piled in the corner of the room.
“Oh, now you have to tell me where you are.”
“I told you, I’m fine.”
“Um, you sound a little better than just fine.”
