She felt his lips against her hair. “It’ll get better. It won’t hurt forever.”
She fell asleep, exhaustion tackling her in the wake of her emotional release. She opened her eyes on faint evening light. She felt utterly, completely empty on the inside, dry and brittle and ready to blow away in a gentle wind.
Mercy was gone. His absence was a cold weight against her. The apartment didn’t feel like him, smell like him, sound like him anymore. She lay on her side, on the couch – the same couch where he’d shown her the pleasure that his body could inspire in hers – but the boxes were missing.
Maggie stood leaning back against the wall, one booted foot propped behind her, her golden silhouette like something off a playbill.
Ava swallowed, saliva burning her raw throat. “He left,” she said.
Maggie nodded, and when she spoke, her voice was clouded with tears. “He did.”
Twenty-Seven
Five Years Ago
Even years later, Ava couldn’t recall the details of the rest of her senior year. She woke, she dressed, she ate some of the time, she grew thin and wan – thinner than normal – and she went to school. Her report cards were stellar. Her teachers were glowing. And somehow, Mason Stephens’ parents were convinced, through her own parents’ street savvy, that it was in everyone’s best interest if the police were not involved and if the incident at Hamilton House was allowed to fade into rumor, Mason and Ava kept apart, never crossing paths. The drugs weren’t mentioned again; Ava didn’t know if the boys found who’d sold them to Mason, and she didn’t care.
Ghost didn’t disguise the fact that he thought Ava’s miscarriage was a blessing.
Ava wanted to kill herself.
She wasn’t her anymore; she was this ruined husk of a human being. She didn’t know how to live in a world without Mercy. It felt like learning how to walk again after a tragic accident. She didn’t smile, didn’t laugh, didn’t care, about anything. Life was a pattern of routine behaviors.
In April, when her acceptance letter from the University of Georgia arrived, she didn’t throw it in the trash like she’d always thought she would. Knoxville was tarnished now; it didn’t glitter for her anymore. And one night, over glasses of white wine, Ava watched Maggie come to tears, begging her to go off to school, because it might be the only thing that brought her back to life.
Carter got a full ride football scholarship to Texas A&M. Leah applied to a local technical school. And Ava made plans to move to Georgia, to the college town of Athens, where Ghost procured her an off-campus apartment that was all her own.
He bought her a gun. And Maggie cried the evening they left for home, and left her behind.
**
She’d been at school three weeks when Maggie’s usual phone call took on a shivery edge. They talked about class and Aidan’s typical stupidity back home as Ava picked through a microwavable lasagna at her tiny apartment table. All alone. No roommates. Just her and her books and her mother’s voice.
Maggie said, her words becoming tiptoe careful, “I got a phone call today.”
Ava knew, before she swallowed her burned hunk of noodles, exactly who’d called. “Really?” she asked, tone casual, as her heart accelerated.
“Ava,” Maggie said. “I gave him your address.”
She studied the tomato sauce glob sliding down her fork. “Okay.”
She skipped her last class of the afternoon the next day, and was in her Cracker Jack box apartment when a heavy knock moved through the door, stirring the dust motes in the air, pounding against the rhythm of her heart.
The sound crippled her. For one regrettable minute, she grabbed the back of her chair and steadied herself, breathing in, breathing out. The months of separation dissolved, and the doom returned, full force, the dread up the back of her neck and in the pit of her belly. And with it, the most acute love, the desire bold as lightning. She hated herself for being affected.
And then his voice floated through the door. “Ava.” Just the sound of her name gave her an impression of both his hands braced on the door, black forelock of hair falling across his brow as he let the wood hold his weight, too exhausted from fighting the distance between them. “It’s me, baby.”
Defiance sparked inside her, just a tiny ember, a speck of red off a dying coal. But it gave her the strength to stand and walk to the door. She laid her palm against the center panel, imagining she could feel Mercy’s warmth through the wood. “Which you?” she called back. “The Mercy who left? Or the Mercy who knows he should have stayed?” It wasn’t much, but it felt like a victory to her.
There was a pause, then: “Open the door.” Not aggravated, just curious, a little taken aback.
Ava constructed a killer comeback in her mind, but when she opened her mouth, all that came out was: “You left me.” Because that’s what it all boiled down to. All the years, all the blood, all the silken threads strung up between them, the abandoned sanity and the lost baby, and he’d left. Just left.
He said, “Yeah,” voice muffled through the door.
Ava turned and put her back to it, gave in to the weakness in her legs and sank slowly down to the floor, until she sat leaning back against the door, her fingers threaded through the fibers of the rug beneath her. Her throat tightened, and she said, “You’d think, after all the books I’ve read, and all the shit I’ve seen growing up in my family – you think I’d understand this. But I don’t. I can’t, Mercy. How does a person just leave? How can there have ever been anything there that was real if you could walk away?”
He didn’t answer.
