“You really gave him, like, thousands of dollars?” Another girl asked.
“I really did.” I said. He maxed out my credit cards and left me in crippling debt. Me and ten other women around my age in Europe. All of us, just a bunch of dopes.
“I’m sorry,” the girl standing in front of me said. “That sucks.”
I laughed humorously.
These girls weren’t any different from me when I moved to Paris for my final semester of school. I thought I knew everything. And when my TikTok account went viral, I thought I was unstoppable. I was the girl from Calico Cove who’d had herheart broken and had recreated herself in college only to explode onto the world stage.
Except I was just me.
And now, I was going home with nothing.
Calico Cove
Nick
She was back.
Nora was back. She was fifty feet away and she might as well have been on the moon. The garage doors were open and my shop faced the town square where the Fall Festival was in full swing. Tents were up, food trucks abounded. Games were being played by the young and old of Calico Cove.
But I wasn’t seeing any of that.
My eyes were on a bench where someone I used to know was sitting alone eating a cupcake.
“You just going to stare at her, or are you going to say something?” Roy asked, hovering behind me.
“You need a new belt,” I said and grabbed a cloth on a nearby work bench to wipe my hands.
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Fine. You need a new truck.” I turned away from Nora and the square because I couldn’t stand it anymore.
He grunted. “One more year.”
“You’ve been saying that for the last six years,” I pointed out. “Seriously, I don’t know how much longer I can hold this truck together.”
“One more year.”
There was no point in arguing with Roy once he made up his mind. If he thought there were two more miles left in the old lady he would make sure to drive those two miles. The guy had more silver in his hair than black, but he was still rawhide tough and as strong as two men.
“So?”
“So what?” I asked. “I’ll work up what you owe and send it to you. For now, you should be able to drive it out of here.”
“Not what I meant,” he jerked his head towards the open bay doors. The Fall Festival. And Nora all alone on that park bench. “She could use a friend right now. You used to be one.”
Used to.
Not anymore. Nora and I were strangers. We never made it back from that night.
These past few weeks, when everything was coming undone for her, it didn’t matter how many texts I sent. How many emails. How often I called. It was radio silence from her end.
“She made it very clear she does not want to talk to me.”
Every time I’d seen her, I’d tried to look into her eyes, see into her head. To know what she was thinking, feeling. But every time she froze me out. I used to be able to know what she was thinking by the way she held her shoulders. Or how she’d tuck her hair behind her ear.
These past six years, it’s like she’d been a locked box. There, in front of me, but never open.
