Chapter Two

Nine Years Ago

Charlotte

It had been a year since I’d left Texas and everything else behind. And I mean everything. Even my name.

Going by April, my middle name, had been an intentional choice for a multitude of reasons. For one, it would make it harder to track me, so the heartbreak of leaving Texas could stay there. For another, April represented spring, my favorite season, a season of refreshment and renewal. Third, I’d always liked it better anyway. Charlotte seemed pretentious and too big for me. April was sunnier, happier. It was who I wanted to be.

Oklahoma was a change of pace, but not one I wasn’t accustomed to. Tamara and I had different fathers, our mom and my dad having split up when I was just two before she moved to Texas and met my step-dad. Tamara came along a year later, and while I spent most of my life in Texas, I occasionally made the trip to Tulsa to see my father.

Tulsa was much busier than Foley, Texas, or even the surrounding towns like Odessa. Being here reminded me of those women on TV who lived in major metropolitan areas, and a part of me had always wanted to try it. I wanted to experience what it was like being young, independent, and living in a city.

Turned out, all that meant was being chronically late on bills and working two jobs and going to school, meaning absolutely zero life and a lack of sleep. Moving in with Dad had been a no- brainer for both of us after I’d been back in town for a couple months. I was drowning in bills and couldn’t keep up the way I wanted because I was so busy, and Dad wanted to reconnect. He had an apartment in Tulsa, right by the interstate on Main Street.

So after a six-month lease, I moved in with him and settled as best I could. It was less lonely with Dad there, but he wasn’t exactly the most engaging person, and he still drank a lot. At least he was a sleepy drunk. I’d come back from class to find him six or seven beers deep and watching a movie with one eye closed, and then find him in the exact same spot the next morning when I got up for work. His job as a trucker meant that he often wasn’t home at all, and my only responsibility was to make sure the place didn’t burn down and keep his one cactus alive.

Such was the case when I came home from class on a Wednesday night to an empty apartment. I tossed my bookbag on the floor by the couch and made my way to the kitchen. A box of microwavable Thai noodles in the pantry was what I was making a beeline for, and I got my meager dinner going just in time for my phone to ring.

I didn’t need to look at the screen to know who it was. It was eight-thirty. Tamara was calling like she did every single night at this time.

“Hey, you,” I said, answering the phone.

“Oh my God, you are not going to believe this,” my sister said, her voice vibrating with excitement. I tried to go through the Rolodex of all the things I wouldn’t be able to believe from her perspective and settled on it being a boy. Which one was the problem.

“What?”

“Collin Montogomery asked me out!”

I cocked my head to one side in confusion and got my dinner out of the microwave, popping the top and sticking a fork inside.

“Collin? Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she said defensively. “I can tell the Galloway boys apart, Charlotte.”

I didn’t bother to correct her. Mom and Tamara weren’t going to just start calling me April no matter how much I insisted. They were both positive I was going to move back in a few weeks and start going by my first name again. Mom was already preparing my room at the old house, reconverting it from the poorly-thought-out workout room they had initially turned it into.

“I’m just surprised,” I said. “Collin doesn’t seem like the type to ask anyone out.”

“Well, I mean, he didn’t directly ask me out,” Tamara said. “I mean, not in those words.”

I sighed and shook my head. Oh, boy crazy Tamara.

“What did he say, exactly?” I asked.

“He said I should come to Crockett’s tonight,” she said. “He said he’s going to be there and that I should come. But like… suggestively.”

“Suggestively?”

“It’s hard to convey it over the phone,” she said. “But, like, with his eyes. He was saying a lot with his eyes.”

“Ahh,” I said. “Well, are you going to go?”

“Of course not,” she said.

I paused for a moment, trying to work out her logic, then gave up.

“Why?”

“Because Jesse is going to be there, and I’m still not talking to him.”

I tried to hide my emotions at hearing his name. It was rare for me to hear it, but I thought it all the time. We had only been seeing each other a few weeks and hadn’t done much more than get past second base, so it wasn’t like we had some big, intimate thing. And I knew he had been with a bunch of women before. It was why I was hesitant to jump in bed with him. But he didn’t mind. He was into me as I was him.

And then…

I shook my head to get my brain out of it. I couldn’t think about Jesse right now. I couldn’t think about him at all. He was the past. I didn’t need the past.

“Well, I think you should go,” I said. “You can’t deny yourself happiness because of other people. They’re doing another under twenty-one night, right?”

“Maybe,” Tamara said.

Tamara was not unknown for getting into trouble occasionally. Last year, when I went with Luke Galloway to prom because neither of us had a date and we’d always been friendly, she had snuck in alcohol from her dad’s collection. A week later, she snuck us into Crockett’s for the first time, saying her best friend was being too sad and she wanted to have some fun. Both times she was lightly punished, far less than I would have at her age.

“Tamara, you are still nineteen,” I began.

“Twenty in two months,” she interjected.

“That’s still under twenty-one. You keep this up and they might bar you from Crockett’s before you even get old enough to go regularly. You know how the Andersons are always up there looking for people to get in trouble.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said. “Well, they never mind people over eighteen being there if they are with someone and aren’t drinking. When you get back home, we can go every week until I hit twenty-one.”

“Ahh, right, about that,” I said.

“It’ll be awesome. I’ll be with Collin, and you can date, like Logan or something, and we can party and have a blast,” she continued.

I hated to burst her bubble, especially after her best friend moved to California, but I couldn’t let her go on like this. Not when I knew I wasn’t going back.

“Tamara, I’m not moving back to Texas anytime soon.”

“I know, I know,” she said. “It’ll be a few months at least. But as long as you’re back before I turn twenty-one…”

“No, I mean, I don’t intend on coming back at all,” I said.

There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment, and I thought I heard her sniffle.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “I thought you said living with Dad wasn’t really great and that it was too expensive there. I thought you were going to do school remote from home, like we talked about.”

“Like you talked about,” I said. “You were the only one who ever mentioned that. And I’ll be honest, it has an appeal. But I just… I don’t want to be back in Foley, hon.”

“You don’t have to be in Foley,” she said, sounding a bit desperate. “We could get a place together in Odessa or something. Somewhere a little nicer. Why wouldn’t you want to come be with your sister? We could have so much fun together!”

“We could,” I agreed. “But I don’t want to be in Texas, Tamara. If you want to come up to Tulsa, by all means, we will get a place. But I don’t want to be there anymore.”

“Why?”

I wanted to tell her. I wanted to spill my guts and tell her how Jesse had had a miserable date with her, how Tamara had spent the entire time talking about herself, and when she wasn’t talking about herself, she was being kind of loud and obnoxious the way she had a tendency to be. How Jesse found me on the porch, and we’d talked in a way that we really hadn’t all our lives growing up around each other. How we’d run into each other again and ended up spending an evening at Crockett’s together. And ended up in his backseat, with his hand up my shirt and our lips pressed against each other.

How I’d been willing to go all the way right then and there, but that Jesse had stopped.

Because he didn’t want to hurt Tamara.

We’d kept it secret for weeks, sneaking around to see each other either out of town or in dark corners of his family’s ranch. Every time we kissed, it was more intense, and every time, he was the one to put on the brakes and ask me if I’d told Tamara yet.

So when I knew there was no more time, I wrote Tamara a letter. I told her everything in that letter and left it in her room. Then I went to the county fair, knowing I was going to spend the night with Jesse at his hotel.

And the world fell apart.

“I just don’t want to,” I said. “Please understand.”

“I don’t,” she said morosely. “But maybe I’ll take you up on Tulsa. I’ll think about it.”

Then, in classic Tamara style, she moved on to the next subject, as if this one had never existed.

After finishing up the call, I drew a bath and poured a glass of wine. It wasn’t like Dad was going to miss it. He never drank wine.

I disrobed and climbed into the tub, sitting down and letting the warm water soothe my aching joints. I’d been going since seven that morning, two jobs and three classes, and deserved to relax a bit.

But I couldn’t. Not with the memory of that day in my mind. How that woman…. Lacey had been her name, had shattered my whole world. She’d shown me pictures of a baby, and his eyes… they were just like Jesse’s. Deep blue, almond-shaped. She said she was his girlfriend, and that Jesse had been cheating on her with me. How he was a father now. How he needed me gone so he could own up to his responsibilities.

When I looked at Jesse, I could see the guilt on his face, even while he continued to sing another song.

So I’d left. I’d packed my bags that night and got in the car to drive to Tulsa. Mom was beside herself upset, but I calmed her by telling her I would be near Dad and that I would call every night. That turned into Tamara calling me every night, but it appeased her. She knew I was safe. She just didn’t know why I’d left. No one did.

As far as I was concerned, Charlotte died in that Louisa County Fair. April arrived in Tulsa and until tonight, hasn’t let Jesse have more than a few moments of thought.

But now, sinking into the tub, the wine warming my chest, all that pain and loss came right back like it was yesterday.

It turned out Charlotte wasn’t dead after all. She was just hiding, deep in a locked room, with all the pain Jesse had caused.