Total pages in book: 101
Estimated words: 95775 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 479(@200wpm)___ 383(@250wpm)___ 319(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95775 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 479(@200wpm)___ 383(@250wpm)___ 319(@300wpm)
He’ll definitely show up here if he’s hungry. Bib’s is his better bet for food, which is why I’m hiding on the far side of the dumpster, waiting. I pulled over one of the tattered chairs the smokers use on their breaks, and I’ve been passing time by reading. Lily’s words have kept me company. A little too well, because there have been several times I’ve been so engrossed in this journal, I forget that I’m supposed to be on alert.
I don’t know for certain if the kid who has been vandalizing my restaurants is the same kid who shares a mother with me, but the timing makes sense. And the targeted insults that he’s been spray painting make sense if they’re coming from a kid who despises me. I can’t think of anyone else who would have a good reason to be angry with me more than a little boy who feels abandoned by his older brother.
It’s almost two in the morning. I check the security app on my phone for Corrigan’s, but there’s nothing new happening over there, either.
I go back to reading the journal, even though the last couple of entries have been painful to read. I didn’t realize how much my leaving for Boston impacted Lily when she was younger. In my mind at that age, I felt like an inconvenience in her life. I had no idea how much she felt I brought to her life. Reading the letters she wrote back then has been a lot more difficult than I expected it to be. I thought it would be fun to read her thoughts, but when I started reading them, I remembered how cruel our childhoods were to us. I don’t think about it much anymore because I’m so far removed from the life I lived back then, but I’m being thrown back into those moments from every angle this week, it seems. The information in the journal entries, my mother, finding out I have a brother—it all feels like everything I’ve tried running from has formed a slow leak that’s threatening to sink me.
But then there’s Lily and her impeccable timing being back in my life. She always seems to show up when I need a lifeline.
I flip through the rest of the journal and see that I’m already halfway through the last entry she made. I have very little recollection of that night because of the dreadful way it ended. Part of me doesn’t even want to experience it from her point of view, but I can’t not know how I left her feeling for all those years.
I open the last entry and pick up where I left off.
He took my hands in his and told me he was leaving sooner than he planned for the military, but that he couldn’t leave without telling me thank you. He told me he’d be gone for four years and that the last thing he wanted for me was to be a sixteen-year-old girl not living my life because of a boyfriend I never got to see or hear from.
The next thing he said made his blue eyes tear up until they looked clear. He said, “Lily. Life is a funny thing. We only get so many years to live it, so we have to do everything we can to make sure those years are as full as they can be. We shouldn’t waste time on things that might happen someday, or maybe even never.”
I knew what he was saying. That he was leaving for the military and he didn’t want me to hold on to him while he was gone. He wasn’t really breaking up with me because we weren’t ever really together. We’d just been two people who helped each other when we needed it and got our hearts fused together along the way.
It was hard, being let go by someone who had never really grabbed hold of me completely in the first place. In all the time we’ve spent together, I think we both sort of knew this wasn’t a forever thing. I’m not sure why, because I could easily love him that way. I think maybe under normal circumstances, if we were together like typical teenagers and he had an average life with a home, we could be that kind of couple. The kind who comes together so easily and never experiences a life where cruelty sometimes intercepts.
I didn’t even try to get him to change his mind that night. I feel like we have the kind of connection that even the fires of hell couldn’t sever. I feel like he could go spend his time in the military and I’ll spend my years being a teenager and then it will all fall back into place when the timing is right.
“I’m going to make a promise to you,” he said. “When my life is good enough for you to be a part of it, I’ll come find you. But I don’t want you to wait around for me, because that might never happen.”