Page 103 of Even After Sunset

Surely to God they must have found a group home by now, at least, that I can park my ass in until I turn eighteen. So I can leave Jackie to do the rest of her misguided cookie-sales trip on her own and get these goons off my back. Everyone gets what they want, and I stay out of Trenton.

And out of rehab.

“I’ll go back to Allerston Lake,” I tell them. “Take me back and I’ll check in with my PO, and I’ll go to a group home or wherever they tell me.”

“You need help,” Richard answers. “None of those options will get you the help that you need right now.”

“With all due respect, Doc, a few FaceTime calls don’t give you free rein to decide what kind ofhelpI need.”

Richard just gives me that same thin-lipped smile. Like he actually feels sorry for me. Which makes me even more livid. This guy totally played me. He lured me into disclosing stuff to him, so he could slap me with a label and ship me off to some rehab center, away from his precious adopted daughter.

And she’s no better. In fact, Jackie is worse: making shit up about me just because I came home drunk a few times. After she acted like she cared about me and like there was actually something between us, beyond her just wanting to fix me.

“Can you answer a couple of questions for me, Silas?” Wreck-it-Ralph asks.

Aubrey.The oversized oaf who probably spends hours in the gym beefing up every day just to compensate for the fact that his parents saddled him with a girl’s name.

“Do you find you usually need a few drinks in order to get to sleep?”

I hold his stare for a few beats. I don’t answer, but he carries on like I did. Like he already knows what my answer is.

“Do you think about alcohol a lot? When you know you’ll be in a situation where it might be hard to get access to it?”

We go through the same stare-down routine.

“Did you try staying away from alcohol at any point and find that it’s almost impossible to do? And that it affects you physically? Like maybe you get the shakes? Or you sweat a lot or get stomach cramps? Or do you sometimes—”

“This is bullshit.” I slam my glass on the table and water splashes onto one of the guidebooks I must have left out yesterday. I move toward the door, only Aubrey takes a step sideways to block my path. We have another stare-down, except this one is charged and confrontational. This one is him communicatingthat I’m not going anywhere right now without the two of them—that he’s here to do more than pepper me with questions about my drinking habits.

Richard is the messenger, and Aubrey is the enforcer.

And Jackie, obviously, is the snitch.

The traitor.

And I’m the idiot, because I honestly didn’t see this one coming. I thought I could trust her. Even though we had a couple of blowouts, I actually believed that over the past few weeks, we’d moved past just being two people who shared a shitty past or a childhood friendship or whatever. And I sure as hell never expected her to turn on me like this. Not when her biggest mission this whole road trip has been to make me happy. She’s been driven to find a way to bring me the same level of peace or joy or whatever it is she managed to find since our parents’ deaths. And I swear I could actuallyfeelhow much she wanted that for me, that time we fell asleep together by the fire, or when she saw how the nightmares affected me, or when she looked over at me before jumping off the cliff into the water at that old quarry in Vermont. And the fact that I realize now I was wrong all those times makes me feel even more betrayed.

I really, really liked her. I actually thought about us staying together, once we got back home—even though we live almost an hour apart and go to different schools and have different lives. I thought we could make this thing work. I thought, after telling her the truth about what I’d done and the way she forgave me and the fact that it seemed to actually bring us closer together, that she would find a way to see past my other weaknesses and all my other faults.

Instead, she just went and used them against me.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Jackie

The look Silas gives me when the guy from Henderson House escorts him out of the camper hurts more than any words ever could. His silver gaze cuts into me, slashing me with disappointment and hurt; anger and hatred. And I could handle all those things, if I didn’t think he was shutting me out for good, too.

Richard hangs back for a few minutes before joining them in the car for the drive back to Connecticut, folding his arms around me in a hug that makes me feel whole again, even if it’s just for a few minutes. He offers to come back with Meryl in a day or two once he’s sorted everything out with Silas. But I tell him I’ll be fine. It would feel like cheating if I leaned on them now—in the middle of a venture that I specifically set out on to prove I was stronger than the girl I was at ten years old, who needed a whole team of people to put her back together when things were crumbling around her.

I need to get back on track—spend less time designing book covers and more time focusing on what I came here to do. So after a shower and another cup of coffee, I get out the ingredients and spend the rest of the morning baking. I bake until every single Tupperware container is filled with cookies, and almost all the other vendors have packed up and hit the road, en route to the next festival location.

I eventually follow, taking my own winding route. It starts to rain about twenty minutes into the drive though, and I’m secretly glad because it gives me an excuse not to stop at the handful of mainly outdoor attractions I had highlighted on my itinerary for today. My heart just isn’t in it, and my thoughtskeep drifting back to Silas. I still feel like I failed him. I wanted him to be happy, and right now, he’s anything but happy. He’s angry and alone.

And he hates me.

The day he leaves isn’t even the hardest. It’s the days that follow that are the worst. It’s driving along miles of scenic roads in silence, and listening to hours of my epic playlists without one interruption or snarky comment or roll of the eyes, or trying to figure out the cotton candy machine on my own and making a huge mess that isn’t even any fun to clean up. It’s eating meals by myself and coming back after sitting around a campfire with some of the other roadies and not having someone to laugh with about an anecdote someone brought up, or analyzing who we think hooked up after the rest of us went home to bed. It’s opening my itinerary binder and finding every green sticky in exactly the same spot where I put it. None of them switched around or mysteriously removed, and no new ones added.

I call Richard and Meryl more… I miss them more.

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