Page 43 of This Love
“You were very clever.” He picked up the daffodil and turned it over. “See, you would write very small on the backside so it looked like you were making a design on the leaves. But there are words.”
I took the daffodil from him and peered at the letters. It read, “Tonight you will tell Tucker you love him.”
I set it down abruptly. “I get it.” I picked up the pink tulip. On the back of the leaves it said, “Mom stole your journal.”
The book said that, too. “Where is Mom now?” I asked everyone this. I wanted to compare Tucker’s answer to Dad’s and Harry’s.
“She still lives out near Wimberley in the house she moved you to back when you were about to turn eighteen. She was trying to get you away from me. She knew if your memory reset, you would forget who I was and not try to leave.”
Everyone had mentioned Wimberley, but no one had told me this much. “Did it work?”
“It did.” He flipped through the book to pages of densely typed words I hadn’t read yet. “The whole story is here. She told you that you were fifteen years old, not eighteen, and kept you away from anyone who might tell you the truth. But then you turned sixteen, according to her. You wanted to get a job since you were old enough, but she wouldn’t let you, and you got suspicious and found your birth certificate.”
I gripped the edge of the sofa cushion. Mom was indeed bad. “What did I do then?”
“You ran away and got to a librarian who helped you go to a shelter here in Austin.”
“I’ve read notes about the shelter. Men are bad, everyone said.”
He nodded. “Yes, there are terrible situations that lead women to go to shelters.”
“I saw your sticky note.” Tucker had placed one on the page about the shelter. It said, “Some men are bad. Others are good.”
“Do you want to read more of the paper flowers?” he asked. “I think you wrote most of them in your usual handwriting at one point.” He pointed at the book. “Can I look?”
“Okay.”
He flipped through it until he found a page that said, “Paper flowers” at the top. Sure enough, one of the flowers was glued in, with an arrow pointing to the letters on the back. It explained the markings.
I guessed I should have gone back to reading it. But it was so much easier just to ask Tucker.
“Will Mom come for me again?”
“Your dad got a restraining order against her back then. I’m not sure whether it has expired. He may have called it off. You tried to have a relationship with her for a while.”
“What’s a restraining order?”
“It’s something you can have the police use to keep people away from you. It’s not as easy as it sounds. You have to prove they are a danger. Your dad had to hire a lawyer in your case to get it through. But it’s one way of protecting yourself.”
Protecting yourself. Flo at the diner had told me I should always do that. “What are the other ways?”
He sat back against the cushions. “You can learn self-defense. There are classes where you learn how to fight back, to hit and kick people, or to escape if someone grabs you.”
I shifted forward, my mind a whirl, picturing myself kicking and hitting someone to get away. “Where can I do that?”
“I can look up a class for you and sign you up. There’s bound to be some close enough to walk, or…” He trailed off.
My body tensed. Or what? I waited for him to keep going.
“I could drive you to a class. I don’t mind.”
“Okay.”
He took a quick, short breath, as if he were surprised by my answer. “I’ll find one. I guess I need to know your work schedule at the diner.”
“Big Harry will let me work whenever I want.” He’d said so.
“Okay. Good.”
