Page 13 of Finally Mine
Her dark hair had lost its heavy length. Instead it was styled around her face in a cloud of natural curl and volume.
“You look like Sofia Loren,” her mother said with satisfaction.
Gloria reached up to touch it. “I don’t look like me.”
“You didn’t look like you before,” Sara countered, pouring more frozen goodness into their glasses.
Turning her head from side to side, Gloria admired the reflection. It was…perfect.
“I love it,” she said, staring in the mirror longer than she had in years andlikingwhat she saw.
“How do you feel about some makeup?” Sara tempted.
Makeup.Gloria had once loved all things cosmetic. She loved experimenting, making pretty. She’d done her friends’ makeup for homecoming her junior year. Glenn didn’t approve. She’d managed to hide a small stash of guilty pleasures from him for over a year before he’d found it and called her a whore for painting her face.
“Yes,” she said, enjoying the spark she saw in her reflection. “And then let’s go out to dinner.”
Sara pushed the glass toward her. “We will Uber.”
“Cheers,” Gloria raised her glass, the smile stretching her face in unfamiliar and wonderful ways.
7
She’d picked up her new phone to cancel at least a dozen times. It was a pity invite, she decided as she rolled out the pie crust with a panicked violence. “Harper felt sorry for me,” Gloria told herself. Besides, her car was in the garage getting some of its rust removed and its brakes changed—thanks to her saint of a mother.
It was the perfect excuse to cancel. Of course, she could walk. It was only a couple of blocks.
“Gah!” Gloria swiped the back of her hand over her forehead in frustration, leaving a streak of flour behind.
Her mother was at work, queen beeing around her salon, and she had the house to her self-conscious, terrified self. They’d gone to dinner in town that weekend, and it had been a mistake.
“Poor little Gloria Parker” had been on the lips of every patron as they smiled sadly at her. By the end of dinner, she’d felt like a zoo animal rescued from the wild where she was too weak to survive.
“Why am I even making a damn pie?” She wasn’t going. She didn’t know how to socialize. For all intents and purposes, high school sleepovers were her last real social experience, and she was quite certain none of that etiquette applied to a casual backyard barbecue. Though she couldn’t help but wonder what Aldo Moretta’s reaction would be if she hit him with a pillow.
She was definitelynotgoing. The man left her tongue-tied, shy, and painfully nervous. The absolute last thing she needed right now was a crush on a man like that. Aldo’s personality was as big as his barrel-like chest. Next to him, she’d fade away as she had with Glenn.
And she was good and tired of fading.
She draped the crust over the pie plate and spooned the filling into it, ignoring the way her hands shook.
The dream last night was still with her. Glenn, bursting into her room, murder in his eyes. He’d kill her in her mother’s house. She knew it even when she’d woken up, sobbing and covering her face.
Too many times it hadn’t been a dream. The abuse—and worse, the fear—was engraved in her bones, woven into her DNA. She was a different person from the teenager Glenn Diller had claimed as his own.
Where was the girl who shoved Bobby Leinhart off of Jamal Ngyuen on the playground? The girl who’d argued with her English teacher for a full letter grade higher on herTo Kill a Mockingbirdessay? The girl who’d laughed and awkwardly flirted and sang?
Was she still in there? Or was she already dead?
In her head, she could still hear Glenn’s hateful laugh.
She grabbed the wooden spoon out of the bowl and hurled it across the room. “Get out of my head!”
* * *
“I’min love with your hair,” Harper announced, opening the door before Gloria made it to the top step of the porch.
Self-consciously she patted it with her free hand. “Really?” She’d taken her time with the styling and with her makeup, and when she looked in the mirror, it wasn’t the old Gloria she saw or the teenage, pre-Glenn Gloria. It was someone new.
