Page 44 of Escape Girl

“How so?” she asked.

Obviously, my mom had still been alive, and we didn’t know she was sick yet. That was clearly the biggest chunk; I hadn’t been saturated in sadness yet. But it wasn’t just that. “I just…liked myself more, maybe?” I was never the life of the party or the smartest person in the room, but I had been more confident in my own skin. I was funny and a hard worker. I had a lot to give. “I didn’t know exactly who I was yet, but I was certain I was in progress toward the woman I wanted to become.”

Jo nodded and started to unravel her braid. “And now?”

I looked at myself in the mirror. “Now I sometimes feel like a guest in my own life. A rude, irritable, occasionally batshit-crazy guest.” Ugh, was there truth serum gas being pumped through the air vents here? I looked down at my hands.

“Was it batshit-crazy to marry Bobby or to leave him?” Her tone was so offhand, it completely contradicted the gunshot nature of her question.

“Both.” The answer popped out without any thought. But I stood by it.

My stylist appeared in the mirror behind me before Jo could say anything else. “What are we doing today?”

“Covering up my roots,” I said. I pulled up the notes app on my phone and showed her the color formula I’d been using for years.

As with every new stylist I’d had in that time, she looked from the notes to my bright roots and frowned. “Are you sure?” When I nodded, she went back to mix the color, shaking her head.

Jo had been watching our interaction. “Before I approached your father five years ago, I did a lot of research on your family.” She waited until I made eye contact and then fired another verbal gunshot. “You look almost exactly like your mother, don’t you?”

Damn her.

I’d always been my mother’s mini-me, and with every passing year the resemblance grew stronger. I had her small waist, rounded hips, and good boobs. Heart-shaped face with a dimpled chin and high cheekbones. Pointy ears and long feet. Round green eyes and eyebrows that needed constant maintenance.

And, most obviously, the hair. The auburn tresses had been my mother’s particular vanity. Her scarlet crown.

“Is that why you dye it?” Jo asked quietly. “Because it makes you sad to see so much of her in the mirror?”

Suddenly furious, I turned to face her in person instead of in reflection. What gave her the right to ask such intrusive questions? What made her think she was entitled to the answers? How dare she make me think about these things, let alone talk about them!

“No,” I hissed. “It’s not forme.”

Comprehension dawned on her face, and I was shocked to see moisture brighten her eyes. “Oh,” she whispered. “Your father.”

I swiped a tissue from a box on the counter in front of me and shredded it, just to give my hands something to do. “Yeah.” I glared at her. Words were building in my lungs. Horrible, burning words. Ones I’d never said—and never intended to say, ever ever. “Want to know exactly how my father was propelled out of San Francisco after the funeral, Jo?”

The memory came rolling back, thick and acrid, fresh tar on an old highway. “He made it through the church service, but notto the cemetery. He went back to the house instead, drank an entire bottle of scotch.”

I’d suffered the rest of the day in public on my own, hugged by hundreds of acquaintances. Some actually knew and cared about my family. Most didn’t. “I didn’t own a funeral-appropriate black dress, and after she passed, I didn’t have the energy to leave the house and shop for one. My mother had dozens of black dresses though, and I was the same size, so I wore one of hers.”

When I finally closed the front door on the rest of the world that night, my parents’ house was silent and dark. “I assumed my father was in bed, but he was sitting in the den with no lights on.” I’d wandered into the room in the dress, looking for my book because I knew I wouldn’t sleep.

“He was dozing, passed out from the whiskey. He heard me and startled awake.” I’d never forget his face at that moment as long as I lived. Absolute joy. Wonder. Relief. “Tru!” he’d gasped.

“For an instant he thought I was my mother,” I said flatly to Jo. “When I winced and corrected him—”Dad, it’s me; it’s Em“—it was like she died all over again.” His stricken eyes had widened even as the rest of him had crumpled into sobbing despair. I rushed toward him, and he shook his head wildly and launched himself out of the chair, out of the room.

“He was gone the next morning.”

Jo had listened to my wretched memory without flinching. Her face was a study in empathy, and my fury at her disappeared as abruptly as it arrived. The stylist popped back at that moment to escort me to the washing station, and I leapt up, ready for a few minutes of quiet.

As the warm water seeped through my hair and the stylist’s strong fingers dug into my scalp, I felt an odd loosening of tension in my body. I’d never told anyone what had happened with my father that night. I’d always felt so guilty about thatmoment, and so hurt that my father abandoned me right afterward.

But telling Jo about it actually made me feel a little better. Maybe it was her sympathetic reaction, but more likely it was simply the realization that confronting the memory didn’t kill me. Yeah, it hurt. But I’d survived a lot of hurt. Maybe it was the keeping things in that was more toxic to me now.

The stylist led me back to her chair. For some reason, Sloan, Andie, and Heather were now gathered around it, along with Jo.

Sloan put her hands on her hips and spoke without preamble. “Jo showed us an old picture of you.”

For the love of God. What was this nonsense? Some sort of idiotic hair intervention? I glared at Jo again, but she just gave me an enigmatic smile.

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