Burn Down the Night (Everything I Left Unsaid #3)- Molly O'Keefe Page 0,13

She dragged her heels making her shoes squeak across that floor.

But I was stubborn and stupid, so I filled out the admissions paperwork under the secretary’s narrowed eye. She pretended to be kind, but she was watching me watching her. I’d put on some of my mom’s old clothes that Dad kept around, trying to look older than fifteen.

I think about it now and cringe. How stupid must I have looked? How desperate and scared? I didn’t know anything about the cost. You had to pay tuition to go to that school. And Jen needed to take a bunch of tests to even be considered.

I didn’t know shit.

Before I finished with the form, the secretary called some service and we were swarmed with social workers and police and everything changed.

Our mother died when Jennifer was a baby which left us in the not-so-tender-care of the system but after a few weeks in a foster home, they finally tracked down Aunt Fern. We’d been stunned she was real. We’d thought she was just a story Dad told us, like Santa Claus or Paul Bunyan. This magical, mystical sister who’d gone off into the army and was too busy saving the world to write or call or visit.

But if we were shocked she was real, Fern must have been blown away to find out we existed at all.

But she took us in. Kept us from being separated. Two things I did not appreciate enough when I was a kid.

So, on my sixteenth birthday we left the woods of Wisconsin and moved to Florida.

At the time, Fern had been the worst thing that I could imagine happening to us. I had too little experience with blessings to recognize them when I landed on their doorstep. To appreciate them when they tried to be kind.

And she had tried—in her super weird way.

Why wasn’t I kinder to her?

It never occurred to me to wonder why she wasn’t kinder to me.

The country music was once again, too earnest. The happiness those singers claimed felt like one of my broken promises.

I changed the channel and found some miserable classic rock station with songs I didn’t know at all.

“Everything is going to be fine,” I told the passed out, bleeding biker in my backseat.

The sun came up over the orange trees. Alligators crawled out of the drainage ditches beside the highways.

Killer shadows just waiting.

Chapter 6

Aunt Fern lived in a coral tower between the main drag and the beach, side by side with a dozen other coral towers, each one nearly indistinguishable from the other. I knew this because once a year I got an email from her saying,

Sitrep: unchanged. You?

Which I took to mean she was the same rigid woman living in the same condo complex.

At least, I hoped to God that was what she meant. If she’d moved, I was in serious trouble.

I was exhausted but shaking from the amounts of caffeine I’d been pouring down my throat—my front seat was littered with cans of Red Bull, coffee cups, and those little red bottles of five-hour energy shit.

My heart was racing in my chest. I was probably going to have a heart attack any minute.

Giddy and slap happy, I laughed at the thought. I would survive the bombs and the shoot-out only to die of a heart attack in front of a retirement condo in Florida.

Sweet, sweet irony.

I slowly rolled down the main strip, amazed that nothing had changed much in the nearly seven years I’d been gone.

At the top of the strip, just off the highway, there was a big hotel. Something fancy. That hadn’t been there before. There’d been a cheap motel and I’d had a thing with Jared, who worked the desk. He and I and a few friends of his would party in the rooms that weren’t rented out. Bad Boyfriend #1.

Along the strip were a few more coffee shops than there had been before. A lot fewer donut places, which was a shame. The nice seafood restaurants were all still there: the Lobster Pot and Sweetgrass. The dive bars; Frankie’s still had its peel and eat special and dollar drafts at happy hour.

A few of the old condos had gotten facelifts. Paint jobs.

But all in all—unchanged. Like nothing had happened.

Time moved on in other parts of the world. Not in Indian Shores, Florida.

What a weird relief.

I found her condo because I remembered it was across the street from the gas station with the night shift guys who never carded me during those