ignore how it makes me feel. How it’s going to ruin me.”
Tears fill her eyes, and I’m quick to reach out, to palm her face and brush my thumb along her cheeks to wipe them away.
“I’ll ignore it all, okay?” I search her eyes, but they refuse to meet mine, and so I drop my hands, releasing her completely. I rest my forearms on the ledge again and stare out the window, noticing the water tower in the distance. I push down the pain in my chest. “For you, Mia,” I murmur. “I owe you that much.”
Chapter Nineteen
Mia
I read somewhere that the human body replaces itself every seven years. The thought stuck with me for months afterward, until I became so intrigued by the notion that I finally looked it up. Turns out, it’s bullshit. Like a lot of things in life.
While it’s true that cells have a finite life span, there’s no real science backing up that specific time frame. And besides, if you think about it, that would kind of mean that every seven years we’d feel younger. It was so obviously incorrect that, now, I roll my eyes at the thought. But swear, for those few months, it felt like I had something to look forward to. I even looked it up on a calendar and set a reminder on my phone on the exact date, seven years from the last day I spent at the Prestons’. On that date, there’d be nothing, at least physically, to remind me of that night. Of how it felt to hate the body I was born with. I would be a new me. I think, in a way, that’s why I waited so long to do the research. I wanted so badly for it to be true, which is dumb. You’d think that after everything that happened, I’d realize that the simple act of believing in something or someone wasn’t enough to make it real.
I tug my hair out of its knot and stand back up, my legs wobbly when I’m back to full height. The image of me in the mirror is blurred, distorted by dirt and grime and all the things that cover surfaces that haven’t been touched in years. When I open the door, sunlight filters through the cracks in the roof, splintering the room with shards of dust-filled rays. Rows of beds take up each side, couches and an old TV on one end. On the other are a small kitchen, eating area, restrooms, and showers.
At one point, the barn was the sleeping quarters for all the workers that would come through. Most of them were drifters or hitchhikers just looking to make a quick buck so they could continue on. But some of them stayed, became full-time employees. Papa said, in the beginning, they used to pitch tents on the field, but my nagymama—my grandma—complained about them going in and out of the house to use the bathroom and shower and kitchen, so Papa built the barn for them to relax in and sleep once the workday was over. He even let workers from other farms use the beds for a small fee when it was peak season, usually during the summers. I know most of this through stories alone. According to him, he didn’t like strangers around me much, especially when I was little, so, as a precaution, he stopped hiring the males he didn’t know. And then, females. Eventually, he stopped hiring anyone who didn’t come with a trusted reference. Soon, the lack of employees made it hard for him to keep up with the work, so he retired and sold up before he started losing money. At first, I worried that he’d want us to move, somewhere smaller with less upkeep. I shouldn’t have worried. This land, the house we live in, the life we have, it’s his dream. His American dream.
I pull out my phone as I walk to the door and send a text to Holden that I’m awake and to come and get me. It’s been three days since Leo and I were at the parlor, and I’ve spent most of that time with Holden—not replaying Leo’s words in my head over and over like a damn broken record. Just as I begin to push the barn door open, someone does it for me. That someone is the boy I was not just thinking about. “Sorry,” he rushes out, and he won’t look at me. He’s in his running