of when she was a little kid, kind of—the two of them going to the hardware store and the dry cleaners and the nursery, stopping for a dozen doughnuts on the way back. After school during the week, though, she’d driven home to her mom’s house and gotten to work: scooping her hair up into a messy knot and blasting Fleetwood Mac as loud as the sound system would go while she vacuumed the bedrooms and dusted the baseboards and scrubbed the inside of the refrigerator, opening all the windows to get the air moving around. She’d watched a YouTube video and figured out how to hang the art in the hallway; then, encouraged by her success, she’d gone ahead and painted the living room a fresh, clean white. She’d gone to the Philly farmers’ market with Lillian and Maja. She’d taken Lisa’s kids to an arcade.
She hadn’t talked to Colby at all.
She missed his laugh and his bitten cuticles and his dry sense of humor; she missed him more than she’d ever missed anyone before. And the worst part was how she’d been kind of right that night in the hotel room; he did lift neatly out of her life, as far as everyone else in it was concerned. Like maybe he’d been her imaginary friend. She’d thought about texting, about getting in her car and driving all the way to Ohio, but in the end she knew it wasn’t going to accomplish anything. It had been fun for a while, but now it was over.
It was never going to work.
Meg swallowed hard and straightened up, turning and slinging her purse over her shoulder. “Come on,” she said, slipping her hand into her mom’s and squeezing. When she’d gotten back from the rehab place, they’d cleaned out all the closets and cabinets one by one. Meg knew they had a long way to go—when she’d driven to New Jersey for the family therapy session, her mom’s counselor had explained about the probability of relapse and maybe even more inpatient rehab, that addiction was a lifelong disease that could be managed but never cured. Still, in this house in this dress on this warm, sunny morning, it felt like they were making a start. “Let’s go.”
Two nights later, her coworkers threw her a little graduation party in the tiny conference room at WeCount, with paper cups of Trader Joe’s lemonade and a fistful of Mylar balloons Lillian had picked up from Party City. Maja had made lavender sopapillas. Rico played the sunscreen song on his phone.
“To the newest member of the Annie Hernandez campaign,” he said, offering a lemonade toast. “They’re not going to know what hit ’em.”
Meg grinned. It had been easier than she’d thought, telling her parents she was taking a year off from school to see what happened, that she’d rethink what she actually wanted and apply again. Meanwhile, in the days since she’d gotten the call about the internship, she’d found a roommate through the campaign and lined up interviews for some waitressing gigs to supplement her piddly stipend. She’d leave for Columbus at the end of the month. She didn’t think she’d ever been this terrified—and for the first time since she could remember, she was kind of thrilled by the idea of what came next.
After the party, they all drifted over to their stations, Meg pulling up her call log on the computer—the software was working for once—and brushing some pastry crumbs off the front of her shirt. She’d just hung up with a single dad in Cincinnati when Lillian’s round face appeared over the partition. “Hey, Meg?” she said. “There’s a call for you.”
Meg frowned. “For me?” she repeated, her heart doing something strange and complicated deep inside her chest. WeCount’s number wasn’t listed on their website. There was only one person she could ever imagine calling her here.
Lillian nodded. “I’ll transfer it over.”
Meg tugged at her bottom lip for a moment, reminding herself not to get her hopes up. It was true that in the weeks since her dad’s wedding there had been a million things she’d wanted to tell him—about Emily and her mom and her internship, about all the ways knowing him had made her brave—but no matter how many times she came close to calling, she hadn’t been able to make herself reach out. Probably she had been right: they were just too different.
But maybe that didn’t mean what they had wasn’t worth fighting for.
Now she took a deep