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  By noon that first day, I had to resist the urge to collapse into the pot of mac and cheese I was making for lunch. The previous night had consisted of image after revolting image as I tried to interpret what one night thing might mean. And most importantly, was this “thing” before or after October, when I first made my appearance?

  These questions—and the likelihood that I’d never get the answers to them because I felt too stupid to ask—were slowly driving me insane.

  Of course, a deep-down part of me wasn’t surprised at all. It had happened to me once and it was only a matter of time before it happened to me again. Boys were…well, boys. Why should Michael be any different? Loving someone, opening up your heart to them, didn’t provide any immunity to getting hurt. In fact, the opposite was true. By giving your trust to someone, you also gave them the power to hurt you more deeply than anyone else. I’d always admired the way girls like Robin bounced back from bad relationships, moving right on to the next guy and effortlessly letting him in without fear of the unknown, but that was Robin. I wasn’t like her. She’d always been the brave one. Not me.

  Which was why, I thought, I should’ve known better than to take the risk. But now I did know better, and when Michael called my cell that afternoon, I let it go to voicemail.

  Then, when he called again an hour later, I answered and told him I had a bad headache, which was true, and that I planned to go to bed really early tonight, which was also true. The excuse worked that night, but the next afternoon, after a short phone call during which I offered more lame excuses, Michael started to catch on. I acted distant on the phone, putting him off, hoping he’d get the hint without my even saying anything, and give up. But he didn’t. He knew something was up.

  And so did Lynn.

  I was in my room listening to music, cell phone set to vibrate on the bed beside me, when she appeared at my door. When I noticed her there, I ripped out my earbuds and tried to furtively dry my cheeks with the pillow, but it was too late. She saw.

  “Taylor?” she said, her perma-smile slipping. She wore pink sweats and no makeup, her curly hair damp from the shower she’d taken when she got off work.

  “Yeah?” I blinked away the last traces of wetness from my eyelids.

  “Are you okay?”

  I nodded, wishing more than anything that she’d leave me alone and at the same time, hoping she wouldn’t. But it was close to five and she needed to start dinner, so she backed off for now. I knew that wouldn’t be the end of it.

  At dinner, I picked at my food and tuned everything out. I did notice my father and stepmother exchanging a few meaningful glances, but I focused mainly on my plate until the meal ended and then escaped to my room again, leaving the door open. Lynn would probably be along soon with an offer to talk. This was what she did. She was a nurse—she took care of people.

  But to my surprise, it wasn’t Lynn who showed up in my room ten minutes later. It was my father, the last person on earth I wanted to talk to right then. The last person on earth who would understand.

  “Are you sick, sweet pea?” he asked, hovering near my bed.

  “No.” I busied myself with untangling my earbuds wire so I wouldn’t have to meet his eyes. Just the fact that he was standing in my room right now, all worried about me, made me inexplicably angry at him. Angrier than I’d been in a good three years. Feelings I thought I’d put behind me long ago were suddenly erupting to the surface all at once, raw and sore like a re-opened wound. The protective scab had been picked off and I was bleeding, even worse than the first time. Back then I was young and naive, unable to grasp anything other than that my daddy had left me. Now, I was old enough to understand the impact it had made on me, the damage it had caused. And I realized maybe I hadn’t forgiven him, after all. That maybe I never would.

  “I want to be alone, Dad,” I said, securing the earbuds in my ears. My finger rested on the “play” button, ready to drown him out.

  He backed away. “Okay, I’ll come back later—.”

  “No,” I heard from the hallway, and then Lynn burst into the room, heading straight for my father. She put a hand on his arm to stop him. “Steven, no. Talk to your daughter. I’m not going to let you avoid it any longer.”

  Dad dropped his gaze to the floor and I sat up, plucking out my earbuds. I stared, intrigued, at Lynn’s determined face. Obviously she’d been listening outside the door. She turned to me before Dad could react to her words.

  “Taylor, this talk is well past due.” She placed a hand on my father’s back and sort of steered him toward me. He sat down at the foot of my bed, slowly, as if in pain. Lynn stayed close by, arms crossed, eyes fixed on my dad.

  “Honey,” Dad said, and then paused to take a deep breath and rub his beard. “Honey, what you said a few weeks ago, about how I felt guilty for ruining your mother’s life…”

  I shook my head. “I was mad.”

  “No.” He looked at me now, that same stinging pain in his eyes. “You were right.”

  That shut me up. I touched the swan charm at my neck, feeling its shape with my fingers as I waited for Dad to continue. He took a deep breath and shot a glance at Lynn before speaking again.

  “I’ve spent the past four years feeling guilty for what I put your mother through. For what I put you and Emma through. For how I handled it all. At the time, I didn’t see any other way, but now…now I look back and think about what I could have done to make it easier on you.”

  “Not leave at all?” I said bitterly. I couldn’t help it. This had been building in me for so long.

  His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “I have a lot of regrets, Taylor. The infidelity—that was inexcusable. But I don’t regret divorcing your mother. I don’t regret meeting Lynn and marrying her.”

  Lynn squeezed his shoulder, her eyes shiny with tears.

  “Is that what you think I’ve been upset about?” I asked. I was curious as to why they chose today of all days to come to me about this, when I was already emotionally wrecked. “Because it’s not. It’s about Michael. It has nothing to do with what I said to you that day.”

  “I’ve been bugging your dad to talk to you ever since he told me about what you said,” Lynn explained. “We both wanted to talk to you. There are some things I need to say too.”

  “What happened with Michael?” Dad asked.

  “Just a fight,” I said, though it wasn’t a fight at all. More like a stonewalling.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No offense, Dad, but you’re the last person on earth who should be giving out relationship advice.”

  He did that wincing thing again, like I’d slapped him, and right away I wanted to take it back. Here he was, trying his best to reach out to me, and I was acting like a brat.

  “I guess I deserved that one too,” he said softly.

  No one said anything for a minute. Finally I look at Lynn, whose hand still rested on my father’s shoulder. “What did you need to say?”

  She frowned a little. Seeing Lynn’s face without its smile was like seeing a cat without its fur. Strange and just…wrong.

  “I needed to say that I’m sorry,” she said, her voice cracking on the last word. Dad gripped her hand. “Taylor, I’ve loved your dad from the moment I met him, but I never…I never intended to break up a marriage and a-a h-home.”

  She started crying then. I’d only seen Lynn cry once before, years ago, when Leanne ran away from home and was returned by the police. Lynn had cried with relief when she realized her daughter was safe, and then in anger because Leanne had worried her so much.

  “I forgive you,” I told her. It was the truth. I’d stopped blaming her long ago, and home-wrecking aside, she was an amazing stepmom. Most days I liked her better than my own mother.

  Lynn reached for me, wrapping me in an Ivory-soap hug. “I love you and Emma,” she blubbered into my shoulder. “Like daughters.”

  I could tell she’d been waiting a long time to get all that
out, so I sat still while she hugged me and whispered her apologizes, over and over. “It’s okay,” I said, patting her back. Finally she pulled away and took a deep, shuddering breath.

  “Sweet pea,” my father said once Lynn had control over herself. “I guess what we’re both trying to say is we know we’re not perfect. We’ve made mistakes. Adults do make mistakes sometimes. And we hope you and Emma can forgive us for them.” He reached tentatively for my hand. “I left your mother and our house, yes. But I didn’t leave my girls. I hurt them deeply, but I’ll never leave them.”

  But you did leave us, I thought. You left us confused, scared, and angry. You left us with a broken mother and an upside-down life. Maybe you were technically there, a twenty-minute drive away, or as a voice on the other end of the phone, but it was never the same again. We never looked at you the same again.

  I thought all this, but didn’t say it. Instead I said, “It felt like you left us.”

  “Yes,” he said sadly. “And I plan to spend the rest of my life making it up to you.”

  Lynn wrapped her arm around Dad’s shoulders, and his arm circled her waist. They both looked at me nervously, as if they thought I might scream at them or call them horrible names. I’d wanted to, at one point in my life. But now, all I could do was let it go.

  I met my father’s eyes. “I think I understand why you did what you did. You found the person who you wanted to spend the rest of your life with. Mom was never that person for you.”

  Dad cleared his throat a few times, like he did when he was trying not to get emotional. “You’re exactly right,” he managed to say. And then he looked at Lynn in that mushy, starry-eyed way he always did. The way Cliff Huxtable looked at Clair. The way Brian looked at Kara.

  The way Michael looked at me.

  As I was thinking this, a buzzing sound came from my bed. It was my cell phone, still on vibrate and burrowed in my covers. I grabbed it and checked the call display. Michael. “I should take this,” I told my father and stepmother. They quickly got up to leave.

  “Go easy on that kid,” Dad said on his way out. “I’m sure he’s sorry for whatever he did to upset you.”

  We’ll see, I thought, putting the phone to my ear. “Hello?”

  “What’s going on?” Michael’s voice sounded both alarmed and annoyed. “You said you were going to call me back and you…Why are you mad at me?”

  “Can you come over?” I asked. “We need to talk.”

  There was dead silence as the heaviest four words in history registered in his ears. “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “When I get there,” he said, “will you let me in?”

  “Yes,” I said, my index finger reaching up to trace the swans again as I spoke. “I’ll let you in.”

  Chapter 20

  Every year around April, when the warmer weather hit, my father and stepmother would go away for a weekend to “reconnect”. I tried not to think about what, exactly, that entailed. This year they were heading down the shore to a seaside resort. Usually, I’d stay at home during that particular weekend and didn’t anticipate this time being any different. But about a week before their trip, my plans unexpectedly changed.

  “You can come over next weekend and keep me company, if you want,” Leanne said to me as we cleaned the kitchen together after our traditional Sunday brunch of pancakes and turkey bacon.

  “Really?” I said. Leanne had never requested my presence before. Up until a few months ago, she was too busy trying to ignore it.

  “You can help me with Jamie and stuff.”

  I quickly hid my shock. “Uh…sure. I can, like, babysit too, if you wanted to go out.”

  “Yeah?” She smiled. “I did sort of want to go to this concert Friday night…are you sure you don’t mind? I wouldn’t want you to feel like I’m taking advantage of you. I mean, I totally don’t mind sticking around.”

  “No. Really. I don’t mind at all. We can do something on Saturday, take Jamie to the movies or whatever.”

  “Okay, sounds good,” she said, nodding. “Oh, and if you wanted to have Michael over tomorrow night, feel free. I won’t tell a soul.”

  That settled it for me. After weathering our first rough patch, I figured Michael and I had earned an unsupervised night together.

  As promised, I’d let him in when he showed up at my dad’s house that night. And even though we weren’t really supposed to, we went for a drive and parked near the waterfront. It took me a long time to organize the thoughts in my head into coherent sentences but, as always, Michael waited patiently until I was ready.

  “Elena Brewster,” I’d said at last. “You did go out with her.”

  “I did?” he’d asked, thoroughly confused.

  “So you didn’t go out with her. But you had a thing with her. A one night thing.”

  With that, his gaze wavered. “Who told you that?”

  “Kayla said something about it Monday night.”

  “Right out of the blue?”

  “She assumed I knew. She assumed, after seeing Elena flirt with you over and over again right in front of me, that you’d told me about having a thing with her.” I felt my business-like calm start to slip. “So tell me…was this before or after you met me?”

  He seemed bewildered by the edge in my voice. “It was a stupid mistake,” he said. “Yes, it was before I met you. A couple of weeks before.”

  “And?” I wasn’t totally sure I wanted to know all the details.

  “And…” He squirmed a little in his seat. “One night, we kissed a little and she…well, I let her…”

  Now I knew I didn’t want to hear the details. What went on in the bedrooms of the Redwood Hills party houses was common knowledge. Some of the girls even bragged about their skills in this particular activity. “I’m sure you really fought her off,” I said, feeling sickened by the fact that in one sense, Elena Brewster knew my boyfriend almost as intimately as I did.

  “Really, it was no big deal. Temporary insanity on my part.”

  “But you told me,” I said, “not long after we started going out…when I asked you why you’d never gone out with her, you said you didn’t like her, that she wasn’t a nice person.”

  “I remember.”

  “You didn’t like her, yet you…did that with her.”

  He ran a hand though his hair, looking pained. “We were at a party and having a few drinks. It just sort of happened.”

  “So you made out with her, made her think there was something between you, and you’ve been avoiding her ever since.” When he didn’t answer, I knew I’d hit the mark. She liked him, and he had led her on. Gave her hope. And while I was busy worrying about her trying to steal Michael away from me, she was probably thinking I had stolen him away from her. “Why didn’t you tell me about this, if it was no big deal? You let me think she had this little crush on you all this time. You could’ve mentioned something about hooking up with her once.”

  “Well, it happened, and I’ve been regretting it ever since. It was a mistake, okay? It didn’t mean anything.”

  I looked away, out the window, toward the choppy water in the distance. “It didn’t mean anything to you,” I said, “but it obviously meant something to her. She doesn’t care that you don’t want her, Michael. She doesn’t even care that you have a girlfriend. She’s just waiting for the day when I’m not there so she can move in and take you away from me.”

  “She’ll never take me away from you.” He gripped the steering wheel hard, like he was suppressing the urge to touch me, scared of how I might react. “No one will.”

  I didn’t answer because I wasn’t quite ready to believe that. Maybe I never would.

  “Did you think I cheated on you with Elena?” he asked. Something in his voice made me look up, and I could see the hurt in his features. “You really think I’d do that to you?”

  “I…” My throat closed over, and two seconds later I was doing something I swore I’d never do—I was c
rying in front of a boy. Letting him in.

  Michael wrapped his arms around me and I sobbed into his shoulder, sobbed until my throat ached and my eyes swelled and his leather jacket felt slippery under my cheek. “I should have told you about Elena,” he said, rubbing circles into my back. “I guess I didn’t want you to know what an ass I was to her.”

  I pulled away, dabbing at his jacket with my sleeve. “We all have our ass moments,” I said. He smiled slightly, and I took a deep breath to steady myself. “Will you promise me something?”

  “Anything.”

  “Don’t keep things from me. I want to know things, and not just stuff about your past. I want to know about what’s going on with your father and Josh and college and your plans. Full disclosure, okay? You never have to pretend to be perfect around me.”

  He reached up to clear away the tears I’d missed. “It’s a deal, but only if you promise me something.”

  “What?”

  “Stop expecting me to disappoint you. I get enough of that already from my dad.”

  “I promise.”

  “Then I promise too”

  “Let’s shake on it,” I suggested, and then kissed him instead.

  ****

  When I got to Dad and Lynn’s house on Friday evening, the door was locked. I’d forgotten my key, so I sat on the steps to wait for Leanne and Jamie. I figured they must have gone to the store. Or maybe, I thought, they decided to go stay with a relative for the weekend and forgot to tell me. But no, Leanne and I had this weekend all planned out. She’d called me during the week to discuss things like what food to get, little details like that, and I’d been pleasantly shocked at how fun and funny my stepsister could be when she opened up. We weren’t exactly close yet, but we were starting to become friends. At last.