Total pages in book: 27
Estimated words: 25416 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 127(@200wpm)___ 102(@250wpm)___ 85(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 25416 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 127(@200wpm)___ 102(@250wpm)___ 85(@300wpm)
“He’s being released at 10. It’s a few hours’ drive, so we’ll have to leave bright and early.”
“Is he staying here?” Tatum asks.
My already racing mind starts sprinting.
“No,” Nina says. “For now he’ll be staying in a halfway house, but we’re going to drop him off there.”
“This is just—” Tatum beams from ear to ear. “—the best news, you know?” She bounds over to me and grasps my hands. “Isn’t this amazing, Lucas?”
“It’s great.” I manage to smile and nod.
“Be ready to go at six, okay?” Nina says.
“I’ll be ready at five.”
Tatum leads me by the hand up to her bedroom. I move in a daze, dumbstruck and panic-stricken. I have to do something. I can’t let Gene break her heart when she shows up at the prison all excited to see him, and he barely recognizes her.
I have to tell her.
I have to tell her now.
“Tatum,” I say, sinking down onto the edge of her bed as I watch her move like a whirlwind around the room.
“I want to dress up for tomorrow.” She tugs the blue dress off and then pulls on another dress, a darker one, more modest, with little red flowers all over it. “What do you think of this one?”
“Tatum, baby. I need to talk to you about something.”
“No good?” She turns to her closet to rifle through it to find something better.
“Tatum, it’s not about the dress. Please, just…sit down.”
She stops what she’s doing and looks at me, confusion written cleanly across her face.
“What is it? Lucas, you’re scaring me.”
I take a deep breath and survey her beautiful face, memorizing how she looks in this moment, the instant before I lose her. “I wrote the letters.”
She blinks. “What?”
“The ones from your father. I wrote them. That’s why you haven’t received any since I got out. That’s why—”
“I don’t understand,” she says. “I’ve been writing to my dad for four years.”
“I was your father’s cellmate. You sent him a birthday card four years ago. The one with the cheese grater and the school photo.”
She takes a step back. This is it, the beginning of the end of everything.
“You wrote those letters?”
“I did.” I hate the way she’s looking at me, like I’m someone she doesn’t know.
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I thought you deserved a response.”
“So, you’re saying you stole his birthday card?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then how—”
“I picked it up off the floor. It was already opened. I picked it up, and I looked at you, and I thought, this girl deserves an apology, if nothing else. I thought, maybe I could do this one small thing. I could give her that. I shouldn’t have kept it going for so long, but…those letters became the only bright spots in my life at the time. You were the best part of the last four years, Tatum. My sunshine in that gray place, and I didn’t want to let it go…” I clear my throat and look away. “When I got out, I told myself that it was time to fess up. So I showed up at the salon…”
“You lied to me,” she hisses, hurt and betrayal coloring every line of her expression.
“Baby, I—”
“Don’t call me that,” she snaps. “Don’t you dare call me that.”
My heart shatters.
“Please, Tatum, you’ve gotta understand. I didn’t mean for it to happen this way. I didn’t mean to fall in love with you—” Her eyes widen at my words, her lip trembles. “—but I did. I fell in love with you. I love you, Tatum, and I know what I did was wrong, but I’m not sorry that I did it. I’m only sorry I lied to you.”
She looks like she wants to say something. But without saying a word, she marches over to the door and throws it wide.
“Get out.”
“Tatum—”
“I said, get out, Lucas!”
I rise slowly and make my way to the door, wishing I could take it all back. But I can’t. This was going to happen one day. Sooner or later, she was always going to learn that I’m a liar and a fraud. No amount of time served could ever make up for the harm I caused her.
As soon as I’m past the threshold, she slams the door. It’s no less than I deserve.
eight
TATUM
I want to beg Lucas to come back to me the second I slam the door. But I don’t. I can’t. I have too much self-respect for that.
How could he?
How could he?
Our entire relationship was built on a lie, and then he goes and tells me he loves me? That isn’t love. That’s manipulation at worst, and desperation at best. He just didn’t want to lose me, and he was willing to say anything to gain my forgiveness.
I drop onto my bed and bury my face in my pillow and let out the kind of scream you only see in the movies. Guttural, visceral, and all-consuming. I let my pillow swallow it whole. I cry until my body is trembling from the force of my sobs, the tears soaking into my pillowcase. I cry until I’m weak, until I cry myself into a deep and fitful sleep.