chapter 4
After a few minutes of small talk, he cleared his throat.
“I’m driving back to our hometown tomorrow to visit my grandma,” he said. “She keeps complaining she never sees you anymore. Want to come with? It’s on the way back toward the city.”
I thought about the little house at the end of our old road. The hill behind it. The two headstones up there under a scraggly maple.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I do.”
His grandmother practically cried when she saw me.
“Zephany! Look at you,” she said, pulling me into a hug that smelled like laundry detergent and cinnamon. “You’ve been gone too long, baby. Come in, come in.”
Back in the country, the internet felt like another planet. I helped wash dishes, fed the dog, went on grocery runs, and, for the first time in forever, didn’t feel like I had to film any of it.
I also went to see my parents.
They’d died together in a car accident when I was in college. It took me years to be able to bring them home and bury them on the hill behind our old house, like they always talked about when I was a kid.
I carried a bouquet of wildflowers up the slope. The air smelled like damp grass and pine.
“Hey,” I whispered, kneeling to brush leaves off the stone. “I’m back.”
That’s when I noticed it.
The soil around the headstone was disturbed. Not just from rain. Freshly turned, like someone had dug into it recently and tried to cover the evidence.
A chill slid through me.
I smoothed the dirt back out, set the flowers down, and headed home with a knot in my chest I couldn’t explain.
It only tightened when I turned the corner and saw who was standing in the driveway.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered.
Gavin was there—with his suitcase, like he was about to move in.
And next to him, in an oversized sweatshirt and flawless no-makeup makeup, was Leslie Hall.
The girl the internet had chosen over me.