THE YEARS by Krashband15
The Years by krashband15 Summary When a prisoner is released after serving sixteen years, she struggles to readjust to the outside world and move on with her life. But a surprise encounter with her first love pulls her back to the past.
Outside The morning Ashlyn Harris is released, she sits in a worn booth at the back of a Denny’s, trying to decide what to order. She’s imagined this moment for months, as soon as she’d learned she’d been approved for parole, and years before that, as soon as she’d tasted her first Fluvanna meal and cried once she realized how long it would be until she had food from Outside. She’d cried easily back then, in those first days and weeks and months. Not anymore. Now she feels like a pebbled layer has stretched over her skin, toughening her like leather. She’s spent years steeling herself, turning herself into an unthinking, unfeeling machine. She isn’t rattled by much anymore, or at least she’d thought, until she’d finally stepped outside, blinking into the brightness of the sun. Outside, everything is bright and harsh and loud. Outside, people jitter around her quickly, and she feels dizzy just watching. In Denny’s, the waitresses scuttle back and forth across the linoleum floor, and at the next booth over, two teenagers pose for pictures in front of black rectangles small enough to fit in the palm of their hands. She gawks when the teen girl holds the rectangle to her ear. Cell phones. She hasn’t seen a cell phone since they were chunky plastic things, slightly smaller than cordless phones. But now they are sleek and small with screens like tiny televisions. She wouldn’t even know how to make a phone call on one of those things. How did you hang up? Did people even still call it hanging up? “Ready yet, hun?” An older blonde waitress smiles at her, popping a strip of pink bubble gum. She’s friendly enough, but she wants Ashlyn to hurry. Everyone wants her to hurry: the people who walked around her on the sidewalk, the passengers behind her who’d groaned when she’d paused at the bottom of the bus steps to catch her bearing. In sixteen years, Dumfries, Virginia has changed as much as the rest of the world. She’d wandered through downtown, where mom-and-pop shops had transformed into chain stores. She’d finally ducked into Denny’s, comforted by the familiar bright yellow logo. But even now, she feels overwhelmed. The menu, for one. Has the Denny’s menu always been so extensive? Pancakes, eggs, french toast, waffles. Bacon, sausage. Combos. She hasn’t had to decide what to eat for breakfast in years. She hasn’t had to decide anything, really. But Outside, there are endless choices. She’s already made a big choice by returning to Dumfries. She feels exhausted at the thought of making more decisions. She points at a photo of a stack of pancakes that looks bigger than her head. “How about that?” she says. “Come again?” the waitress says, leaning closer. Speak up. She has to speak up. Outside, everything is loud. Inside, she’d learned to be quiet. She’d survived by being the quietest person in the room, the one who’d always watched and listened and observed. Even now, she can’t keep her eyes still. She glances around the restaurant constantly. She sits on the side of the booth facing the door. She feels like everyone is watching her too, like they can glance at her and tell that she’s spent the past decade and a half in state prison. She’s wearing the same outfit she wore at intake: a black UVa t-shirt that grips her arms tightly now after she’s packed on more muscle, and blue jeans ripped at the knees. She’d bought them ripped, which seems stupid and impractical now, but she hadn’t cared much about practicality when she was twenty. Now she touches her bare knees under the table. At release, she was given an envelope of her belongings, a one-way bus ticket, and $200. The gate money won’t last long; she’ll have to find a job, to survive and as a condition of her parole, and no one will hire a near forty-year-old in a too-small college t-shirt and ripped jeans. She will have to get new clothes. That’s the first thing. She hates wearing these old clothes. She feels like she’s wearing another person’s skin. The girl who’d worn this outfit doesn’t exist anymore. She died Inside. Ashlyn glances back at the menu, even though she doesn’t read it. Today is Monday. In Fluvanna, Mondays are toast and eggs. So she orders toast and eggs. *** Her parole officer is prettier than she ought to be. Ashlyn sinks into the chair across from her, embarrassed that the thought even crosses her mind. But she can’t help it—she’s surprised. She’d envisioned a balding man with hairy fingers or an old woman in a boxy suit jacket, her makeup creased in her wrinkled face. Not this woman, who’s young and beautiful, her light brown hair falling to her shoulders as silky and smooth as a hair model’s. She has grayish blue eyes and a genuine smile, and when she stands to shake Ashlyn’s hand, Ashlyn feels so rattled, she stares at the floor. She hasn’t been this close to a woman this beautiful in years, and she can’t stop fidgeting, plucking at the white strings threading across her knees. “Are you getting settled okay?” the parole officer asks. Ashlyn nods, then realizing she’s expected to answer aloud, says, “Yes ma’am.” Her parole officer smiles. “You don’t have to call me ma’am,” she says. “Alex is fine.” But it’s not fine—Ashlyn glances at the gold nameplate on the desk and feels a stab in her stomach. Alexandra Morgan. Alexandra, that name she’s been trying to forget. “I have to read off a list of conditions for your parole,” Alex says. “Guidelines, sort of. Don’t worry if you don’t remember them all. I have a printout for you.” She smiles again and Ashlyn nods, her eyes fluttering to the ground. Why is this parole officer being so friendly to her? What does she want? Or maybe she’s not being exceptionally friendly. Maybe she’s just being polite and this is how polite people act Outside. How normal people act. Why can’t Ashlyn remember? Why can’t she remember being normal? She stares at the worn gray carpet, listening while Alex rattles off a list of rules. Must report within 24 hours. (Check.) Stay within a certain area. (Where else does she have to go?) Obtain permission before changing residence or employment. (Christ, where will she even live?) Obtain and maintain employment. Maintain acceptable, non-threatening behavior. Report any arrest within 24 hours. No firearms or weapons. Submit to search at any time by parole officers. When Alex finishes, she gives Ashlyn a little smile that almost seems apologetic. But Ashlyn isn’t bothered. If anything, she’s relieved to have a new set of rules to live under. Some structure, at last, for Outside, some borders to show her how far she is allowed to go. “I remember your case,” Alex says. “Never seemed like you got a fair shake.” Ashlyn tugs at the thread across her knee until it snags, making a larger hole. In the beginning, a lot of people thought she hadn’t gotten a fair shake. She used to receive letters of support, usually from other gay women, and once, an LGBT legal defense organization had even written briefs on her behalf to ask the court for leniency. If she had been a man, the brief had argued, no jury would have faulted her for what she’d done. She would have been celebrated, even, as a hero. But the judge denied her appeals, and soon, the letters dried up. She doubts anyone remembers her case anymore or even cares about whether she had been treated fairly. She tries not to think about fairness. She would’ve gone crazy Inside if she’d allowed herself to obsess over the details of her trial. Inside, fairness doesn’t matter. Survival does. So she’d stopped thinking about the trial altogether. Her incompetent lawyer. The prosecutor’s snarling accusations. What’s the point in looking back? Besides, she’s no innocent. She killed a man. That’s the stone cold truth. The only murky part is that some people understand why. “Can I go?” she asks. Alex glances up, startled. “Oh,” she says. “Well, yes, but you’ll have to report back next week. And I’ll need to know where you’re staying.” Ashlyn sighs, easing out of the chair. Another decision she’ll have to make, not that she has many choices. Her family has since moved to Florida. No one has come to visit her in the past ten years and no one even knows that she’s been released. It’s for the best, probably. She’d only be a burden on them. But now she has no idea where she’ll stay. She can’t even think about finding an apartment until she finds a job. A headache starts to creep toward her temples. She starts toward the doorway but pauses, gripping the door handle. She can’t think of anything else to do. She needs help. “Where can I get jeans?” she says. *** In Target, she feels blinded by the endless white. Shiny white floors and shiny white walls, bordered by a violent red. The fluorescent lights overhead burn too brightly, and on the PA system, a repetitive pop song threatens to bore itself into her brain. What do people even listen to nowadays? Just another question she hasn’t considered, another enigma she will struggle to unfold. On the music aisle, she passes row after row of a toothy blonde—Taylor something—but she doesn’t have time to stop and look. She’s scuttling quickly after her parole officer, who leads her to the clothing section. Quickly, because Alex is going out of her way to help her and Ashlyn doesn’t want to waste her time. Quickly, because in a store this massive, she’s worried that she’ll get lost. Once or twice, she clips the back of Alex’s heel when she stops suddenly to explain something. She mumbles her apologies, always staring at the ground. “You should look up,” Alex says kindly. “When you’re talking to people. It bothers some people if you don’t look at them.” Ashlyn knows this. Of course she knows this. But old habits die hard. Inside, she never looked at people. Inside, making eye contact with the wrong person or holding it for a second too long could get you killed. In the jeans section, Ashlyn stares at the dozen racks, not even knowing where to begin. Each rack has a label above it that she doesn’t understand. Skinny. Bootcut. Boyfriend jeans. Jeggings. What the fuck are jeggings? When did jeans become so complicated? Alex senses her hesitation and steps forward, pulling a pair off the rack. The jeans look like normal jeans. Ashlyn glances at the label. Relaxed fit. “How about these?” Alex says. “Do you want to check for your size?” But Ashlyn doesn’t remember her size. She hadn’t even checked the jeans she’s wearing now, just grateful that they’d fit. But even if she did remember her size, she doubts it would be helpful. The jeans Alex is holding are a size 00. What does that even mean? Jesus, are clothing sizes different now too? “I don’t know,” she finally says. “What?” “My size. I don’t know it.” She tries to look at Alex when she says it, even though she’d rather look anywhere else. She feels like a kindergartner whose mother has taken her shopping. At least a kindergartner would know more about the world than she does. Alex studies her a second, then rifles through the rack, finally pulling out a pair. She holds the jeans against Ashlyn’s waist. “Those look about right,” she says. “Why don’t you try them on?” In the fitting room, she takes a steadying breath, reaching out both hands to touch the wall. Inside, she obsessively measured space. Her shared cell: twelve steps to the bars, nine steps from wall-towall. She’d spent some time in solitary—she’s never sure how long—where her cell was nine steps to the bars, six from wall-to-wall. It stunned her, how those few feet of difference could make her feel trapped and panicky. That, and the endless silence. She imagined her life growing smaller and smaller, the room shrinking and growing quieter, until she was left standing on a single tile. By the time she’d been reintegrated into general population, her cell felt enormous, even with her constant stream of new cellmates she’d had to share it with. She leans against the fitting room wall, clutching the jeans to her chest. Strangely, she doesn’t hate confined spaces. She feels safer here. Yes, she is locked in, but everyone else is locked out. *** When she finally steps out with a pair of jeans that fit, Alex has already begun gathering the essentials. A toothbrush and toothpaste, soap and shampoo, a hairbrush. All little things Ashlyn has not even realized that she’ll need. She’s been too overwhelmed to think about more than one thing at a time, so she follows Alex around dumbly as she drops item after item into the cart. As they roll toward the checkout lanes, Ashlyn realizes that she hasn’t even been adding up the cost of all of this, and she reaches quickly for the folded wad of cash in her pocket. But Alex shakes her head, reaching for her wallet instead. “Let me,” she says. “I can’t—” “You can,” she says. “Save your money.” She pulls out a shiny silver card and hands it to Ashlyn. “Why don’t you try?” Ashlyn is so overwhelmed by Alex’s generosity that it takes her a moment to realize what Alex wants her to do. She stares at the machine in front of her, below a red sign that reads Self Checkout. A credit card reader. Finally, something familiar. She tries swiping Alex’s card, but the machine beeps so loudly, she jumps. “Some of the cards have chips on them now,” Alex says. She points to a tiny metallic square on her card. “So you have to insert them here, not swipe them.” Ashlyn slides the card into the glowing blue slot at the bottom. The machine whirs pleasantly, and she laughs, in spite of herself. “I feel like a caveman,” she says. Alex laughs too. “I know you feel like everything has changed,” she says. “But the world’s moving fast for all of us. We’re all just trying to keep up and figure out what the hell we’re doing. So don’t feel bad, okay? You’ll catch on.” For the first time, Ashlyn begins to feel like she might. She hates how stupidly proud she feels of herself for making it through a trip to Target, but she’s grateful for progress anywhere she can find it. She scoops up all the bags, ready to carry them to the parking lot when Alex pauses. She nods at the green and white logo hanging overhead. “How about coffee?” she asks. “Do you like Starbucks?” Coffee. Ashlyn hasn’t had coffee in years. Partly because Fluvanna coffee was a weak, watery mess and partly because she didn’t want to drink any caffeine. Why would she want to drink something that would keep her awake any longer than she already had to be? She tries to think back to the last time she drank Starbucks. She doesn’t remember exactly, but she pictures the white cup with her name scribbled on it and she drifts back to autumn mornings at UVa, walking with Ali Krieger to Starbucks before class. The only Starbucks was on the opposite end of campus from her morning lecture, but she never cared about being late. It was worth it, strolling through the quiet campus with Ali, holding hands, smiling so hard her cheeks burned. Ali returns to her as suddenly as she always does, but the memories are different Outside. Inside, her memories felt like fantasies, like she was watching movies about someone else’s life. But Outside, her memories feel sharp, like she’s dug her fingernails into a closed wound. No good can come of looking into the past. She’s told herself this plenty of times already. That girl back then—the one who bought ripped jeans and drank Starbucks and loved Ali Krieger—that girl died Inside. Ashlyn is what’s left. She’s the one who survived. “I did,” she finally says. “I don’t know what I like anymore.” Alex smiles, starting toward the Starbucks. “Well,” she says, “now you’ll get to find out.” *** She spends the night in the Clamshell Inn, a dingy motel where the rooms are all painted a faint, nearly translucent blue and the handles are all shaped like sea shells. In the bathroom, she carefully arranges her things on the counter. She slides on the Do Not Disturb sign, then double-checks that the door is locked. She showers, then sits on the bed, exhausted but unable to decide what to do with herself. It’s only four P.M. Too early to fall asleep, she knows that much. But what are you supposed to do with your free time Outside? Inside, she read books. She read her way through the Fluvanna library, which wasn’t saying much. The library was dilapidated, the books always falling apart, losing covers and pages or just going missing. She’d tried reading the Harry Potter books—a cellmate told her that everyone was obsessed with them Outside—but she’d only managed to find the first and the last one, so she never quite understood the story. Still, in Fluvanna, reading isn’t about the story. Reading is another way to distract yourself, to make it through the day, and she wishes she would’ve thought to ask Alex to buy her a book. But she couldn’t have. Alex has already done too much, even though she insisted that she’s doing exactly what her job requires. “I’m supposed to do this,” she’d said, pulling out of the Target parking lot. “I’m supposed to help you transition.” But Ashlyn knows she’s lying. Other parole officers don’t buy their parolee Starbucks. She knows that Alex is helping her extra because she pities her. And why wouldn’t she? Ashlyn’s a thirty-six year old sitting in a silent motel room, hugging her knees, because she doesn’t know what to do with her idle time. Television. That’s what people do Outside. She reaches for the remote and presses the red power button. A group of black-haired women screeching inside a mansion appears on the screen. She flips the channel quickly. She doesn’t recognize any of the shows she used to watch—why would she?—but finally, she lands on a sports channel where the US Women’s National Team faces off against Brazil. She sighs, dropping the remote as the orange ball skips across the sea of grass. This, she understands. This, at least, has remained the same. Her favorite players have all retired, she’s sure of this, but the game remains, the ball and the grass and the gloves and the crowds. God, the crowds. She’s forgotten what it was like to have thousands of people cheering for her. Standing in goal while the opponent’s fans jeered her, or listening to the roar on the other end when the ball sailed into the net. After her trial, she doesn’t think she can handle a crowd watching her, cameras flashing in her face. But in college, when she’d traveled with the Youth National Team, she’d wanted this, the crowds and the cameras and the attention. She’d wanted to be the center of it all. On the screen, the new U.S. Goalkeeper—a tall brunette with icy blue eyes—skips out to kick the ball. Ashlyn wonders if she could have challenged her for her starting spot, if things had turned out different. Maybe, if things had turned out different, Ashlyn would be on that screen, instead of watching as darkness falls around her. That night, she tries to fall asleep but can’t. She’s in a strange place. She jumps at every unfamiliar sound, footsteps past her door, voices through the wall, the ice machine clinking. The room is too big. Everything is too big. So she climbs out of bed and begins re-arranging the furniture. She drags the maroon chair closer to the bed, and pulls the nightstand to the other side, and soon she has built new walls around her bed. She doesn’t even have to step to know it’s the right size. Twelve steps to the television, nine steps from the chair to the dresser. She knows this without measuring because she, finally, feels at home. She sinks into bed, and within minutes, falls fast asleep. *** The next morning, she begins ten job applications but doesn’t finish any of them. They all end with the same question: Have you been convicted of a felony or incarcerated in connection with a felony in the past seven years? Check yes or no. At Parker’s Hardware, the teenage manager who’d handed her the application scratches his scruffy beard while she leans over the desk, her pen frozen. There’s no point in lying. Anyone running a simple background check will quickly discover her record. The next box over says If yes, please explain. Maybe she can just explain herself. But what is she supposed to write? I killed a guy, not because I wanted to but because I had to. But the court had already called bullshit on that. A revenge killing isn’t self-defense, the judge had said, no matter how hard you try to spin it. Besides, she had wanted to kill Hardy Jones. She’s glad that he’s dead. I killed a guy, but he deserved it. Now that’s more accurate. But she can’t write any of this, of course, so she leaves the box blank and slips the incomplete application on the desk before the teenager can question her about it. How is she supposed to find a job anywhere? She considers calling Alex but talks herself out of it. She feels too needy, too helpless, utterly incapable of figuring anything out on her own. But if she doesn’t find a job, she’ll violate her parole. And when she runs out of money—which she will, soon—she won’t have anywhere to live. She feels exhausted just thinking about all of this. So she does the only thing she can think to do: she walks. She walks because she has no money and nowhere else to go, and if she doesn’t figure out how to find a job soon, she’ll end up on the streets, or worse, back Inside. She walks because she is Outside now, because she can walk faster than twelve steps by nine steps, farther than the exercise yard and the cafeteria. She walks to help herself think, to help herself not think, to buy herself time. She doesn’t plan where she is going, and before she knows it, she’s all the way across town in Ali Krieger’s old neighborhood. Of course she has ended up here. She feels as if her feet, not her brain, led her. As if, after all these years, she’s still retained the muscle memory that, despite the town’s other changes, will help her find this house. She’d spent a childhood making this same walk to that big white house at the end of the cul de sac. A childhood worth of walks and bike rides and foot races, always trailing behind Ali’s dark ponytail. A childhood of birthday parties and sleepovers and soccer practice, Ashlyn setting up a plastic goal in the cul de sac, Ali trying to send ball after ball past her. Even now, there’s a small goal set up in front of the house. A new family must have moved in. Ali’s parents had split by the time they’d entered high school, but the last Ashlyn heard, Mr. Krieger moved to Roanoke and Mrs. Krieger had remarried a man in Miami. She remembers this from the last letter Ali had written her, the last real letter, anyway, not counting the one when Ali explained that she would not be writing her anymore. By then, Ali had sent a hundred letters that Ashlyn hadn’t answered. By then, her name had been taken off of the visitor’s list and Ashlyn had refused all of her calls. By then, Ashlyn had already begun the long, steady work of trying to forget about her. That last real letter had been chatty and informal, the way all of Ali’s letters were, as if Ali were pretending that she was writing some who was away on vacation. She was trying to put on a brave face, trying to sound chipper and positive for Ashlyn’s sake. Only at the end did Ali seem honest. At the end of this letter, she’d written, please write back, sweetie, I’m going crazy. Tell me what you want me to do. Please, I need to hear from you. But that was just it: what Ashlyn wanted was to disappear. So she’d done it, the most cowardly way she could. The letters stopped, then the phone calls, and eventually, the money in her commissary dried up too. She’d never felt lonelier or more relieved. She couldn’t survive sixteen years thinking about someone waiting for her Outside. She couldn’t ask Ali to pause her life, to make that long drive to visit her each Saturday, to spend hours writing letters and trying to call her, to postpone her own hopes and dreams wanting someone behind bars. The best thing for the both of them was for her to let Ali go. Now Ali has moved on. Ashlyn doesn’t know where she lives now—she imagines someplace warm and tropical, like Florida or California—and she doesn’t know the new people who’ve moved in. A family, she imagines. The soccer goal and blue SUV parked in the driveway. She shoves her hands in her pockets, starting to leave, when the front door swings open and a girl runs down the steps. She looks ten, maybe eleven, tomboyish and knobby-kneed in grass-stained soccer shorts. She carries goalkeeping gloves tucked under her arm, and when she glances over at Ashlyn, she looks so much like Ali that Ashlyn’s chest hurts. A car blares its horn behind her and Ashlyn jumps, realizing she’s wandered out into the street. The driver rolls his eyes, widening around her to pull into his driveway, and she glances back to see the girl staring at her. She panics. She backs up quickly, too quickly, and stumbles over her own feet, falling hard onto the ground. The suddenness of her fall stuns her more than the pain shooting through her hands and her hip. The girl’s eyes widen and she comes closer. “Hey!” she says. “Are you okay?” Ashlyn’s hands are stuck with gravel. She sticks out an arm, and the girl freezes. “Don’t!” Ashlyn says. “I’m—just don’t. Stay there, okay?” She shouldn’t have come here. Why did she ever think it was okay to come here? Why hadn’t she considered that something like this might happen? Why doesn’t she ever think anything through? She tries to push herself off the ground, but the girl pauses only a second before taking a few steps toward her. “Are you sure?” she says. “I can get—” Ashlyn sees Ali first. In fact, Ali isn’t even looking at her. She’s only focused on the girl—her daughter—who has wandered out into the middle of the street. She must have heard the car horn, she must be thinking the worst. She looks worried as she squeezes the girl’s shoulder. She’s wearing a red apron—she must be cooking dinner. Is it dinner time? Is this when people eat Outside? Ashlyn’s mind feels scrambled and disoriented. She’d only meant to go on a walk, and now she’s ended up here, ten feet away from Ali, who doesn’t even see her. “Melissa, what’d I tell you—” Ali freezes, finally seeing her. Her hand flies to her mouth. Ashlyn can’t tell if she is upset or just shocked, but she finally manages to push herself off the ground. “I’m sorry,” she says. But for what? For walking over to her house? For refusing to answer her letters? For killing Hardy Jones? No, she isn’t sorry for that, especially not now, not with Ali right in front of her. But she doesn’t know what else to say to her, especially not with her daughter standing there, glancing between the two of them. “Mom?” the girl says. “Who’s that?” “Go inside, Missy,” Ali says. “But—” “Just go inside.” The girl sighs, glancing over her shoulder at Ashlyn one last time before trouncing back toward the front door. Ali takes a small step forward. She looks the same. God, she looks the same, and Ashlyn can’t tell whether this comforts or disturbs her. Because she certainly doesn’t look the same. She looks older, more worn, more tired. She’s packed on more muscle but she’s also skinnier, in a harsh, desperate sort of way. More than that, her eyes look empty. She’s noticed this about herself whenever she looks into the mirror. It’s something that no amount of money or makeup or new clothes can fix. It’s just who she is now. She brushes the gravel off her palms, spotting a scrape on her left hand that’s beginning to bleed. “I’m sorry,” Ashlyn says again. “I just—I didn’t know—” “When did you get out?” Ali says. “Yesterday,” she says. “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t—you weren’t—” “Oh God,” Ali whispers, then she starts toward Ashlyn suddenly. She wants to hug her, but Ashlyn flinches, taking a step back. She can’t help it—she hates being touched by anyone now. Ali freezes, startled by Ashlyn’s reaction. Ashlyn stares at the ground, embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” she says again. Why can’t she think of anything else to say? Ali steps toward her, more slowly now. “Can I hug you?” she asks. “Please?” Ashlyn glances up to find Ali’s brown eyes shimmering with tears. She has never imagined that anyone might look at her like this, as if she is some tender, beloved lost thing. She has never imagined that anyone might beg her to allow a hug. Her own throat tightens, so she just nods, closing her eyes once she feels Ali’s arms around her. *** In the kitchen, Ali rinses Ashlyn’s bleeding hand out in the sink and places a bandage on it. The bandaid is colorful, the type meant for a child; Ashlyn stares at it, the cartoon yellow sponge and the starfish and the squirrel. She feels silly wearing a child’s bandaid, silly that she’d fallen in the first place and scraped her hand. More than that, she feels blustery and nervous, alone with Ali in the old Krieger kitchen which looks nothing like the kitchen she remembers. The appliances are all new and shiny, the pots on the stove a stainless steel. There’s a coffee maker on the counter with no pot, just a space for a single cup, like a soda dispenser at McDonald’s. How does that even work? Where does the water go? Ali notices her staring and smiles a little. “I’m sorry,” she says. “The kitchen’s a mess.” But it isn’t, which bothers Ashlyn. The kitchen is pristine, like something out of a catalog, so Ali has no reason to apologize for it. And Ali must know this. She’s only apologized because she can’t think of anything else to say, because it’s the type of thing you say when you’re alone with a stranger. It’s the type of thing Ali would have never said to her before, not when Ashlyn had practically grown up here, mining her way through a bathroom covered in Ali’s hair products, excavating herself from the mounds of dirty laundry in Ali’s room. But things have changed now. They are adults. They are strangers. “Have you eaten?” Ali asks. “Are you hungry?” Two different questions, two different answers. Confused, Ashlyn just shakes her head. “How about tea?” Ali asks. At the table, Ashlyn takes small sips from a beautiful tea cup that feels awkward and clumsy in her hands. When’s the last time she drank out of a cup as nice as this? She begins to worry that she’ll break it. Her hands start shaking, rattling the cup against the saucer, so she sets both down. “A baby keeper, huh?” she says. She’s just trying to find something to say, something to distract herself from her own nervousness. Ali smiles. God, she’s missed that smile. “I know,” Ali says. “I was hoping she’d want to play a real position, but you can’t win them all.” “She looks just like you.” Ashlyn pauses. “Is it just her?” She doesn’t ask what she really wants to: is it just the two of them? There’s no ring on Ali’s finger. Ashlyn has glanced around the house for signs of a boyfriend: a photo, men’s shoes by the door, a man’s coat on the hook. But so far, nothing. Well, maybe Ali’s dating a woman. Ashlyn doesn’t know how to search for the signs of this. She doesn’t know what Ali likes in a woman, besides what she’d liked in her. And that had been so long ago. Who knows what Ali likes now? More importantly, why would any of this matter to Ashlyn? What does she expect to happen? That she’ll swoop in Ali’s kitchen after sixteen years away and they’ll pick up where they left off? “Just her,” Ali says. “My only.” Ashlyn nods. She can’t think of anything else to say. She has never felt this speechless around Ali, except, perhaps, the first time she’d mustered the nerve to kiss her. That had been a different type of speechlessness, though; she’d been too emotionally overwhelmed to muster up the words. Now, though, she just feels exhausted, like her brain has been overworked and now sits inside her head, gummy like her muscles after lifting for too long. She hears Ali call her name, but she can’t stop staring at the tea cup instead. Beautiful and delicate, the type of item Ali would own, the type of thing she has spent years acquiring. She’s built a life for herself. A family. And what does Ashlyn have to show for all the years? What does she have to show for her life? A dead boy and these shaking hands, the inability to sit in her first love’s kitchen without wanting to cry. “Ash?” Ali says. “Why won’t you look at me?” She doesn’t have to look up to hear the misery in Ali’s voice. Why had she ever decided to walk over here? What was she thinking? What did she think Ali would feel after seeing her, or what’s left of her? “It’s too much,” she whispers. “What is?” “This. Sitting here. With you.” Ali’s silent, and Ashlyn worries at first that she’s offended her. She doesn’t mean too much in a bad way. She just means that everything is too much Outside, everything overwhelms her, the good and the bad. Especially the good. She feels more startled and flustered by kindness, by Alex driving her to Target, by Ali pulling her into a hug. By Ali’s daughter, who’d wandered toward a fallen stranger to see if she was alright. So she can’t look at Ali because she’s afraid of what she might see looking back. She’s afraid that Ali will see her for what she’s become, this scared, shaky person who isn’t normal and will never be again. She hears Ali’s chair scrape against the floor and then she feels Ali’s hand on the back of her neck. “Talk to me, baby,” Ali says. “Please talk to me.” Ashlyn closes her eyes, feeling Ali rub small circles on her neck. “I’m sorry,” Ashlyn says. “No, stop saying that. Why are you sorry?” “I know I’m different. I know I’m not the person I was—” “Don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault, honey. You have no reason to be sorry.” “I shouldn’t have—Al, that night, I should’ve—” But before she can finish, they both hear the staircase creak. Ashlyn glances behind her and even though she can’t see Missy, she can tell that she’s listening. Of course she’s listening. A strange jittery woman has appeared to whisper with her mother in the kitchen. Missy’s probably terrified of Ashlyn and her gaunt frame, her shifty eyes, her skittishness. She pushes suddenly away from the table. “I should go,” she says. “Wait!” Ali stands too. “Where are you staying? How can I reach you?” Ashlyn shakes her head. “You can’t,” she says. “I shouldn’t have come by—” She starts toward the front door, passing Missy who watches her, wide-eyed, from the base of the stairs. She shouldn’t have come by. She shouldn’t have come by. It repeats in her head like a refrain. She’s always known that no good would come of dredging up the past. She’s known this was true in Fluvanna—why would any of that change now that she’s Outside? She doesn’t need to start thinking again about that night. She doesn’t need to make Ali think about it either. Ali has moved on. Ali has a life. Ali has a life without her. But as Ashlyn reaches the front steps, she feels Ali tugging on her hand. “You can’t do this,” Ali says. “You can’t just show up and disappear again. You can’t do this to me.” Ashlyn tugs her hand away. Yes, she can. If there’s one thing she knows that she can do, it’s disappear. Persistent Chapter Notes Wow, thanks for such a warm welcome back, everyone! I'm overwhelmed by all your kind comments and your enthusiasm. As you may notice, this story has longer chapters, so I'm hoping to update about once a week. But thanks again for your feedback. This story has been slow (and a bit painful) to write, so your comments and kudos always bring a smile to my face. Onwards! The next morning, Ashlyn spends an hour waiting outside of Alex Morgan’s office. She pretends to flip through a magazine, stealing glances instead at the other parolees, wondering, as she often does, what each person had done. A stringy-haired white girl missing teeth. (Drugs.) A burly man with a tattooed head. (Gangs.) A nervous black kid jostling his foot. (Knowing this town, maybe nothing at all.) No one knows what she’s done, she’s sure of it. When she’d first arrived Inside, the other inmates had laughed, incredulous. “No way this one killed a guy,” one of the older women said, and who could blame her disbelief? Ashlyn Harris, twenty-years-old and dimpled and baby-faced, so terrified her first night Inside, she nearly pissed herself. This girl, a killer? No, no, the women of Fluvanna knew killers—some of them were killers—and this girl did not fit the bill. But it had been a crime of passion. At least that’s what the papers said. Anyone was capable of a crime like that. But the papers—and the court—was wrong. It wasn’t a crime of passion. She hadn’t felt any passion at all when she’d swung the two-by-four at Hardy Jones’ head. She’d killed him because she knew Ali would never feel safe again as long as he was breathing. That isn’t passion. That’s fact. Inside Alex’s office, Ashlyn stares out the window while Alex walks her through some programs that might be able to help her find work. Windows. That’s another thing she’s noticed. There are windows everywhere Outside, as if people want to remind themselves that there’s a whole world surrounding their businesses and restaurants and homes. She’s grown used to the windowlessness, so the constant streaming of light almost irritates her, even though she can’t stop gazing outside at the street below. “Are you listening?” Alex asks. She’s holding another printout, so Ashlyn nods. She’s not exactly sure why she’s decided to come by, not call. She doesn’t have to check in for another five days. She’ll just have to make another trip, wait outside the office again. But she just wants to see somebody after the disaster at Ali’s house yesterday, even if it’s only her parole officer. Alex Morgan, she realizes, is the closest thing she has to a friend. Alex’s cell phone buzzes and she glances at it, tilting it toward her before she sets it back down on the desk. “How does it work?” Ashlyn blurts. Alex frowns. “I’m sorry?” “There’s no buttons. So how do you…do anything?” Alex smiles, finally realizing what she means. She presses her thumb against the bottom of the phone—the goddamn thing reads her fingerprint, like a James Bond gadget—and a new screen appears. Alex touches the screen, swiping through rows of colorful buttons. Then she presses a green button shaped like a phone. “See? You just dial here,” she says, pointing at the keypad. “Goddamn,” Ashlyn says, mystified, as she watches Alex press buttons, the numbers appearing. Alex laughs. “You can do anything with a cell phone nowadays,” she says. “They’re basically computers. How good are you with computers anyway?” Ashlyn shrugs. “I used to be.” “Well, you should start practicing again. It’ll make you much more employable.” She swipes through other features on her phone, most of which mean nothing to Ashlyn. (Gmail? Twitter? Instagram?) She finally reaches her photos and swipes a few times. Pictures appear, one of Alex standing with a handsome Latino man, his hair ruffling in the wind. Another of the two of them, Alex holding a chocolate lab puppy with blue eyes. This is her family, Ashlyn realizes. She almost feels more amazed by these photos of Alex and her beautiful family than she does by the features on the phone. “You should probably think about getting a phone,” Alex says. “In case anyone needs to reach you.” Now Ashlyn laughs. “Who would need to reach me?” she says. “Well, do you have any family nearby? Or friends?” Ashlyn considers, for a second, telling her about Ali. But what is she supposed to say? Ali is neither family nor friend, but once, many years ago, she was so much more than that. Ashlyn shakes her head. “We find that recidivism rates are much lower when people reintegrate into a community.” Alex pauses. “A church, maybe? Or a club?” Ashlyn shakes her head again. She can’t imagine voluntarily choosing to be around a bunch of strange people. She has already been forced to spend too much of her life around people she doesn’t know, in the shower and the cafeteria, strangers in her space, strangers watching her. No, what she needs now is the opposite of that. What she needs is to be alone. *** In the afternoon, she meets with a job counselor, who is brisk and efficient. She still doesn’t feel any more encouraged. The counselor does not ask about her interests, only her skills, and it doesn’t take long for him to figure out that she doesn’t have any. Employable skills, at least. She’s never worked a real job before—aside from lifeguarding a few summers—and in Fluvanna, she only picked up menial jobs, like washing dishes or picking up trash, the type of job where she could keep to herself, safe inside her own head. She’d tried, at first, to take a class or two. She’d been dedicated to becoming the best inmate she could, to not waste her time completely. She could earn her degree even, she’d thought, thinking back to the orientation video she’d watched at intake which showed inmates, or actors playing inmates, bowing their heads over textbooks. She’d been so swift to search for a silver lining back then, back before she’d learned that silver linings only depressed her further. The best thing to do, she’d learned, was not to think about her release. Not to think about her future at all. To only think about the day she was living. A day at a time. But now she’s started to regret not planning, now that the job counselor sighs, flipping through her paperwork, and tells her he’ll give her a call if something comes up. After, she goes to the library. It’s too early to go home—if the Clamshell Inn can even be called that—and besides, she figures that the library will have computers and now is as good a time as any to practice, like Alex suggested. She’s used to computers as big clunky boxes besides slender towers, but the computers at the library are slender and flat-screened, like small televisions. She sits next to a teenager in a slouchy gray hoodie and rattles the mouse. The screen comes to life. She stares at the blue background, not sure what she should actually do. Search dogs or something? Look up historical facts? She doesn’t remember how to search anything. She thinks about asking the librarian, but the woman is older than she is. She’ll judge, wondering how a person Ashlyn’s age could know so little. She turns instead to the teenager sitting next to her, tiny white headphones jammed in his ears. He’ll help her. He’ll just think she doesn’t know how to do anything because she’s old. To a teenager, anyone over thirty is ancient. “Hey,” she says. The kid doesn’t hear her, so she waves her hand in front of his face. He sighs, pulling out the headphone. “What?” he says. “How do I search for someone?” “What?” he says. “Like Google?” What the fuck is a google? “I want to look up a person,” she says. “How would I do that?” The kid rolls his eyes a little, but he reaches over to her keyboard, typing quickly. A white screen with colorful letters on top appears. He points at a blinking cursor in the white bar. “You just type their name there,” he says. She looks down at the keyboard, punching the keys carefully. Then she hits enter, and photos of Ali Krieger appear at the top of the screen. She scoots closer to the screen, clicking on one, then another. Ali chasing down a ball on pitch, Ali posing with the Youth National Team, Ali drafted by the Washington Freedom. But then the league had folded and Ali decided to retire from soccer. She’d gone to law school at Georgetown. Goddamn, Ashlyn thinks, smiling. Ali’s a lawyer now. She feels oddly proud, even though she knows she should be looking at any of this. This is exactly the type of thing she can’t do anymore, search through the past. This is exactly why she should have never gone by Ali’s old house. Now the floodgates have been opened and she wants to know everything about Ali’s life now. “There are better ways to stalk someone,” the kid says. He smirks at her, and Ashlyn bristles. “I’m not stalking her,” she says. “I’m just—I mean, I’d never stalk someone.” The kid laughs. “Not literally,” he says. “I mean, you’ll probably find more on her Facebook.” “Facebook?” She thinks about the directory she’d received at freshman orientation with pictures of all of her classmates inside. How could that possibly be helpful? But the kid shakes his head again, clicking on a different link, and the next thing Ashlyn knows, she’s staring at a picture of Ali and Missy sitting together on the beach. Ali riding a horse. Ali with friends at a driving range. Ali and her brother Kyle at a Nationals game. She flips back slowly, moving further and further back in time, watching Ali grow younger, turning, once again, into the girl she remembers. *** The morning after Ashlyn Harris reappears, Ali Krieger runs so hard that she pukes. She hasn’t pushed her body this hard since her retirement twelve years ago. Retirement, which still feels like such a silly word for someone in her late thirties, for someone who is still working, not lounging on cruise ships in tropical locations, sipping out of coconuts. But Julia, her therapist, has encouraged her to think of it as a retirement, not the word she sometimes uses, which is quit. Retirement is a more dignified term, Julia has said. Retirement is not a failure, just a transition from one life phase to another. She shouldn’t think of leaving soccer as a failure, Julia has said, not when she’d had such a successful career. Ali hadn’t left because she was incapable of competing anymore. She’d left because it was time to. Because she’d devoted her entire life to a singular goal and felt ready for a change. Because she was a newlywed who wanted to start a family. Because soccer reminded her too much of Ashlyn. On the side of the track, she hunches over, hacking and spitting until her stomach feels empty and sore. A hand rests heavy on her back. “Whoa there, cowgirl,” Kelley says, panting. “You okay?” “I’m fine,” she says. “Just dehydrated.” She swishes water around her mouth, spitting it onto the grass. “Um, yeah,” Kelley says. “Your pace was insane.” “My pace is fine. I’m just dehydrated.” Kelley looks unconvinced. They’d met five years ago when their daughters ended up on the same club soccer team. A former Stanford star, Kelley’s the only other soccer mom who has actually played soccer before, so Ali spends each practice sitting beside her in the stands, snarking quietly about the coach’s questionable choices and trying to hide the fact that they care too much. She’s normally grateful for Kelley’s company, but right now, Ali only feels irritated that she’s not alone. She can’t begin to explain why she’s rattled, because then she’d have to explain who Ashlyn is. And if she explains who Ashlyn is, she’ll have to explain why Ashlyn went away and those are memories she has spent her entire adult life trying to avoid. When she gets home, it’s almost eight. She can hear Missy’s heavy footsteps above her. She should shower if she wants to drop Missy off to school on time, if she doesn’t want to be late for work, but instead, she reaches for her phone and dials Kyle’s number. He groans when he answers. “Jesus, Ali, I’m three hours behind you.” “She’s back,” she says. “What?” “She’s back, Kyle. Ashlyn’s back.” Tears spring to her eyes at the sound of Ashlyn’s name. She hasn’t spoken Ashlyn’s name in years. The new people in her life don’t know about Ashlyn, and the old people in her life know better than to ask about her. She’d heard once about cultures that refuse to speak the names of the dead and she had unwittingly found herself subscribing to the practice herself, except that Ashlyn wasn’t dead. She still felt like Ashlyn was, although it almost hurt worse to know that she wasn’t, that she was living but she didn’t want Ali to be a part of her life. Ashlyn had never explained why she’d cut her off but Ali could easily guess. Ashlyn blamed her. If Ali hadn’t gotten hurt, then Ashlyn would have never swung a 2x4 at a man’s head. Her mind spins out like this, even though she knows it’s not healthy. Ashlyn blames her and she blames herself, especially now, especially after Ashlyn has shown up at her doorstep. “What?” Kyle says. “What do you mean?” “She just showed up outside the house yesterday.” “Fuck,” Kyle whispers. Then more loudly. “Fuck. Well, how is she? What’d she say?” “She’s…” Ali pauses. She feels more tears burning her eyes, blinks them back. “Scared,” she finally finishes. “She’s so scared, Kyle. Like an animal in a cage.” “Well, she has been in a cage,” Kyle says. “For sixteen fucking years. Jesus, Ali, why didn’t you call me sooner?” “I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve been—I don’t know.” “I’m flying out there.” “No, Kyle, don’t—” “I’m booking a flight,” he says. “I don’t care what you say. You need someone there for you.” She starts to protest further when she hears the floorboards overhead creaking. Missy’s out of the shower, and Ali ducks further into the kitchen, further out of earshot. Missy can tell something’s wrong. She has noticed Ali acting strangely, more furtive, more cagey. “Who was that?” she kept asking last night, not satisfied even when Ali had told her, an old friend. Soon Ali will have to tell her the semblance of the truth and she’s not ready to have that conversation with her daughter either. She sighs, leaning against the refrigerator. “I don’t even know where she is,” she says. “She just took off and I don’t know where she went.” “Well, I know where I’d go,” Kyle says. *** Since she’s started at Wilson, Paul & Associates, Ali Krieger has earned a reputation around Virginia for only taking on stinker cases. The type of cases that no attorney who cared about winning would ever accept. Cases where clients have panicked and behaved stupidly, where clients have answered police questions without requesting a lawyer, where the prosecution’s evidence overwhelms her. She tries not to take on liars and she avoids the true scum, the child pornographers and kidnappers and rapists. But she has spent her entire legal career drawn to loser cases that seem impossible to win, especially because most lawyers would not even try. The types of clients who find themselves in the middle of a loser case are the types of people who cannot afford to pay for quality legal representation. The type who know little about their legal rights, who are scared shitless of the legal process, who talk too much and who try to take matters into their own hands because they don’t anyone else to save them. She doesn’t blame her clients for not trusting her. Why would they? Why would they trust any part of this legal system? Last week, she’d convinced a judge to drop charges against a teenage black kid who had swerved his car to avoid hitting a cat. The state tried to nail him for reckless endangerment. The kid had sobbed in her office, his mother holding his hand, and even after she’d gotten the charges dropped, his family still had to pay a court fee they could hardly afford. All because the kid had tried to be a good person, to save a cat. This is why it doesn’t bother her that she’s, as her conservative relatives like to say, on the opposite side of the law. The state’s power needs to be checked, and she’s glad to fight for that balance. The other reason, of course, that she takes on loser cases is that she was, once, involved with one. In law school, she’d found herself obsessing over the details of Ashlyn Harris’ case. By then, they hadn’t spoken for years, but Ali still thought about her incessantly. She re-read courtroom transcripts, searching for moments when Ashlyn’s lawyer had made mistakes. Eventually, she concluded that the case was un-winable. Her lawyer’s self-defense argument quickly evaporated. Deadly force is justifiable to prevent the imminent, otherwise unavoidable threat of death or grave bodily harm to the innocent. The problem is that Ashlyn may have been trying to prevent a threat of harm, but that threat wasn’t imminent or unavoidable. She could have walked away. She could have called the police. But Ali understands why Ashlyn had felt the need to act on her own. It was illegal but it wasn’t wrong. Those are the toughest losses to swallow. *** Ali spends the entire workday distracted. She zones out during a meeting. She forgets to answer emails. She finally snaps out of it late in the afternoon. She can’t just sit here, wondering when— or if—Ashlyn might pop up again. She can’t sit here and do nothing, not when Ashlyn is so close. She can’t be far, not without violating her parole, so Ali finally picks up the phone and begins to call every motel, inn, and halfway house within twenty miles. Her chest hurts when she imagines Ashlyn sleeping in places like this, grimy dumps mostly inhabited by drug addicts and prostitutes. But gate money in Virginia is laughably low—where else could a recent parolee, with no nearby family, afford to live? Most of the desk clerks are cagey, not wanting to offer up information about their guests. She understands it. Most people who stay in places like this don’t want to be found. “I’m her attorney,” she finally tells the clerk at the Clamshell Inn. “I need to reach her.” Ali’s still amazed how quickly her Important Lawyer voice can convince the unwilling to give her what she wants. The clerks transfer her, and she holds her breath as the phone rings and rings. She begins to lose hope that Ashlyn will answer until she hears a click and then Ashlyn’s soft “hello?”. “Hi,” Ali says. “It’s me.” She does this unthinkingly, the way she had greeted Ashlyn over the phone when they were girls and neither of their houses had caller ID. Back then, she hadn’t needed her phone to tell her when Ashlyn called. It’s me, they would both say, and they would both know who me was. But there’s only silence on the other end, and Ali blushes, feeling stupid. “It’s me,” she says again. “It’s Ali.” “I know,” Ashlyn says. “I know your voice.” Ali grips her office phone tighter, her breathing growing shallow. The sound of Ashlyn’s voice does this to her, rips the air right out of her lungs. “How’d you find me?” Ashlyn says. “Called every motel around town. I probably sounded like a crazy person.” Ali laughs a little. But the other end goes silent again. She tries to accept their halting, jerking conversations now, that the conversations they used to have, flowing and endless, speaking over each other and laughing and interrupting, are gone. But it just makes her sad, the way she’d felt when she used to receive calls from Ashlyn in prison. She’d accepted all of those collect calls, never caring about running up her parents’ phone bill, and she’d sat on her old bedroom floor, trying to hear Ashlyn over the din in the background. She always tried to imagine Ashlyn someplace else—on a ship, maybe, sailing around the world or in a remote village in a faraway country. She always tried to imagine Ashlyn anywhere other than where she was, standing in a long phone line and trying to have a normal conversation. Ali never knew what to talk about, which disturbed her, because she’d never not know what to talk about to Ashlyn. She’d always told her anything and everything, but she worried constantly that she’d say the wrong thing. Their last phone calls had been so painfully one-sided—her chatting incessantly just to fill the silence, pausing only to make sure Ashlyn was still there—that she should have known that Ashlyn was pulling away from her. That the phone calls would dry up and end altogether, that her letters would go unanswered, that one Saturday she would arrive at Fluvanna for her weekly visit and the guard would turn her away. “There has to be a mistake,” she’d insisted, blinking back angry tears, but the guard ushered her to the exit. “It’s not your fault, hon,” he told her. “The girls change inside.” But Ashlyn wouldn’t change, or so she’d told herself. She’d wanted to believe this because she was young and naive, because she’d always believed that she and Ashlyn would exist in each other’s lives, because she’d never imagined that a day might come where Ashlyn would not want to see her. But here they are now, years later, wading through a phone call so silent and so awkward that Ali almost regrets dialing in the first place. “I stalked you today,” Ashlyn finally says. Ali glances over her shoulder. “You stalked me?” “On the computer!” Ashlyn says quickly. “A kid showed me how to look up your pictures. On your webpage?” She’s stammering, tripping over her words trying to explain herself, trying to explain that she has not been hiding in bushes surrounding Ali’s house or trailing behind her car. Ali laughs. “You Facebook-stalked me?” she says. “Yeah,” Ashlyn says. She sounds like she’s smiling. “That’s what I meant.” “And what did you find?” “You still go to L.A. to visit Kyle at Christmas. You golf now. You’re really happy.” She swallows. “I’m glad, Al. I’m glad you’ve lived a happy life.” And she does sound glad, which is the hardest part. She sounds genuinely glad that Ali has lived a happy life without her. Ali wants to protest, wants to argue that her life hasn’t been as happy as it looks online, that nobody’s life is as happy as it looks online. That she has been miserable and lost, that she has been permanently altered by grief, that she has missed Ashlyn more desperately with each year. But it feels selfish to tell her this. She can’t decide what’s worse, for Ashlyn to think that Ali has been perfectly happy without her or for Ali to reveal that she hasn’t. Because if she hasn’t been happy, then what was the point of Ashlyn’s sacrifice? If Ali isn’t happy, then Ashlyn has wasted all of those years for nothing. “Ash—” she begins. “I want to be friends again,” Ashlyn says. “I do, but I can’t right now. It’s…too hard. Everything’s hard. I don’t know anything. I feel like Rip Van Winkle or something. I can’t figure out how to buy jeans. I can’t find work. No one wants to hire a felon. The teenage kid at the hardware store probably ripped up my application.” She takes a deep breath. “I don’t—I’m not asking for your pity, I just want you to understand, Al. It’s too much. I just…I need time.” “Of course,” Ali says. “Of course.” What else can she say? How can she deny Ashlyn this small request, when Ashlyn has given up so much for her? But the thought of it still kills her. Ashlyn is closer than ever, but somehow, she feels even farther away. *** That night, Ali has the nightmare. She hasn’t had the nightmare in years. Therapy has helped; time, too. She has even wondered if it could be considered a nightmare, if it’s not just a memory, but that’s what’s so nightmarish about it. It feels vivid, like a memory slightly altered, and over the years, the nightmare has left her confused, trying to figure out what was real, what actually happened, what her mind has made up. In the nightmare, someone is chasing her but she’s blinded by a bright light. She can hear the footsteps pounding closer, she runs as hard as she can, but she can’t see anything in front of her. Julia has told her that dreams are rarely literal, but Ali doesn’t need an expert to explain what this dream means. She is reliving the night of the carjacking, even though this is not exactly how it happened. That night, she hadn’t run. That night, she and Ashlyn had been driving home from the movie theater when a blinding white headlight appeared in their rear-view mirror. The road was dark and desolate, the type of country back road that she now avoids. Ashlyn had pulled over. “Asshole,” she’d muttered, irritated that someone had been riding her bumper. Neither of them realized anything was wrong until the truck had pulled over behind them. Ali awakes with a start. She opens her eyes to find her daughter kneeling beside her bed, her eyes wide. “Mom?” Missy whispers. “Are you okay?” Ali tries to smile. “I’m fine, sweetheart,” she says. “I think I was just having a bad dream.” “You were screaming,” Missy says. “You were—you’re crying.” “I’m fine,” Ali says, touching her daughter’s hair. She’s trying to remind herself of what’s real. “Go back to bed, honey.” “Do you want me to call Dad?” “No, no, it’s fine. I’m okay, honey. Go back to bed.” When Missy finally leaves, Ali rolls over and cries quietly into her pillow. She hasn’t had the nightmare since Missy had been born. Part of her felt almost as if she’d been cured of it, as if Missy, innocent and pure, had flushed out everything bad from her brain. Now she realizes how stupid that seems. Time and distance had helped her, but now that Ashlyn was back, both of those things seemed to have compressed. She has never felt closer to that night and it rattles her, how easily she can find herself catapulted back into the past. Is that why Ashlyn wants her space? Why she wants to keep distance? Is she trying to protect Ali from the past? Ali takes a steadying breath and reaches for the phone. It’s nearly three A.M, but she can’t wait until the morning. She has to do something. Ashlyn always protects her. Ali needs to do something to protect Ashlyn for once. The phone rings and her ex-husband answers groggily, his voice thick with sleep. “Hello?” he says. “Hi Will,” she says. “I need your help.” *** In the morning, Ashlyn receives a phone call from the teenager at the hardware store asking her to come in for an interview. She rides the bus over, so nervous that her hands are shaking. She’s convinced that she’ll say the wrong thing, that she’ll find a way to screw up the good fortune she has miraculously been handed. Maybe the manager hadn’t seen the felon box. Or maybe the store was so short-handed, he just didn’t care. Either way, she can’t mess this up. The store owner, Will Parker, greets her at the front. He’s tall and handsome with sandy blond hair, the type of naturally charming man who’s been charming all his life. The type of man who normally annoys her. But she’s in no position to be anything but grateful. She expects him to lead her to his office for questioning—she can’t help but think of interviews as an interrogation—but instead, Will takes her on a tour around the store. To the home appliances, the lights and drapes, the pipes, the garden. Be normal, she thinks as she follows him. Just be normal. Look him in the eye. Laugh at his jokes. And she tries, even though it feels fake, even though she’s sure he can tell that she’s trying. He finishes his tour, stopping in front of his office. He sticks out his hand. “And that’s pretty much it,” he says. “Can you start tomorrow?” She’s so shocked, she forgets to shake his hand. “Is that it?” she says. “Do you—I mean, aren’t you gonna—” She stops. Stupid. Why is she asking questions? Why is she giving him another chance to change his mind? Will just laughs. “The job’s yours,” he says. “Let’s just say you came highly recommended.” She laughs too, finally shaking his hand. She can’t wait to get back to the motel and call Alex to thank her. Who else could have helped her like this? “Thank you,” she says. “I won’t let you down, I promise.” “Don’t thank me,” he says. “Thank Ali. I got a call from her at 3 AM and she would not let me off the phone until I said yes.” Ali helped her? Ali called Will Parker and asked him to hire her? But why? And how? How does she know him? Maybe they’re old friends. But Will doesn’t look like the type of man a woman would just be friends with. And if Ali had called him that late, she must be close to him. Calling a person late at night is a sign of intimacy. She feels a sick feeling in her stomach, even though she knows it’s silly. Of course Ali has had other relationships. She has a daughter, for god’s sakes. Maybe that’s who Will Parker is, Missy’s father. Maybe that’s all he is. Or maybe he’s Ali’s boyfriend. Ashlyn can’t tell if he’s from the past or the present, but either way, she feels her smile slipping. “She’s persistent,” she finally says. Will laughs. “You’re telling me,” he says, in an overly-familiar way that makes Ashlyn want to hit him. “Well, I’ll be sure to call and thank her,” she says, although she’s not sure if she will. She ought to, she knows that, but Will Parker has just confused her more, complicating what’s already a complicated situation. “Or you could thank her in person,” Will says. “I could use your help with something.” *** So that’s how she ends up riding the bus to Ali Krieger’s house, balancing a butterfly bush in her lap. The shrub is small enough to carry but large enough that she can hardly see around it, the bush sprouting in red and white and lavender spindles of flowers. At first, when Will asks her to deliver the bush, she hesitates. Is this a romantic gesture? Is she supposed to be some type of messenger, bringing Ali flowers so another person can woo her? But she’s in no position to say no —not before her first day of work—so of course she agrees. Besides, she realizes, halfway to Ali’s house, if it was a romantic gesture, then why wouldn’t Will bring the bush himself? Wouldn’t he want to see Ali? Wouldn’t he want to see her face when he delivered it? And who gives a woman a bush for a romantic gift anyway? She sighs, staring out the window. She’s overthinking this. She just got asked by her boss to deliver a bush. It’s none of her business why. It’s none of her business what Will Parker means to Ali. She’ll deliver the bush, she’ll tell Ali thanks, and then she’ll be on her way. But when she arrives, Ali’s SUV is missing from the driveway. She doesn’t know what time it is —a watch, she needs to buy a watch—but she figures that Ali’s still at work. She considers leaving the bush on the porch when the front door opens and Missy walks out, followed by a girl covered in freckles. Both girls are wearing their soccer uniforms and both girls freeze when they see Ashlyn. “Will Parker asked me to bring this,” she says. “For your mom?” She hopes, at least a little, that Missy’s reaction will tell her who Will Parker is. She isn’t surprised by the name, which confirms to Ashlyn that he’s familiar to her too. “Why didn’t he just bring it?” she asks. “I don’t know,” she says. “Do you know when your mom will be back?” “Probably soon,” Missy says. “Want me to call her?” “No,” she says quickly. “Don’t bother her. I’ll just…maybe I’ll just wait here.” Her voice lifts at the end, like she’s asking for permission. But Missy just shrugs, strapping on her goalkeeping gloves and trotting out into the cul de sac to join her freckled friend. Ashlyn sits on the porch beside the potted bush while the girls practice PKs. The freckly girl’s a shifty little striker, quick with a powerful followthrough. But Ashlyn finds herself watching Missy instead. She’s good, naturally athletic, although Ashlyn wouldn’t expect any child of Ali Krieger to be anything less. She makes a few good reaction saves, but she’s slow to change directions, not as agile as she could be. She gets frustrated more easily than she ought to, but that’s just youth. Still, after the third time watching the ball sail past her, Ashlyn can’t stop from saying something. “Stay off your heels,” she says. Both girls turn, as surprised to hear her speak as if the bush itself had started talking. “What?” Missy says. “You lean on the back of your foot. That’s why your strides are too slow. You gotta stay on the ball of your foot. The front part, you know.” It’s a basic tenet of goalkeeping, and the fact that Missy doesn’t know this only speaks to the quality of her coaches. The girl stares down at her feet, shifting her weight. She glances back at Ashlyn, who nods. This time, the freckled girl tries to trick her, darting to the right then kicking with her left, but this time, Missy switches direction quickly enough to make the save. She glances at Ashlyn again, beaming so proudly that Ashlyn can’t help but smile back. She almost doesn’t notice the blue SUV creeping down the street until it turns into the driveway. She clambers to her feet as Ali climbs out. She’s wearing a navy blue skirt suit and pumps, and she looks so sophisticated and so goddamn grown up that it takes Ashlyn’s breath away. Of course Ali looks grown up. She is grown up, they both are now, but Ashlyn still feels stunted, as if her life had halted at twenty, as if she had never progressed past then. “Hi,” she says. “Will Parker asked me to drop this off?” Ali glances down at the bush. “I kept forgetting to pick that up,” she says. “Thanks.” “No, thank you,” Ashlyn says. “For the job, I mean. You didn’t have to do that.” “It’s nothing,” Ali says. “Will owes me one.” “Well, now I do too.” “You could never owe me,” Ali says. Ashlyn’s eyes flutter to the ground. She feels suddenly exposed, unsure of what to do with her hands, so when Ali bends to lift the bush, Ashlyn helps her. She knows that Ali could lift it on her own, but she helps her move it to the side yard where they settle it next to the garden shed. “So,” Ashlyn says, “is Will, like, your boyfriend or something?” Ali makes a face, wiping dirt off her hands. “Is that what he said?” she asks. “No. Just…you guys seem, I don’t know. Familiar.” Ali smiles. “Well, we were together for nine years,” she says. “We divorced a few years ago.” “Oh,” Ashlyn says. “I’m sorry.” “It’s fine. It was friendly.” For Ali or for Will? She remembers the look that crossed Will’s face at the mention of Ali. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t wanted to drop off the bush himself. Maybe it still hurts him to see her. Ashlyn understands the feeling. That evening, Ashlyn returns to the public library and, this time, searches Ali Parker. A new wave of photos pop up. The beginning of Ali’s legal career, a news article about the hardware store, an announcement in the newspaper about their wedding. She clicks on this photo, staring at Ali in her white wedding dress. She’s laughing at Will over her shoulder and she looks so happy, Ashlyn has to look away. What went wrong? Who in his right mind would want to divorce Ali Krieger? Whatever happened must have been Will’s fault, which only makes even more wary of him. Before she clicks out, Ashlyn searches herself. She winces as the screen fills with links about her trial. Lesbian Revenge Killer Faces Judge. Gay Vigilante Rocks Small Community. At the top of the screen, there are photos of her. A tearful mugshot. The courtroom drawing. The bailiff leading her away in handcuffs after her sentencing. There’s one photo of Hardy Jones’ mother, who’d read a victim statement at the sentencing hearing. She’d asked the judge to give Ashlyn the maximum sentence. She was crying angrily as she’d read it, and Ashlyn cried too, because she couldn’t imagine anyone hating her as much as Mrs. Jones did in that moment. And who could blame her? Ashlyn had taken her son from her, forever. Even if he was a bad man, didn’t his mother still have a right to love him? Ashlyn’s own mother had stopped going to the courtroom weeks before. It was too much for her, the protestors, the reporters. Hardy Jones was a bad man, and his mother had defended him even after death. Her own mother had moved to Florida to escape the public scrutiny, and the memories, and her. *** That night, Ashlyn dreams about Hardy Jones. Not the first time she’d seen him but the last. The first time had been hazy. He’d knocked her out quickly with a haymaker, and after she’d thudded to the ground, she couldn’t see anything. She couldn’t only hear his heavy footsteps moving around her and Ali screaming her name. First to see if she was okay, and then to ask for her help. She could hear the man hitting Ali—she could hear Ali crying for her—but she couldn’t move, and later, she would realize that that night had been the definition of hell. She’d spent her life training her body, but when she’d needed it the most, her own body had betrayed her. When she saw Hardy the second time, she hadn’t heard anything. She’d felt as if all the sound in the world had leached out, everything around her muted and dulled. She didn’t know his name was Hardy then. But she recognized him, three months later, filling up his truck at a gas station outside of town. She wasn’t sure how she recognized him, even though the D.A. had drilled her on this endlessly during the trial. If she had been unconscious during the attack, then how could she be sure this man was the carjacker? Eyewitnesses were wrong all the time. The brain and the human eye play tricks. She was under duress and it was dark and months had passed. How could she know that this was her attacker? She had been confused and twisted around by all of the D.A’s questions. Even outside of a courtroom, it felt impossible to explain. She just knew it was him as soon as she watched him walk out of the station mart, clutching a bag of Fritos under his arm. When she had opened her eyes and finally seen him hovering over Ali, when she’d seen the terror in Ali’s eyes, she knew that she would never forget his face. She’d returned to her brother’s truck, shaking. She was alone. Ali didn’t go out at night anymore. She’d almost stopped going out altogether. She’d taken a leave of absence from school, from soccer. Ashlyn had to beg her to leave her room. She tried to take Ali’s mind off that night, but Ali wouldn’t go anywhere fun. The movie theater was out of the question. (Too dark.) So were bars. (Too noisy.) And baseball games. (Too many strange men.) The only place Ali would go was to the grocery store because it was well-lit and filled with mothers and children, so they would spend hours there, walking slowly up and down the aisles, buying too much food for them to ever eat. When Ashlyn spent the night, Ali asked her, three or four times, to make sure the door was locked. Each time, Ashlyn climbed out of bed and checked, even though she knew she’d locked it. She would climb out of bed every hour to check the door if it meant that Ali would sleep peacefully. But Ali never did. Sometimes she thrashed in her sleep but other times, she just whimpered quietly until Ashlyn held her closer, whispering “It’s okay, honey, it’s okay” until she finally woke up. She’d tried to convince Ali to talk to someone but Ali always refused. “I’m not crazy,” she said. “I’m fine. You’re fine.” Ashlyn realized, years later, that this must have bothered Ali the most. From her perspective, Ashlyn was fine. Normal, even, completely unchanged. But Ali had fallen apart and maybe she was ashamed of this, maybe she saw it as weakness. And maybe—this worried Ashlyn the most —she even resented Ashlyn for this. Ashlyn, who’d failed to protect her, who’d been utterly useless in her time of need. How could she ever trust Ashlyn again? How could she even feel safe around her? She wouldn’t, Ashlyn gradually realized. Ali would never feel safe again, not as long as the man who’d attacked them was still roaming the streets. She could have ducked inside the station mart and called the police. She could have driven back home, back to Ali. But she’d done nothing the first time she’d seen Hardy Jones. She couldn’t do nothing the second time too. So Ashlyn had followed him. She’d grabbed one of the wooden boards out the bed of her brother’s truck and she’d followed the man back to his car. The station was remote, deserted. He didn’t notice her following him until he reached his truck. He turned and their eyes met for a second. She wanted to ask if he remembered her, but when he smiled, she knew he did. So she swung the board and cracked his skull before he even hit the ground. In her dream, she’s sitting beside Hardy Jones’ dead body. Her mouth is filled with dirt, like she’s been buried alive. The board rests at her feet, but when she turns toward Hardy, his head is not covered in blood. He has no head at all. Where his head should be, there’s a butterfly bush, blooming lavender and white and red. Lessons In Parker’s Hardware, Ashlyn lifts. She lifts cardboard boxes, bags of sod, bundles of pipes. Boxes of lightbulbs, jugs of weed killer, cans of paint. She lifts anything her supervisor Danny tells her to lift, following his orders as she helps him organize the storeroom and re-stock the shelves. She’d been worried, on her first day, that Will might try to train her at the checkout station. She imagined embarrassing herself as she fumbled with the computer, all the awkward interactions where she forced herself to make eye contact with strangers. But he’d directed her right to the storeroom, as if he knew that was the best place for her. The only place, really. She likes lifting. Lifting is good. When she lifts, she doesn’t have to talk to anybody. When she lifts, she doesn’t have to think. Her third day, she’s carrying a big bag of potting soil through the store to the garden section when Missy pops out of one of the aisles. Ashlyn stops, her heart slamming against her chest. “Christ,” she says. “You scared me.” What’s Missy doing here? Does that mean Ali’s here too? No, it doesn’t mean that at all. This is her dad’s store, after all. Maybe she’s here to see him. Maybe it’s his weekend to keep her or something. Ashlyn still can’t get over the fact that she’s staring at a miniature version of Ali. Missy smiles at her—that same goddamn smile. She’s wearing her soccer uniform and she’s even pulled her socks up over her knees, the same way Ali used to wear hers. “I’ve been staying on the balls of my feet,” Missy says. Ashlyn tries to smile. “Good,” she says. She continues toward the garden section, but Missy follows, trotting alongside her. She makes Ashlyn nervous. Ashlyn shouldn’t be talking to her. You shouldn’t just talk to a kid when her parents aren’t around. Besides, she has no idea what Ali has told Missy about her. She’s sure Ali has tried to explain her away somehow but she doesn’t know how and she’s afraid to say anything, afraid to contradict her. “My mom said you played with her in college,” Missy says. “I did,” she says. “And that you were the starting keeper for the Youth National Team.” “That too.” “So I was thinking…maybe you could coach me.” Missy floats the question casually, so casually that Ashlyn doesn’t even realize at first what the girl is asking. “What?” she says. “You could coach me,” Missy says. “I mean, if you wanted to.” Ashlyn glances down at her over the soil. The girl is trying to seem composed, as if she cares less than she actually does, but she’s horrible at pretending. The excitement practically radiates off her body. “Don’t you already have a coach?” Ashlyn asks. “Yeah, but he sucks,” Missy says, so bluntly that Ashlyn has to laugh. “He couldn’t coach his way out a paper bag. My mom and Miss Kelley say that all the time.” “Well, what’d your mom say?” Ashlyn asks. “About me coaching you.” “That you’re still settling in and I shouldn’t bother you.” Ashlyn shifts the bag of soil. She can’t tell if Ali told Missy not to ask because she doesn’t want to bother Ashlyn or because she doesn’t want Ashlyn to coach her kid. Who could blame her for that? Ashlyn still feels rattled by Outside; she still sleeps in a dingy motel, her furniture arranged to resemble a cell. She still eats, best she can, according to her prison schedule. She still spends an inordinate amount of time trying to seem normal. She’s not the type of person who should be left around anyone’s child. “She’s right,”Ashlyn finally says. “I’m just…I can’t now, see? I’m sorry, kid. But just keep practicing. Just keep working on your footwork.” She brushes past Missy before she can see the heartbreak spread across her face. She doesn’t see it but she knows it’s there. It feels a little like breaking Ali’s heart. *** The evening Kyle arrives, Ali carries the bottle of merlot out to the backyard patio swing. She shouldn’t be drinking red wine, not with this headache she’s been nursing all day, but she pours a glass anyway. She hasn’t been sleeping. Maybe the wine well help. What isn’t helping is Kyle. She feels horrible for thinking this—she loves her brother—but his sudden visit only stresses her out more. She can’t handle his energy level, his constant fluttering around to make sure that she’s alright. He acts as if she’s an invalid, which drives her crazy. After the carjacking, she’d spent three nights in the hospital. Kyle was nowhere to be found then, too deep in his meth addiction to even know what was happening in her life. Part of her wonders if his suffocating attentiveness is a function of that—his guilt from abandoning her before. But the difference is that she’d needed him before. She’d been twenty and terrified and recovering from a concussion and a cracked rib. Severely traumatized, she realized years later. But right now, she’s not recovering from an assault. She’s healthy, whole. Kyle’s hovering won’t turn back time. Time is her problem. Time is what she can’t understand how to face. “You haven’t been sleeping,” Kyle says, plopping on the swing beside her. He sips his club soda. She feels, as she often does, guilty for drinking around him, but she’s too irritated to deny herself this one indulgence. “I’m sleeping fine,” she says. “Ali.” “I just have a headache,” she says. “You would too if you had to deal with a sulky eleven-yearold.” Missy had taken a brief break from her sulking when Kyle had arrived, but now she’s back in her room, undoubtedly texting her friends about how awful and unfair her mother is. All because Ali has refused to cajole Ashlyn into coaching her. She still can’t believe Missy hunted Ashlyn down at work to ask, after Ali had deliberately told her not to. Ashlyn had said no. Of course she’d said now. She’d finally regained her freedom—why would she want to spend her time with someone else’s kid? But Missy was convinced that Ali could change Ashlyn’s mind if she just talked to her. “She said no, honey,” Ali said. “What do you want me to do?” “You have to ask, Mom, please! She’ll say yes to you, I know it.” Ali had shaken her head, returning to dinner. She couldn’t ask Ashlyn for such a large favor. But Missy had taken Ali’s refusal to get involved as a personal slight, and she’d spent most of the dinner moping, staring gloomily at her plate. She’d only spoken to answer Kyle’s questions and to ask her own about Ashlyn Harris’s goalkeeping career. Was she really that good? Before Ali could shoot her brother a look, he was already nodding. “Oh, she was amazing,” he said. “We used to call her The Brickwall.” “The Brickwall,” Missy whispered, mystified. Ali could practically see the legend of Ashlyn Harris growing right in front of her eyes. She wanted to kick Kyle under the table. “Maybe I should,” Ali says. “Ask Ashlyn.” Kyle raises an eyebrow. “Come again?” “Well, Missy’s got her heart set on it—” “Is Missy the only reason?” She knows what Kyle is insinuating, but she takes a sip of wine, refusing to bite. “And Ash could use the money,” she says. She’d driven by the Clamshell Inn earlier on her lunch break. She couldn’t help it—she just had to see for herself where Ashlyn was staying. Maybe the motel wasn’t as much of a dump as she’d remembered. Her heart sank as soon as she pulled into the parking lot. The dingy clamshell sign advertised rooms for twenty dollars a day. Trash littered the parking lot, and two women in skimpy dresses smoked cigarettes on the balcony. She didn’t even want to think about what the rooms looked like on the inside. It took everything inside of her to not pound on Ashlyn’s door and beg her to stay in the guest room. She wanted to respect Ashlyn’s boundaries, to respect her desire for space. But she still hates the idea of Ashlyn staying in a place like that. She can’t just give Ashlyn money. That would only embarrass her. Maybe she can offer to pay Ashlyn for private lessons. She could keep Missy happy and help Ashlyn at the same time. But Kyle’s still frowning. “Are you sure those are the only reasons?” he asks. She rolls her eyes. “What other reason would there be?” “You love her,” he says gently. “You’ve always loved her.” Kyle had said the same thing to her twenty years ago, when she’d told him that she and Ashlyn had kissed. She’d been sixteen then and giddy and confused, and her older brother had been so calm about the whole thing that she felt even sillier for freaking. “But she’s my best friend,” she’d said, as if that were the strangest thing, not the fact that she’d kissed another girl. Their friendship seemed the greatest impediment then, because what if things went south? What if they broke up? What if Ashlyn broke her heart? But Kyle just sighed, with the wisdom of his seventeen years. “You’ve always loved her,” he said, and she’d felt calmness wash over her. Her brother was right. She had loved Ashlyn her whole life; falling in love with her had only been the next, natural step. On the patio swing, Kyle pats Ali’s knee. “I know you want to help Ash,” he says. “I get that, but you have to think about Missy.” “I am thinking about Missy,” she snaps. “I’m always thinking about Missy—” “I know, I know, I just mean—” He pauses. “I mean, how well do you really know Ash? Who she is now. It’s not like she went away to summer camp. You said yourself that she’s different now.” “She would never hurt Missy,” she says. “She would never hurt anyone.” But Ashlyn already had hurt someone, hadn’t she? She’d killed a person. Ali hadn’t thought her capable of violence back then. She’d driven to the police station in shock, assured that there had been some mistake, that the police had arrested the wrong person. She’d cycled through every possible explanation. Maybe the man had tried to hurt Ashlyn again. Maybe she’d just defended herself. Maybe she hadn’t meant to kill him. Maybe it had been an accident. She couldn’t imagine Ashlyn doing what the police said she had: following a man through the darkness and swinging a 2x4 at his head. But when Ashlyn had hugged her and whispered “I’m sorry”, she knew. She knew that Ashlyn had done exactly what the police said. And she has always wondered what exactly Ashlyn had apologized for. Was she sorry for killing the man? Or was she sorry for the consequences that she would have to face? Was she sorry because she’d known, even before her trial, that her decision would take her away from Ali forever? She knows now what Ashlyn is capable of, but she still can’t think of her as a violent person. She’d killed a violent person, and maybe that type of violence was explainable, excusable even. But Ali still feels unsettled. Maybe Kyle has a point. She doesn’t know who Ashlyn is now. Trauma changes a person, and she doesn’t even know what trauma Ashlyn survived inside Fluvanna. Maybe Ali is naive to think that she can slip back into Ashlyn’s life. Maybe she’s naive to think that Ashlyn can slip back into the outside world. But she can’t share Kyle’s skepticism, not when it comes to Ashlyn. She can’t allow herself to give up on her. “It’ll be fine,” she finally says, to herself as much as to Kyle. “Everything will be fine.” *** Inside, Ashlyn used to dream about being back on a soccer field. She knew she would never play competitively again—even if the scandal hadn’t ruined her chances of making a roster, you could never beat Father Time. Still, she used to imagine herself lying out on the grass, her skin damp and itchy. The space. That’s what had become inconceivable the longer she’d spent Inside. All of that open space, the sea of endless green, the only walls surrounding you drawn in white chalk. When she reports to the park early Sunday morning, the space overwhelms her. She plops onto the grass to catch her breath. She’s glad that she’d thought to arrive early, glad that Missy and Ali aren’t here yet to see her. Ali had offered to pick her up on her way to the park, but Ashlyn had refused. She hated the idea of Ali seeing her again at the Clamshell Inn. The first time had been excruciating enough. She’d answered the door to find Ali standing there in a gray dress, and she’d moved quickly to shut the door behind her so Ali couldn’t see the dumpy room she was living inside. “What’re you doing here?” she said, a little more forcefully than she intended. She couldn’t help it. She felt ashamed for Ali to see her living in a place like this. She doesn’t know why. Ali had visited her in Fluvanna. She’d seen her in her khaki jumpsuit, marched in by watchful guards. She’d spoken to her across glass, pressing her palm against the dirty pane. What could be more shameful than that? Compared to Inside, the Clamshell Inn looks like the Hilton. Still, Ashlyn can read the concern on Ali’s face. Perhaps this shames her most of all. The fact that Ali still worries about her. “I’m sorry,” Ali said. “Missy shouldn’t have bothered you at work.” “Oh,” Ashlyn said. She stuck her hands in her pockets. “It’s okay. She didn’t bother me. She’s a sweet kid.” Ali smiled a little. She looked nervous, which made Ashlyn nervous. “She’s also a stubborn kid,” Ali said. “And she’ll never forgive me if I don’t at least ask you to reconsider.” “What?” “Coaching her,” Ali said. “I know it’s a big favor to ask—” “Wait, you want me to do it?” Ashlyn asked. She hadn’t meant to sound so surprised, but she was. She’d been convinced earlier that Ali didn’t want her around her child, but now Ali was standing on her doorstep, practically begging her. Ali paused for a moment. “It would mean the world to her,” she said. “And I’d pay you, of course—” “I can’t take your money, Al.” She felt stupid saying this—of course she could take Ali’s money, of course she needed to take it —but she felt even worse about accepting Ali’s charity. “It’s not charity,” Ali said, reading her mind. “I’m paying for a service. And I was going to hire Missy a private coach anyway. I’d feel better if it was you. Someone I know.” That’s what had finally convinced Ashlyn to say yes. Not the money, not even Missy’s enthusiasm, but the fact that Ali trusts her. Ali trusts her around the most precious person in her life, and that feels like something Ashlyn can’t just throw away. So Ashlyn pushes herself to her feet when Ali’s blue SUV pulls into the parking lot. She smiles at Missy, who hops out before the car completely stops, and Ali who climbs down after. She’s dressed casually in a UVa t-shirt, her ponytail hidden under a baseball cap, looking every bit the soccer mom that she and Ashlyn had joked about one day becoming. “Okay, you can go now, Mom,” Missy says, dropping her bag on the grass. Ali pauses. “I was just going to do some work,” she says, gesturing toward the metal bleachers. Missy makes a face. “Can’t you work somewhere else?” she says. She’s being bratty because she’s nervous. She’s nervous because she wants to impress Ashlyn. She’s acting exactly how Ashlyn would have acted if her mother had insisted on sitting in during her first practice with a new coach. The only strange thing about it is the fact that Ali has become the mother that her daughter is embarrassed of. “It’s okay,” Ashlyn tells Ali. “I’ll watch her. I’ll make sure she doesn’t…I don’t know. Run in the street or something.” Ali gives her a smile, shaking her head, but she bends to kiss Missy’s forehead anyway. The moment seems so private, so tender, that Ashlyn looks away. When Ali finally leaves, Missy rolls her eyes, sitting on the ground to lace her cleats. “I’m not a baby,” she says. “I know not to run in the street.” Ashlyn feels weird standing so she sits too. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t know a lot of kids.” Missy tilts her head, considering this. “How do you know my mom again?” she asks. “Like you said. We played together in college.” “But before that,” she says. “How does Uncle Kyle know you?” Ashlyn feels her stomach clench. She hasn’t thought about Kyle Krieger in years. Growing up, he’d almost felt like her older brother too, although he always acted like he was too cool for them, partying with his friends and rolling his eyes when Ashlyn and Ali tried to tag along. “We grew up together,” she says. “I used to sleep over at your house all the time.” “Then what?” “What do you mean?” “Then what happened?” Missy asks. “Where did you go?” Ashlyn plucks a blade of her grass, her fingertips turning a pale green. “What’d your mom say?” she asks. “That you had to go away.” Missy pauses. “Where’d you go away to?” Ashlyn cycles through all the stories she could tell. All the different versions of her life she might have lived if she hadn’t picked up that 2x4. If she hadn’t gone to the gas station that night. Fantastical versions where she travels the world. She lives in California and New York. She travels the world. She plays soccer everywhere, Germany and Sweden and Portugal. She makes the senior national team. She competes in the Olympics. She wins a world cup. She makes something of herself, she has something to show for all of this passing time. Instead, she eases onto her feet. “A little town south of here,” Ashlyn says. “You haven’t heard of it.” *** When she was pregnant, Ali thought of Ashlyn Harris incessantly. She couldn’t quite understand it. At that point, they hadn’t spoken for nearly five years. Her family and friends stopped talking about Ashlyn. Even the media had lost interest in a once sensational story. Still, as Missy grew inside her, she felt Ashlyn pressing against her brain. She blamed hormones. Fatigue. Pre-partum anxiety. She blamed every scientific explanation she could imagine, but it didn’t change the basic truth. At each ultrasound, she wished that Ashlyn were there to see it. Each time the baby kicked, she pressed her hand against her stomach, pretending that Ashlyn’s hand was pressed there too. She felt guilty about these thoughts. Will was kind and attentive. And it wasn’t like she’d harbored fantasies of having a baby with Ashlyn. The thought had crossed her mind, sure, but she was so young then, she could never seriously picture herself having a baby with anyone. So that wasn’t what bothered her—the fact that this baby wasn’t hers and Ashlyn’s. No, she felt more bothered because she was undergoing a major life transformation and Ashlyn wasn’t there to witness it. Even before they had been girlfriends, Ali had always pictured Ashlyn at the important moments of her life. College graduation. Her wedding. The birth of her first child. But now Ali was traipsing through the big milestones of adulthood and Ashlyn was gone. Ali was full of life, and Ashlyn was in a prison cell, rotting away. She would later blame this relentless thinking on how Missy turned out to be just like Ashlyn. How else could you explain it? How else could you explain how Ali Krieger, whose college nickname had been Princess, ended up with a goalkeeping tomboy who begged for a skateboard each Christmas? Sometimes, she felt as if Ashlyn’s DNA had woven its way around hers, replicating until she’d found herself with a girl who looks like her and acts like Ashlyn. To make matters worse, the longer Ashlyn coaches Missy, the more Missy picks up her mannerisms. When Ali returns from Starbucks to pick her up, she spots Missy and Ashlyn both standing the same, their hands on their hips. Missy begins to wear leggings under her shorts, the way Ashlyn used to. Ali finds Missy sitting on the stairs, taping her fingers the way Ashlyn used to before games, a ritual so calming and so sacred that Ali had always known not to disturb her. Missy and Ashlyn like each other. Ali knew they would, but the ease with which they get along still jolts her. “Coach is funny,” Missy says one day on the drive home. “She doesn’t know anything.” Ali frowns. “What do you mean?” she says. “Like, she doesn’t know what Youtube is. I was showing her one of your games and she was like, you can do that? You can watch movies on your phone?” Missy giggles, and Ali forces a smile. This is the hardest part. Sometimes, she leans against the fence and watches the two in the park, Ashlyn directing Missy to run around cones, and she feels like this could be a normal moment for the three of them. How, in another life, this might have been a typical Sunday morning. Then other times, she feels reminded of their unique circumstances. How confusing and new the outside world is to Ashlyn. How Ashlyn still struggles to talk to people. How any new or unexpected variable can throw her off. Mostly, she sees how hard Ashlyn tries around Missy. Ashlyn has always loved kids. She’s always been natural around them, the first person to reach for a baby, the first person to plop on the floor beside a toddler. But around Missy, Ashlyn is distant. She’s kind and patient, but she isn’t warm and fuzzy, not the way she used to be. Once, when Ali arrives after practice, Missy suddenly hugs Ashlyn and Ali watches, horrified, as Ashlyn’s body stiffens. But she doesn’t pull away. She pats Missy’s back until Missy releases her and the effort she’d exerted to endure that hug breaks Ali’s heart. “You should get a phone,” she tells Ashlyn one day. Ashlyn glances up, stacking the orange cones. “What would I need a phone for?” she says. “It doesn’t have to be fancy. Just in case anyone needs to reach you.” Ali pauses, then emboldened, says, “In case I need to reach you.” The next week, while Ali waits for Missy to pack her bag, Ashlyn shyly pulls a prepaid phone out of her pocket. Ali smiles, reaching for it. She dials her phone and saves Ashlyn’s number. Then she saves her number on Ashlyn’s phone. When she hands Ashlyn her phone back, their hands brush against each other and Ali tries to ignore the flutter in her stomach. *** That night, Ali sends Ashlyn a text. Missy has a game next Sat. at noon. Wanna come? She waits five minutes before a response replies, as formal and stilted as when her mother texts her. Yes, I will be there, thank you for telling me. - Ashlyn. Ali smiles. She’s never texted with Ashlyn before. When they’d left for college, Ali had begged her parents for a cell phone but cell phones seemed such an expensive luxury back then, only for businessmen or celebrities. She can’t imagine if she and Ashlyn had grown up like Missy, phones glued in their hands. Instead, they’d had to borrow the family phone and call a friend’s house just to reach her. In middle school, Ali would rush home after class to call Ashlyn and her parents would shake their heads. “What the heck do you need to talk to her about?” they’d ask. “Didn’t you just see her at school all day?” She’d been too naive to understand that her constant need to talk to Ashlyn wasn’t the same passion most girls felt for their friends, that it was a deeper desire. She flips off the light switch, setting her glasses on the nightstand. Then, thinking better of it, she slips them back on and types, You don’t have to sign your name after, just so you know. My phone tells me the message is from you. A few minutes later, a reply arrives: Oh. Sorry. :) Then a minute after that: Wait, do people still do :) Ali laughs. She replies: Yes. :) Her phone buzzes again. Okay good. :) *** At Missy’s game, Ashlyn feels overwhelmed by the crowd. She feels stupid for not anticipating this. It’s a soccer game, after all, and crowds like sports. But she hadn’t expect this many people would clammer to see a bunch of eleven-year-old girls. She doesn’t remember this many people ever attending one of her games, but Ali explains that women’s soccer has become more popular since the USWNT won the world cup last summer. The row behind her erupts in cheers as Tristan O’Hara scores another goal, and Ashlyn flinches. The sun shines too brightly overhead, like she’s just stepped out of the movie theater, and everyone is loud, jostling beside her on the metal stands. The only thing that settles her is Ali: Ali leaning over to point out one of Missy’s friends, Ali snarking about the poor refereeing, Ali sitting so close that her knee presses gently against Ashlyn’s. This touching, quiet and gentle, doesn’t make Ashlyn anxious. She takes a few steadying breaths, and gradually, her fists unclench at her sides. Gradually, she is able to focus, on the game, on Missy, and she watches, delighted, as Missy makes five saves that ignite the crowd in cheers and earns her first-ever shutout. Afterward, Ali complains about the poor defense. “My daughter should not have to work that hard,” she says. But she smiles when Missy runs over and launches herself into her arms. “You did such a good job, baby,” Ali says. “We have to celebrate later.” Missy throws her arms around Ashlyn too, who tries her best to hug her back. “Mom, can Coach come to dinner tonight?” she asks. Ali glances over at Ashlyn. “If Coach wants to,” she says. So that’s how Ashlyn ends up, hours later, on Ali’s porch with a bottle of wine. Ali told her she doesn’t have to bring anything but she couldn’t show up empty-handed, not when Ali had been nice enough to invite her in the first place. She wears a black button-down shirt she’d bought with her first paycheck. The collar itches her neck. She presses the doorbell, shifting the bottle to her other arm. She’d chipped her thumbnail on the bus ride over trying to remove the yellow price sticker. She’d never had to select a bottle of wine before—her alcohol choices have never matured past helping herself to the keg at a party—so she’d agonized over her decision for a half hour before choosing the bottle with the nicest label. Still, she’d bought it from a convenience store, and she doesn’t want Ali to know how little she’s spent. Ali smiles, shutting the door behind her as Missy starts running over. “You’re gonna help me drink this later,” Ali says in a low voice that makes Ashlyn’s skin prickly and hot. At dinner, Missy barrages Ashlyn with questions. What did she study in college? (Communications, ironically.) How did she and Ali meet? (Playing club soccer.) Why’d she go to UVa? (Because they offered her a full-ride.) Ashlyn stirs her pasta, answering dutifully if incompletely. She doesn’t tell Missy, for example, that she’d first spotted Ali on the practice field and thought she was the prettiest girl in the world. She felt a strange feeling in her stomach when she looked at her, and she had been too young then to understand the nature of a crush. She couldn’t understand why she’d gotten so upset on a sixth grade field trip when Ali sat next to someone else on the bus. She couldn’t understand why, in the seventh grade, watching Ali hold hands with her first boyfriend made her want to cry. “It’s like she’s replacing me,” she told her mother. “She’s not replacing you, honey,” her mother had said. “It’s just a different type of relationship. She likes him in a different way than she likes you but she still likes you.” That was the problem, though. Ashlyn was slowly starting to realize that she wanted Ali to like her in the way she liked boys. She doesn’t tell Missy this, or that she’d actually received two fullride offers, one from UVa, the other from UNC. She’d chosen UVa because it was closer to home, she’d told her mother, but in actuality, she couldn’t bring herself to leave Ali. They’d had their whole lives planned out. Win an NCAA championship. Play abroad together. Make the senior national team roster. They’d never discussed beyond that point but Ashlyn had filled in the blanks on her own. Get married. Retire from soccer. Ashlyn might return to UVa to coach, and Ali might go on TV as a commentator. Now she realizes how fantastical these plans were, even if life hadn’t turned out as it had. But of course she’d believed in fantasies. She’d earned a soccer scholarship, the first person in her family to go college. She’d ended up with the girl she’d always wanted. In her mind, everything would work out perfectly and orderly because everything had already had. At nine, Ali sends Missy to bed, the girl grumbling the whole time as she stomps up the stairs. Ali grabs the bottle of wine and two glasses, and Ashlyn follows her to the back patio. The night is balmy, the stars bright overhead, and Ashlyn settles onto the porch swing beside Ali, taking in the backyard. The green shed, the barbecue grill, the flowerbeds, all of it domestic and cozy enough for a magazine ad. “You have a nice backyard,” Ashlyn says. It feels like a dorky thing to say but she means it. Ali just laughs, handing her a glass of red wine. “Perks of marrying a hardware man,” she says. Ashlyn takes a tentative sip. The wine is bitter yet sweet, but she can’t tell if it’s actually good wine. She doesn’t relax until Ali takes a sip. “So how’d you guys meet?” Ashlyn asks. “A mutual friend. A teammate, actually. We were out bowling and…it’s not that exciting a story, really.” “So what…” She pauses. “I mean, you’re not married anymore, obviously, so—” “What went wrong?” Ali smiles. “Not one thing, exactly. We just…well, over time, we grew apart. It’s fine, though. We’re still friends. It all worked out in the end, I think.” “You guys have Missy.” “We have Missy,” Ali says. “Sometimes things still work out, even when they don’t.” Ashlyn takes another sip of wine. She’s often wondered what drew Ali to Will Parker. He’s a nice enough guy, but that’s just it. Nice enough, nothing more than that. Not interesting or passionate, not the type of person she’d imagined Ali marrying. And she had imagined this when she was Inside, imagined all the details of Ali’s wedding. What she’d look like in her dress, how her mother would cry and Kyle would give a toast. She’d never known what the person standing across from Ali might look like—a man? A woman?—but in her mind, this person would be amazing. Funny and loving and smart, the type of person Ali deserved to spend forever with. She’d imagined this even though it tortured her because she had to imagine Ali’s happiness. She had to imagine Ali’s happiness so it would make her years Inside seem worth it. They talk under the moonlight, time slipping past easily, and after her first glass of wine, Ashlyn starts to feel tipsy. She hasn’t had alcohol in so long, it goes straight to her head. She begins to feel more comfortable, sitting crosslegged on the swing across from Ali, who has propped her bare foot near Ashlyn’s knee. Ashlyn glances down and notices, for the first time, a long scar stretching up Ali’s ankle. “What happened?” she asks. Ali glances down. “Oh, that?” she says. “I broke my ankle senior year.” Ashlyn blames the wine. She blames the late hour and the stressful crowd at the game earlier. She blames the stress of Outside, the perfect backyard and Missy’s enthusiasm. She blames everything she can as she bows her head and starts to cry. She hasn’t cried in so long, the feeling shocks her. She imagines that she’s watching someone else, another woman, start to cry into a glass of wine. About what? That’s just the point. Ali had mentioned her broken ankle casually, as if it’s just another minor detail about her life, because it is. But Ashlyn has missed all of those little moments, all of those minor details. She used to know the ins and outs of Ali’s day. She used to know the entire topography of Ali’s body, the story of each scar, everything that had ever hurt her. “What’s wrong?” Ali asks. “What’s wrong, honey?” She sounds concerned, but Ashlyn feels too ashamed to look up at her. “There’s so much about you that I don’t know,” she says. Ali reaches for her, but Ashlyn jerks away. “Why won’t you let me touch you?” Ali asks. Ashlyn stares down into her lap. She can’t explain it because it’s the type of thing that’s impossible to explain to someone who has never been Inside. Inside, touching is never good. Touching is pat downs from guards and shoving in the cafeteria line and gang fights on the yard. Touching is her first and last fistfight, which landed her in solitary where she touched nothing but white walls. Touching is the few cellmates who’d wanted her because they were lonely, because they could want nobody else, and afterward, she’d wondered if she would ever be touched again by someone who made her feel good, not disgusting and used. “It hurts,” she finally says. “What hurts?” Ali says. Ashlyn just shakes her head. She can’t talk about it. It’s too much. It’s all too much. She bows her head, wiping her eyes, when she feels Ali’s hand rubbing small circles on the back of her neck. “Is this okay?” Ali asks. Ashlyn closes her eyes. Hands. She’s amazed by what hands can do. Hers used to block curving soccer balls and win games. Hers also picked up a 2x4 and smashed a man’s skull. She’s felt hitting hands and shoving hands, an inmate busting open her lip, a guard shoving her against a wall. And now she feels the softness of Ali Krieger’s hands gently rubbing her skin. She nods, and they sit like that for a moment, not speaking. “Can I hold you?” Ali asks. She’s scared but Ashlyn nods again. Ali scoots closer, wrapping her arms around her, nestling her face against Ashlyn’s hair. “It’s okay,” she whispers. “You’re safe. You’re safe now.” Ashlyn remembers telling Ali the same thing once, after the carjacker had driven off. She had crawled over, woozy and disoriented, and reached for Ali, who was crying, lying facedown in the dirt. She’d pulled Ali into her lap and pressed her bloodied face against her t-shirt. “It’s okay,” she kept whispering, “it’s okay,” even though she was crying too, even though she didn’t know how long it would be until someone rescued them, or if the carjacker might return before then to finish the job. “We’re safe now,” she’d whispered to Ali, as if she could will them to be. Help Chapter Notes Thanks again for all the comments and kudos, everyone! And thanks again for reading! Three weeks after Missy’s first shutout, Ali helps Ashlyn move into her apartment. She carries a bag of Ashlyn’s things—Ashlyn carries the other bag—up the narrow stairwell leading to her unit. She has never moved someone who owns so little, so once they arrive in the empty studio, she’s not sure what to do. Finally, she offers to drive Ashlyn over to Furniture Mart so they can check out the discount furniture. She helps Ashlyn pick out a small table and two chairs and an air mattress to tide her over until she saves up for a bed. As they load the purchases into the back of Ali’s SUV, she wants to beg Ashlyn to let her drive her to IKEA. She would subject herself to hours of assembling furniture—she would even pay for everything—if it meant that Ashlyn could have the basic furniture she needs. But Ali bites her tongue. Her offer would only embarrass Ashlyn, who has always insisted on paying her way, and who feels so proud of herself right now for saving up enough to move out of the Clamshell Inn. Instead, Ali drives her to Target and pushes the cart while Ashlyn picks out colorful plastic bowls and towels and sheets. When they carry the Target bags inside, Ashlyn tells her that she has to leave in an hour to checkin with her parole officer. “What’s his name?” Ali asks. “Maybe I know him.” “It’s a lady,” Ashlyn says. “Alex Morgan?” “Oh, she’s one of the best.” Ali pauses. “Smart. Nice. Beautiful. Like, really beautiful.” Ashlyn smiles, giving a half shrug like she hasn’t noticed. Of course she’s noticed. Anyone with eyeballs notices Alex. Ali dips another bowl into the dishwater, handing it to Ashlyn to rinse. “Did you know there’s a gay club out here now?” she says. Ashlyn scoffs. “Here? In Dumfries?” “Believe it or not.” “You ever go?” Ali makes a face. “I don’t do that anymore.” “Women?” Ali laughs. “Clubs.” Ashlyn smiles, shrugging again. Ali dips another bowl into the soapy water. She knows what Ashlyn really wants to know. Had there been other women beside her? Was she just a one-off thing? She doesn’t know which answer is kinder. Would Ashlyn feel special if Ali said that she had been her only? Or would she feel like a fluke, a phase that Ali would have eventually grown out of? The truth is complicated. Yes, there had been other girls, but only in college. Nothing serious. Nothing even close to love. “You should check it out,” Ali says. “That club.” She doesn’t actually mean this but shouldn’t she at least suggest it? Shouldn’t Ashlyn make other friends beside her? Shouldn’t she make more than friends? Doesn’t she deserve at least that? She thinks back to last week’s game when Kelley cornered her once Ashlyn had left. “Who is that?” Kelley had asked breathlessly. “Missy’s new coach,” Ali said. “That’s the coach?” “What? Why’re you so shocked?” “Well, you didn’t say that she was a hottie.” Ali rolled her eyes. “She’s an old friend,” she said. “Just a friend?” Ali bit her lip. Was it that obvious? “We were young,” she finally said. Now Kelley rolled her eyes. “Because you’re so ancient now,” she said. “You should ask her out.” “What? Why?” “Because if you don’t, someone else will.” Ali just shook her head. How had Kelley so easily assumed that Ali and Ashlyn share a past? Was it obvious to everyone? And what had Kelley meant by ‘someone else will’? Did that mean that she planned to make a pass at Ashlyn? Wasn’t that violating, like, some type of girl code? No, that was ridiculous. You can’t call dibs on someone you dated almost twenty years ago. Dibs expire eventually, don’t they? Ali groaned. This was ridiculous. Kelley was ridiculous. Ali shouldn’t even be thinking about Ashlyn Harris and dating in the same sentence. Ashlyn was still adjusting to the outside world, and weeks ago, Ali had thought that she would never see Ashlyn again. Baby steps. They would have to take baby steps if they ever wanted to be friends again. More than friends—that was an impossibility not even worth considering. Still, she hates how much she hates the idea of Ashlyn dating someone else. She knows that it’s hypocritical and selfish. Why wouldn’t she want Ashlyn to fall in love and be happy? But Ashlyn just scoffs. “I wouldn’t even know how to talk to a woman,” she says. “Um, what am I?” Ashlyn laughs. “A strange woman. A woman who’s not you.” She pauses. “You’re different.” “Good different or bad different?” She hands a soapy bowl to Ashlyn, who gives her a lopsided grin. “Good different, Al,” she says. “Always good.” *** In Alex Morgan’s office, Ashlyn taps her feet against the floor while her parole officer updates her paperwork. She’s anxious to get back to her apartment, still in disbelief that she even has an apartment. She keeps expecting her landlord to call and tell her that there has been some mistake, that the apartment will have to go to someone else, and she suspects that’s partly why she’s so anxious to get home and continue unpacking. As if by spreading out her things, she is marking her territory somehow, making it harder for anyone to kick her out. It doesn’t make any sense but she’s also never lived in her own apartment before. She’d gone from home to college dorms to Inside, and she’s just grateful to finally have a place that belongs to her. Even though it’s a tiny studio, nowhere near as nice as Ali’s home, and she’d felt embarrassed asking Ali to help her set up such a small place, she feels proud that she’s worked her way out of the Clamshell Inn. She only owns a few things, but she’s worked for everything she has. When she tells Alex her new address, her parole officer smiles. “How was moving?” she asks. “Did you get settled okay?” “It was fine,” Ashlyn says. “I had some help.” “A friend?” “Not a new friend,” Ashlyn says quickly. “Just…someone I used to know. Before.” She’s hesitant to mention Ali’s name. One, because they know each other. And two, because she doesn’t know how much Alex knows about Ali’s involvement in her case. Alex leans back in her chair, straightening a row of pens on her desk. “How’s it been?” she asks. “Reaching out to old friends?’ “Strange,” Ashlyn says. “Good. It’s just been a long time.” “I’ve actually been meaning to talk to you about this.” Alex pauses. “Have you thought about seeing someone?” “What do you mean?” “Like, a therapist.” Ashlyn laughs. “Why would I do that?” A therapist? Why the hell would she go see a therapist? What, is she supposed to go lay on some old guy’s couch and talk to him about prison? How would he possibly understand? How could he help her with anything? And it’s not like she needs help, not that kind of help, anyway. She’s doing okay, isn’t she? She’s adjusting. She’s working and she’s learning how to do things. She’s coaching Missy. She’s seeing Ali. She’s fine. Better than fine. Better than she’s been in a long time. But Alex looks serious. “Well, prison is an intense experience,” she says. “And some people find it easier to adjust when —” “I’m fine,” Ashlyn says. “Thanks, but…I don’t need to see anyone.” “Okay,” Alex says simply. She slides a printout that reads Mental Health Resources across the table. “Well, just think about it? Sometimes seeing old friends can be stressful—” “It’s not. She’s a good friend. She helps me.” Ashlyn pushes herself out of her chair. “Can I go?” On the bus ride home, she fumes. Where does Alex Morgan get off, anyway? Suggesting she go see a shrink. Of course prison is intense. But Ashlyn is coping, isn’t she? Maybe she struggles sometimes, but that’s because Outside is different. Not because she’s crazy. She leans back in her seat, staring out the window. A few hours ago, she’d been proud of herself. She’d felt accomplished, like she was finally finding her way. But now she’s not so sure. If Alex thinks she’s crazy, does everyone else? Does Ali? No, Ali wouldn’t trust Ashlyn around Missy if she thought she was crazy, right? But maybe it’s just a matter of time. Maybe Ashlyn thinks she’s learning to survive Outside but she’s just pretending. Maybe she’s just gotten better at fooling herself. *** Ashlyn Harris hates surprises. She used to love them. She used to revel in surprising everyone: sending her mother unexpected flowers on Mother’s Day, popping down to Florida one weekend to visit her grandmother, ordering a saxophonist to serenade Ali during dinner. She never understood why anyone would hate surprises. Whenever Ali tried to fish for hints about Christmas gifts, Ashlyn would just laugh. “Just enjoy the surprise,” she’d say. “It’s not like it’s going to be anything bad.” Back then, her life had been often filled with pleasant surprises, like learning that her best friend was in love with her too. When she thought of surprises, she imagined spontaneous trips and gifts, not a pickup truck following her on a deserted road. Now she hates the unexpected. She hates encountering anything she hasn’t planned. She likes routine. She likes preparation. She likes knowing what she’ll encounter before she does. So when she rides the bus to Ali’s house one morning to give Missy her first skateboarding lesson, Ashlyn knows what to expect. The lesson has been a long time coming, the result of Missy begging for weeks ever since Ali had let it slip that Ashlyn used to skateboard; weeks of Ali waffling back and forth, citing statistics about concussions and broken bones; weeks of Ashlyn reassuring Ali that she would only teach Missy the basics. “She’ll be fine,” she said last week. “I’m not gonna send her down the half pipe.” She would just teach Missy how to balance, how to kick off, maybe let her coast a little down the sidewalk. Finally, Ali had relented. “I still think it’s dangerous, but okay,” Ali said, and her grudging assent comforted Ashlyn. I still think it’s dangerous but okay sounds an awful lot like I still think it’s dangerous but I trust you to protect my daughter anyway. So when Ashlyn arrives, she finds Missy sitting on the front steps in a helmet, elbow and knee pads, her blue board across her knees. Ashlyn smiles, not surprised that Ali has dressed Missy like she’s about to compete in the X Games. What Ashlyn does not expect, however, is when the front door opens and Ali steps outside, followed by her mother. Ashlyn swallows hard, instinctively taking a step back. “Hi Ash,” Ali says. “My mom decided to pay a little surprise visit.” The other thing that surprises Ashlyn: Mrs. Krieger does not at all look surprised to see her. Has Ali told her mother that Ashlyn was back? Why? Is that why Mrs. Krieger came to town? Does she want to see for herself what Ashlyn has become? Does she want to make sure that her daughter and granddaughter are safe? Ashlyn’s head swims with possibilities, and she feels so confused by this new development that she doesn’t even notice Mrs. Krieger swooping in for a hug. It’s too late. She keeps her body completely still until Ali’s mother pulls away. Then she tries to smile. “Hi Mrs. Krieger,” she says. “Good to see you.” “Oh, Ashlyn,” Mrs. Krieger says. “I’m so glad you’re back home.” “Thanks. It’s good to be back.” That sounds normal, right? That’s a normal thing to say. But she sounds wooden and she’s staring at the ground again. She realizes this too late, and by the time she forces herself to look up, she catches the glance Mrs. Krieger sends to Ali. But before anyone else can talk, Missy hops off the steps, tugging on Ashlyn’s hand. “Grandma, can you guys talk later?” she says. “We have to get started.” Ali ushers her mother back inside, sending a glance over her shoulder at Ashlyn that looks apologetic. But what does Ali have to apologize for? What has she done wrong? Or her mother, for that case. Ali’s mother is the one who rightfully belongs here. The one who can do things like make surprise visits. Ashlyn’s the intruder, the one poking around in a life where she no longer belongs. She spends the morning teaching Missy how to get up on her board, but her mind wanders. She used to belong here. She used to skateboard up and down this street. She used to spend the night in Ali’s bedroom and fight Kyle for the bathroom and eat breakfast at the kitchen table besides Mrs. Krieger. She’d always thought that Mrs. Krieger had known that she was in love with Ali before she’d known herself. When the girls finally started dating, Mrs. Krieger called Ashlyn into the kitchen for a talk. She squirmed the whole time Mrs. Krieger went over the new house rules— no more sleepovers, leave the bedroom door open—because she knew the rules were meant to prevent sex, and she’d barely wrapped her mind around the idea that Ali wanted to date her, let alone started thinking about when they would start having sex. But at the end, Mrs. Krieger patted Ashlyn’s hand. “I think this is the part where I’m supposed to warn you not to break my daughter’s heart,” she said. “But I know you never would.” Mrs. Krieger had been wrong about that. Ashlyn would break Ali’s heart, splintering it in two ways. She would commit a crime that would rip her away from Ali for years, and she would refuse Ali’s visits. She would do this for Ali’s own good, but heartbreak is heartbreak, and seeing Mrs. Krieger again only makes Ashlyn feel worse. During the trial, Mrs. Krieger accompanied Ali to the courtroom each day, holding her hand, and she imagines Mrs. Krieger holding Ali’s hand after she’d realized that Ashlyn didn’t want to see her anymore. How could Mrs. Krieger hug Ashlyn after that? How could she ever forgive her for what she’d done to Ali? Better yet, how could Ali? Seconds later, Ashlyn hears a scream. She jerks back to attention, spinning wildly, to find Missy lying in street, clutching her arm. Her forearm is bleeding, and at the sight of her blood, Ashlyn freezes. She can’t help it. Her brain tells her body to move, to run over and make sure the girl is okay, but her feet are stuck in place. She’s trapped. Then Missy starts to cry and Ashlyn finally stumbles toward her, kneeling beside her on the ground. “Oh no,” she whispers. “Oh no—what happened?” “I fell,” Missy says. “I rolled off the curb.” She looks miserable but Ashlyn feels even worse. She was supposed to be watching Missy. She was supposed to keep her safe and she had been off in her own head while Missy got hurt. Why couldn’t she do this one thing? Why can’t she do anything right? She feels like crying too. “Are you okay?” she says. “Do you want your mom? Let’s go get your mom, okay?” She scoops Missy off the ground, carrying her up the steps and into the house. Ali and her mother are drinking coffee at the kitchen table, but both women look over when Ashlyn bursts through the door. Ali jumps up. “What happened?” she asks. “She fell,” Ashlyn says, setting Missy on the couch. “She was—I was just—” She stops before she starts crying. Ali kneels beside Missy, wiping her face with one hand. She tilts Missy’s arm toward her. “What happened, babe?” she says. “You fell?” “Yeah.” Missy sniffs, but she’s not crying anymore. “It hurt.” “Why don’t you let Grandma clean you up?” Missy nods, examining her arm as she wanders into the kitchen. She’s not hurt badly. But Ashlyn’s hands are shaking and she feels strange, like everyone’s staring at her. Mrs. Krieger in the kitchen doorway and Missy and Ali. “It’s okay, Ash,” she says. “It’s just a scrape.” “I was supposed to watch her,” Ashlyn says. “I was supposed to—” “It’s okay,” Ali says again. “Things happen. Kids fall. Missy’s okay. Everything’s fine.” But it’s not fine. Because Ashlyn could do a simple thing like show a kid how to balance on a skateboard with something going wrong. Because for the second time, when someone she cares about had gotten hurt, Ashlyn had been completely helpless. She stares at the rug, willing herself not to cry, when she feels Ali’s hand on her neck. “It’s not your fault,” Ali says. “Don’t beat yourself up, sweetheart. Nobody blames you. I don’t blame you.” She can’t tell if Ali is talking about Missy’s accident or that night years ago, or even both. But she closes her eyes, taking a few breaths while Ali gently rubs her neck. She doesn’t know why this comforts her but it does. Missy trounces back in the room. Her arm has one of those sponge bandaids on it and she’s already slipping back into her helmet. “Can we go back out?” she asks Ashlyn. But Ashlyn shakes her head, pulling away from Ali. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I have to go.” On the bus ride home, she clenches her fists until her hands hurt, until she can imagine the bones breaking. *** That evening, while folding laundry, Ali’s mother asks what happened to Ashlyn. Ali almost doesn’t hear her. She’s been distracted ever since Ashlyn had suddenly left. Distracted by her mother, who keeps casting her pitying glances, by Missy, who wants to know if she’d done something wrong. By thoughts of Ashlyn, who’d been so upset when she left. Ali wonders what she could have done differently. Maybe she should’ve sat on the porch to keep an eye on Missy too? But wouldn’t that have upset Ashlyn too? Wouldn’t that have made her feel like Ali didn’t trust her? She folds Missy’s soccer shorts in her lap then glances up, suddenly, noticing her mother staring at her. “What?” she asks. Her mother folds a pair of socks. “I said, what happened to Ashlyn?” “What do you mean?”Ali says. “You know what happened to her.” “I mean, what really happened,” her mother says. “Inside that place. She’s so…broken.” Ali sighs. She feels unreasonably irritated. Why is her mother asking her this? Why is her mother even here? Her mother only pays these surprise visits when she suspects that something is wrong. The last time she’d popped up, Ali had just filed for her divorce. Now her mother is back and Ali knows that it’s because Ashlyn is too. Why did Kyle have to open his big mouth and tell their mother she had been released? And why does her mother think that Ali needs her help? She’s not in crisis. She hasn’t fallen apart. She’s fine. “I don’t know,” Ali finally says. “She hasn’t told me.” “Well, don’t you think she should talk to someone? A doctor?” Of course she does, but it’s not exactly the type of thing she can just bring up. Not now, when their friendship is so new, when they’re still finding their way back to each other. She’s worried that any little thing will push Ashlyn away, the same way a small accident had caused her to crumble. She places Missy’s shorts in the basket. Maybe she should call Ashlyn. Or would that only embarrass her? She doesn’t know how Ashlyn will react to anything anymore and it unsettles her, like returning to your childhood home to discover that a new family has moved in. “I’m doing the best I can,” she says. “That’s what worries me,” her mother says. Ali sighs again. “Go ahead,” she says. “Go ahead and say what you flew all the way out here to say.” She’s being unfair, she knows she is, but there’s something almost vindicating about having a moment of brattiness. After years of raising a daughter and having to always been the sensible one, she feels like she should get to be unfair, at least once. And if not now, then when? Her mother just pats her thigh. “I know you love Ashlyn,” she says. “I know she was your first love—” “Mom—” “Just listen,” her mother says. “I’m not trying to lecture you. I know you’re a grown woman. But you’re still my daughter and I don’t want to see you get hurt again.” “It’s not like that,” Ali says. “We’re not—I mean, we’re just friends—” “Do you even know if she’s going to stay?” Ali laughs. “Where else is she supposed to go? She’s on parole. She doesn’t have anyone else but me.” Her mother gives her a sad smile, touching her hair. “That’s what worries me too,” she says. *** That night, Ali can’t sleep. She slips out of bed at midnight and drives to Ashlyn’s new apartment. She doesn’t know exactly what she will say, but she has to say something. She can’t leave things like this. Before, she’d never worried when she and Ashlyn had a fight. She’d always known that they would retreat to their opposite corners and, eventually, cool off. In a day or so, one of them would come crawling back, hangdog and apologetic, and the other was always quick to forgive. But even though this isn’t a fight, even though neither of them is in the wrong, Ali still worries about what will happen if she lets this tension fester. If the fragile friendship they have been forging might crack, if Ashlyn will retreat again within herself and never re-emerge. When she knocks on the door, there’s no answer. She knocks again, wondering if Ashlyn’s asleep, but when there’s still no reply, she starts toward the elevator. Then she hears the door creak open behind her. “Al?” Ashlyn says. “What’re you doing here?” She’s wearing a black t-shirt and black boxers and the familiarity of her sleep clothes nearly knocks Ali off-balance. How many nights had she slept beside Ashlyn when she was dressed exactly like that? “I’m sorry,” Ali says. “I know it’s late, I just wanted to talk about today.” Ashlyn glances behind her, and for a second, Ali realizes she might not be alone. For a second, she feels a rush of jealousy that overwhelms her. “It’s messy still,” Ashlyn finally says. “That’s fine—” “I mean, I’m still setting everything up—” “It’ll only take a second, Ash, I promise.” Ashlyn sighs, then opens the door. When Ali first steps inside, she doesn’t understand why Ashlyn had hesitated to let her in. The studio isn’t messy at all. In fact, it’s impeccably organized, more organized than Ali had ever seen Ashlyn’s room before. The bed pressed neatly against the wall, then, a few feet over, the nightstand and dresser, all her bathroom items lined up on top. But the placement of the furniture nearly shrinks the studio in half, cutting off the other side like a wall, and Ali slowly realizes why. “It’s the only way I can sleep,” Ashlyn says. Ali leans against the wall, slowly sinking to the carpet. Of course. Of course Ashlyn would recreate her prison cell. Of course, during your first nights in a new place, you would try to make it seem like home. And whether Ali likes it or not, Fluvanna was home to Ashlyn for almost twenty years. Of course, a part of her will always return there. Still, the thought makes Ali sick. No matter how long Ashlyn has been free, a part of her will always remain inside Fluvanna. A part of her hidden away forever, a part Ali will never be able to reach. “I saw a therapist,” Ali says. “After you left. I’m still seeing her, actually.” Ashlyn frowns, lowering herself on the carpet across from Ali. “Why?” she says. “Because it helps. Having someone to talk to about what happened to us. I know you wanted me to go and you were right. I didn’t realize that until I lost you—“ Her voice cracks, and she feels the tears filling her eyes before she can stop them. “I think you should go. I think—you’ve been through so much and I think it’ll help you—” “I can’t,” Ashlyn whispers. “Why not?” “Because. You know I’m no good at that. Talking to people.” But Ali doesn’t know this, because Ashlyn has always been the social one, the life of the party, the one who sparks conversation with strangers. Ashlyn telling a joke to an appreciative crowd, Ashlyn nailing presentations in speech class while Ali dissolved into nerves. Ashlyn has always known how to be around people, but now, she can hardly talk to strangers without staring at the ground. She draws within herself at the sight of a crowd. The idea of talking to a therapist—the same idea she’d suggested so easily to Ali—probably terrifies her. But what else is Ali supposed to do? What else can she suggest that might help? Is she supposed to leave Ashlyn like this forever, sleeping in a replica of her prison cell? “Will you try, baby?” Ali asks. “Will you try for me?” It’s not fair, she knows, to ask like that. It’s not fair to ask Ashlyn to do anything else for her, when Ashlyn has already done so much. But she tells herself it is the right thing when Ashlyn finally nods, when she pulls Ali close and plants a kiss on her hair so soft, Ali almost thinks she imagines it. Deny Chapter Notes Can't promise I'll always be able to update twice a week, but for now, here you go! Thanks again for all the love, guys! This is turning into a long one and your enthusiasm is keeping me going! Onwards! At her first police interrogation, Ashlyn Harris cried. She only realized later how guilty this had made her seem, but at the time, she wasn’t thinking about not looking guilty. She was guilty. And she felt guilty, handcuffed to a table in a small, windowless room while two tall detectives questioned her. She had been arrested after the police ran her brother’s plates. (He would never forgive her for committing such a crime while borrowing his truck; for weeks, the detectives had investigated him as an accessory.) The detectives wanted a confession from her and she was smart enough not to speak but too dumb to ask for a lawyer. Later, her public defender would blame her for not keeping it together. “You practically handed that case to them then and there,” he said, slapping her file on the table in disgust. But she hadn’t been thinking about maintaining her composure. She’d only thought about Ali, who would worry about her if she didn’t come home. Ali, who had been sitting up in bed, hugging her knees, when Ashlyn had come home late the night before, who was afraid of even the sound of Ashlyn’s key in the lock. She wanted to tell Ali then what she’d done. That she’d taken care of everything. That Ali didn’t have to be afraid anymore. But instead, she’d shucked off her jeans and her t-shirt, and she’d climbed in bed beside Ali, holding her until she fell asleep. Later, she would realize how strangely normal their final night together had been. Ashlyn had never imagined that the next morning, when she returned to her dorm room, there would be two police cruisers parked out front. It had been dark. The gas station was deserted. Hardy Jones seemed like a man with a lot of enemies. She had never seriously considered that she might get caught. But the gas station cameras had caught her brother’s plates; when police questioned Chris, he told them he’d lent his truck. “They didn’t tell me the charges,” he hissed into the phone later. “I thought you blew a stop sign or something!” In the interrogation room, you began to feel yourself being stripped away. Ashlyn cried because she was powerless, chained to the table while the detectives barraged her with questions. Three times she asked to make a phone call and three times, the detectives ignored her. “Please,” she finally said, “I have to make sure my girlfriend’s alright.” When Ali finally came to the station, that detective had stared at her, let out a low whistle, and told Ashlyn, “If I would’ve known your girlfriend was so hot, I would’ve let you call her sooner.” She’d never wanted to hit someone so badly in her life. She tried to get up but her chains yanked her back, like a dog whose leash only extends to half the yard. The detective laughed, and she’d realized then the true cost of her actions. She’d killed a man to protect Ali, but now she could never be there to protect her herself. She feels that same powerlessness during her first therapy session, even though the office is open and sunny, even though the therapist is kind, even though she is not chained to a table and can leave at any point. She feels that same powerlessness during her first therapy session, even though the office is open and sunny, even though the therapist is kind, even though she is not chained to a table and can leave at any point. Dr. Holiday doesn’t ask about the murder. She doesn’t even ask about Inside, although she will soon, Ashlyn can feel it, and her neck prickles just thinking about it. What to say about Inside? How to explain it to someone who has never been? The loud, desolate clank of the cell doors slamming behind you. Or the endless whiteness of solitary, a place Ashlyn feels like she’d spent years. That can’t possibly be true, but when she looks back, her stay in solitary changed her more than anything else. In solitary, she forgot how to be touched. She leaned against the white wall for days or maybe even weeks, nobody to talk to, nobody who asked if she wanted to play cards or lift weights, one of those tiny interactions that remind you that you are still human. In solitary, you are no longer human. You float through that endless whiteness, surrounded only by the occasional disembodied voice, which over time, she’d convinced herself that she’d invented. There was nobody else here, she began to believe, only her, floating in this white nowhere. Then one day, as suddenly as she’d been hauled in, a guard unlocked the door and marched her back to general. It took days for her to finally use her voice again. She doesn’t tell Dr. Holiday this. She doesn’t say much at all. Later, when she pays the $150 at the front desk, she knows that she won’t be coming back. She can’t afford it, and even if she could, it’s a ridiculous way to spend the money she does have, just to sit with a doctor who acts questions. Maybe that works for Ali. Maybe it works for normal people. But she’s fooling herself believing that talking to a doctor can erase sixteen years of Inside. The longer she’s been away, the more she realizes just how deeply Inside is burrowed in her brain. She wants to think of it as some minor phase in her life, something she can move beyond. But maybe it’s the most defining part of her life. Maybe who she was Inside is the truest thing about her. Still, later, when she checks in at the parole office, Alex seems pleased with her for going. “I think you’ll find it really helps,” she says. “Can I ask what changed your mind?” “My friend,” Ashlyn says. Alex smiles. “Sounds like a good friend.” Her voice lifts at the end, like she’s giving Ashlyn the opportunity to share more. But Ashlyn doesn’t. What is there to say? That yes, Ali is a good friend, but there’s still a part of her that wants Ali to be more? She hates that this part didn’t die Inside. She thought it did; she thought she’d killed it. In solitary, she’d tried to focus on memories of Ali to remind herself of what was real. Ali rolling toward her in bed, snuggling in the warm crook of her arm. Ali splashing her in the swimming pool. Ali kissing her in the darkness of a movie theater. Then, over time, these memories began to feel like fantasies, like inventions of her own mind, so when she returned to general, she promised herself she would stop thinking of Ali. Over the years, she’d abandoned the hope that she ever might be able to do something as normal as date, let alone date someone like Ali, who could pick anyone she wanted. She hadn’t imagined then that after her release, she would see Ali every weekend during Missy’s lessons and games; that Ali might invite her over later for dinner and Missy would convince her to stay for a movie, then fall asleep on her shoulder, and not wanting to wake her, she would carry her upstairs to her bed and watch Ali tuck her in; that when Ali bent to kiss Missy’s forehead, she’d feel an embarrassing urge to kiss the girl too; that later that night, when she returned to her empty apartment, she would feel like she had just been shaken awake from a dream. In this dream, she carries a sleeping Missy up the stairs, the girl’s soft breaths ghosting her neck. In this dream, she also bends to kiss Missy because in this dream, Missy belongs to her too. Then she drapes her arms around Ali’s waist and follows her down the hall to their bedroom. In this dream, she does not go home because she is already there. *** That night, Ali has the nightmare again. This time, she’s blinded only briefly by a bright light before everything goes black. The whole world goes black and she can’t see anything around her. She can only hear footsteps crunching behind her and her heart thudding in her ears. This time, she tries to call out for Ashlyn but her voice makes no sound. She’s screaming silently, reaching through the darkness but feeling nobody as the footsteps behind her grow louder and louder. Then she jolts awake to find Ashlyn kneeling in front of her, her eyes wide with concern. “Al?” she whispers. “Are you okay?” For a second, Ali feels convinced that Ashlyn is part of the dream. But when she reaches out, she touches the firmness of Ashlyn’s shoulder. And reality comes flooding back. Her darkened living room, Missy snoring softly on the opposite end of the couch. The television in front of her playing Jurassic World. Movie night. They’d been having a movie night and she’d fallen asleep and the nightmare had found her again. Now she’s staring at Ashlyn, who looks so worried, Ali feels her own eyes welling with tears. Still, she forces a laugh. “Shit,” she says. “I think I was having a bad dream.” “About what?” She points at the TV screen. Two raptors gallop through the forest. Ashlyn glances at the movie for a second then back at Ali. She looks unconvinced. “Are you sure?” she asks. “That’s it?” Ali nods, forcing a smile. She can’t bring herself to tell Ashlyn the truth. That she’s had the nightmare again, the nightmare that had plagued her for years, the nightmare that she thought she’d been cured of until Ashlyn had returned. She can’t tell Ashlyn that seeing her again has brought the nightmare more and more frequently, that each night, she climbs in bed anxious that it will return. She can’t tell Ashlyn that she would have the nightmare every single night for the rest of her life if it’d mean that Ashlyn would never leave again. She can’t say all the things she wants to say, like when Ashlyn says she should be heading home. She watches Ashlyn slip into her jacket and imagines herself saying what she ought to: Why don’t you just stay? It’s so late. You could stay in the guest room or even with me. Instead, she offers to drive Ashlyn home. “It’s okay,” Ashlyn says. “The bus is still running.” “Still,” Ali says, reaching for her keys. “It’s late. Let me give you a ride. Please. I don’t mind.” She doesn’t, but again, she can’t say what she truly thinks. That the nightmare has shaken her up so much, she can only imagine Ashlyn waiting at the darkened bus stop while a truck shining bright headlights slowly approaches. The thought makes no sense. She knows that the truck’s driver is dead—Ashlyn had taken care of that herself. Still, the nightmare always felt so real and she feels incapable of taking any chance that something bad might happen to Ashlyn, that she might lose her all over again. After she pulls up to Ashlyn’s building, without thinking, she hops out of her SUV to walk Ashlyn the door. She doesn’t realize, until they reach the apartment, how date-like this suddenly seems. “There you go,” she says. “Safe and sound.” Ashlyn smiles, leaning against her door. This isn’t their dynamic. When they’d been together, Ashlyn had always been the one who’d insisted on walking Ali to her door. Ashlyn who’d asked Ali to call when her flights landed, just to make sure she made it okay. Ashlyn who had always been so sweetly protective that Ali had never seriously considered that anything bad could happen to her. Ali feels emboldened by this shift in their roles. She’s noticed this about herself once she’d given birth to Missy. She’d spent so many years feeling powerless but nothing makes her feel stronger than having to protect someone else. “Thanks for the ride,” Ashlyn says. “But you really didn’t have to.” “I just don’t like the thought of you waiting out there in the dark.” Ashlyn lets out a low laugh. “I’m scarier than anyone out there.” Of course Ashlyn is scary. She’s a convicted murderer. She’d proven herself capable of taking another’s life—what could be scarier than that? Beyond that, she’d spent nearly twenty years locked away in prison with hardened criminals. She had survived by becoming one of them. This is who she is now. Sometimes Ali looks at her and sees the girl she’d grown up with, the girl with the beach blonde hair and the dimpled smile, the girl who tried to act tough but cried easily because she felt everything so much. But other times, Ali only sees the woman she’s become, a woman hidden away behind walls, a woman capable of things Ali could never imagine. Ashlyn doesn’t scare her; the gap between the two versions of Ashlyn does. Still, Ali takes a step toward her. “You’re not,” Ali says. “You’re not to me.” Ashlyn touches her elbow, and for a second, Ali thinks she might pull her in for a kiss. Her heart leaps into her throat. “Al,” she says. “You don’t still think about it, right?” She hates how easily she understands what it means. She hates how disappointed she feels that Ashlyn isn’t thinking about kissing her at all. Most of all, she hates herself for lying but she knows that she can’t tell Ashlyn the truth. That Ashlyn sacrificed nearly half of her life to protect her from a dangerous man, but somehow, Ali has still managed to be haunted by his ghost. “No,” she finally says. “I don’t think about it at all.” *** The next weekend, Ashlyn wanders through the Dumfries Fair, trying not to get rattled by the crowds. She still hasn’t gotten used to the push and press of strange bodies against hers; she jerks away as soon as anyone gets too close. She would have never chosen to come to this fair—it reminds her too much of her childhood, her family—but Missy had begged her to. So she tries to swallow her anxiety as she squeezes past the crowd gathered in front of the hall of mirrors. She tries to keep an eye on Missy who skips ahead with Tristan O’Hara, feeling suddenly responsible for the girls even though Ali is walking alongside her. But Ali seems distracted too, and Ashlyn feels rattled, by the strange people and loud noises. By the conversation she’d had earlier that day when Missy had asked, after her practice, if she could tell Ashlyn a secret. Ashlyn had hesitated, lowering herself onto the curb. She wasn’t sure if you could share a secret with someone else’s child. What if this secret was vital information, something that Ali ought to know? Wouldn’t hearing it be breaching some sort of trust with Ali? Or if she told Ali, then wouldn’t she be betraying Missy’s confidence? But Missy looked so eager to tell somebody that Ashlyn nodded, remaining still as Missy leaned close to her ear. “I like someone,” she whispered. Ashlyn smiled, grateful it was only that type of secret. A harmless one. “What’s his name?” she asked. “I can’t say,” Missy said “But I really like this person a lot and…how do you know if somebody likes you back?” Maybe it was Missy’s nervousness or her careful avoidance of gender pronouns. Maybe it was her tomboyishness, the way she reminded Ashlyn of her younger self. Either way, she understood what Missy wasn’t saying. She had a crush on a girl. She was, in her own eleven-year-old way, coming out, and Ashlyn, who knew she ought to say something encouraging and supportive during such an important moment, found herself unprepared to say anything at all. “Have you told your mom?” she finally asked. Missy shook her head. “I can’t,” she said. “Why not?” “Because. She just wouldn’t—I don’t know. She might be mad.” “She won’t be,” Ashlyn said. “I promise.” “But how do you know that?” She couldn’t tell Missy the truth: that she knew that Ali wouldn’t be upset that her daughter might like girls because, years ago, Ali had liked girls herself. Or, at least, one girl. Missy didn’t know this, so Ali obviously wants to keep it a secret. But why? Why had Ali never told Missy about their relationship? Is it because of Inside? Or because Ashlyn’s a woman? Maybe both? If she’d never returned to Dumfries—hell, if she’d never walked by the old Krieger house—then Missy would have never known she’d even existed. She’s embarrassed by how much that thought bothers her. “I’m a little worried about Missy,” Ali says that evening. “She’s been acting so weird lately.” They’re waiting outside the entrance to a purple roller coaster while the girls trudge forward in the winding line. Earlier, Missy had given Tristan a stuffed squirrel she’d won in a claw game and Ashlyn wondered if Tristan was the mystery crush. She studies the girls in line, how they bow their heads together and giggle, how Missy seems to brim with an electric energy whenever Tristan is around. A girl and her best friend. Isn’t that what happened to Ashlyn? She fiddles with her cell phone, debating whether to tell Ali what Missy shared. Maybe it’s not the type of secret that Ali needs to know, but she’s Missy’s mother. Doesn’t she deserve to know? If only so that she can reassure Missy that she loves and accepts her? “I think she has a crush,” Ashlyn finally says. Ali smiles. “Really? On who?” “I don’t know but I think it’s a girl. And you can’t say I told you. She’s scared you’ll be upset.” Ali frowns. “What? Why would she think I’d be upset?” “I don’t know. Did you ever tell her about…you?” Ali’s silent for a minute. “It’s complicated,” she finally says. Of course it is. Everything about the two of them—and their past—is complicated. “It’s okay,” Ashlyn says. “I get it—” “She’s still so young and I just don’t know how to—” “It’s fine, Al. I get it. You don’t have to explain yourself to me.” “I’m sorry,” Ali says. And she does look sorry, but she has no reason to be. How was Ali supposed to explain this to her daughter? That once upon a time, she’d dated a girl who’d killed a man? It’s better this way. It’s better for Missy to think that she’s just an old friend than to know the reality of who she is and what she’s done. A swarm of children suddenly scuttle past and Ashlyn steps back, pressing herself against the fence. What is she doing here? This isn’t her world anymore; it never was. She feels like a ghost returned to the human world. She can float around and observe, she can even look the part, but as soon as she reaches out to touch something, her hand will only pass through. That’s all she’s doing here, after all. Passing through. Toward the end of the night, Ali convinces her to ride the ferris wheel. She climbs into the rickety seat beside Ali, and as the ride begins, she grips the safety bar. She’s never been afraid of heights but the sudden movement disorients her as she feels herself slowly lifted toward the sky. “It’s not you,” Ali says softly. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, the way she always used to when she felt nervous, and Ashlyn feels thirteen again, shy and trying to work up the nerve to kiss Ali for the first time. She never did but she’d always believed that it might happen on this ferris wheel, that cloaked in darkness and rising toward the night sky, she might find the courage that otherwise eluded her on the ground. Maybe Ali feels that way now. That here, halfway between earth and heaven, she can finally be honest. “I never told her about you because I didn’t want to tell her about that night,” Ali says. “What happened to me. To us. I can’t tell her. I just—I want her to grow up in a world where things like that don’t happen. Not to her mother. Is that stupid?” Ashlyn shakes her head. The thing that’s stupid about any of this is her. She’s been mistaking the woman Ali is for the woman she wants to be: competent and brave and completely past the night they’d been attacked. But Ashlyn realizes now that Ali hasn’t forgotten, not in the slightest. Even all her years of therapy haven’t erased those memories. It was foolish to think that she ever might forget. But Ashlyn had wanted to believe this—needed to believe this—so she could convince herself that what she’d done was gallant and noble. But it wasn’t. She took a life but it didn’t undo the damage that was already done. She thought she’d slain the boogeyman but she’d only been punching at mist. She puts her arm around Ali’s shoulders as their car floats to the top of the wheel. “No,” she says. “It’s not stupid at all.” *** That night, Ali lingers in Missy’s bedroom when she comes to say goodnight. As her daughter disappears behind a book, Ali’s mind returns, as it often does, to when Missy was a baby. She’d been her most vulnerable then but somehow, she’d seemed easier to protect, as if all Ali would have to do was keep her in her arms. But now Missy is nearly a teenager. Soon she’ll go out into the world on her own. She’ll stay out late, she’ll party, she’ll hang out with people Ali dislikes. She’ll fall in love with girls who may not love her back. Ali can’t protect her from any of this. She knows about life’s uncertainties, how a simple trip to the movie theater can end in the hospital. She’d blacked out for part of that night, hours that will forever be inaccessible to her, but she remembers waking in the hospital, how her mother had cried at her bedside. Had her mother felt this helpless? Had she blamed herself, even though there was nothing she could have done? Had she blamed herself like Ashlyn did? Ashlyn, who couldn’t even bring herself to come to Ali’s room, not until Ali had begged her mother to find her. She’d been sitting outside on the flower planter, already discharged, but later during the trial, Ali’s mother told her how she’d had to practically drag Ashlyn back inside. “She was so ashamed,” her mother told her. “She didn’t want to face you.” For years, Ali hated herself for screaming Ashlyn’s name. If only she hadn’t asked Ashlyn for help, if only she had been strong enough. Then Ashlyn wouldn’t have blamed herself. Then she wouldn’t have paid for her shame with sixteen years of her life. But Missy doesn’t need to know this, any of this. Maybe it’s foolish, maybe it’s unrealistic, but Ali wants to protect her from all of this, for as long as she can. “You know I love you,” she says. “No matter what.” Missy glances up from her book. “I know, Mom.” “And I’ll always keep you safe.” It’s a promise she’s incapable of enforcing, but she makes it anyway. Before she slides into her own bed, she checks behind the headboard where she keeps a wooden baseball bat. Will had laughed at her when they’d first gotten married. “Okay, slugger,” he’d said, “what exactly do you plan to do with that thing?” A bat would be useless against an intruder with a gun, he’d said, which was why he insisted on keeping a shotgun under the bed. But she’d always hated the thought of having a gun in the house with her child, so when he’d moved out, she’d made him take it with him. Now she checks for her baseball bat every night before she climbs in bed. She’s never had to use it, but its presence makes her feel safer. Sometimes she wonders if she could use it, if, when she awoke one night and saw a shadow move across her room, she could do what Ashlyn had done years ago and smash wood against a man’s skull. She wonders if she is capable of that type of violence, even in self-defense, even to protect her child. But here is one thing she has learned: you never know what type of woman you are capable of being until the moment you become her. Expand Chapter Notes Road trip, anyone? ;) At her next check-in, Ashlyn asks Alex for a favor. The night before, Ali had called to invite her to help chaperone the soccer team’s overnight trip to Norfolk for a tournament. Ashlyn hesitated at first. A weekend away from home with a bus full of screaming girls? Outside slowly expanding, its borders widening as they drove hours south? Could she handle this? She hadn’t expected to leave town so soon. Technically, she isn’t allowed to venture outside the county without written permission from her parole officer. Ashlyn feels almost afraid to ask, assured that Alex will tell her no. But Alex listens quietly and then reaches into her desk for a form. “It’s for work, right?” she asks. “The mom is paying you?” Yes, yes, it’s for work, although in her heart, Ashlyn knows that her dedication to coaching isn’t the only reason she’s agreed. She’d hesitated at the idea of pulling herself away from her carefully-constructed patterns, but Ali asked her to come, so of course, she would try. Of course she hadn’t been able to tell Ali no. Still, she’s nervous, not just about the trip itself but about spending a weekend away with Ali. She’d already made a complete fool out of herself last night when Ali called. “I’ll ask,” she’d said. “But I should let you sleep.” “Okay,” Ali said. “Good night.” “Good night. Love you.” The words slipped out before Ashlyn even realized it. Then she felt her face burning and she wanted to chuck her phone across the room, as if that could miraculously erase what she’d just said. “Oh fuck,” she said. “I’m sorry, I just—it just slipped. I didn’t—I mean—fuck. An old habit or something.” She was barely speaking in coherent sentences, certain that she had ruined the careful friendship the two were rebuilding. She hung up before Ali could respond. She was worried Ali would say nothing, or worse, that she would be kind enough to say “I love you” back, even though she’d only mean it as a friend. This isn’t good. Not for Ashlyn. She needs to focus on her new reality, on adjusting to Outside. She cannot allow herself to go drifting back into a fantasy where Ali somehow falls in love with her. It felt like a miracle the first time; expecting it to happen twice is like waiting to be struck by lightning again. At least before, she’d been a person. Now? She doesn’t know what she is. She is slowly rebuilding the person who was lost Inside. She cannot allow herself to dream of anything else. *** In her fourth month Outside, Ashlyn finally leaves Dumfries. She stares out the window as the yellow bus winds down the highway. She doesn’t recognize anything along the I-95, which startles her most of all. She might as well be driving through a state she’s never visited, and she wonders if the rest of Outside will always look foreign to her. There will always be places she’s never gone, towns she’s never visited. Will any place feel familiar? Beside her on the seat, Missy sighs. “I’m bored,” she says. “What’re you thinking about?” “Just how all this looks different. From when I was a kid.” “I’ve never been to Norfolk.” “We used to go all the time. To visit family.” Family. Now there’s a word she’s been trying to avoid. In her four months Outside, she’s felt tempted, more than once, to give her parents a call. It’s the right thing to do—call and let them know that she’d been released. Sometimes she sees Ali hug Missy and feels such a sudden urge to hear her mother’s voice that it overwhelms her. Other times, she watches Missy juggle a soccer ball with her friends and thinks about Chris’ boy, her nephew, who should be about Missy’s age right now. She could call. It’s harmless, really, to call. But she doubts that her family would regard it as harmless. Nobody has visited or written in years. They’d wanted to forget about her, and by now, they had probably succeeded. “Where is your family?” Missy asks. “Florida.” Ashlyn pauses. “I haven’t seen them in a while.” Missy smiles. “You should visit them,” she says. “You could bring me and teach me how to surf.” Ashlyn smiles too, imagining herself strolling on the beach, a board under her arm. Missy padding along beside her, Ali carrying a picnic basket. The whole image is so perfect, it hurts. She won’t get anywhere near saltwater in at least a year. She can’t even venture outside the county without asking another adult for permission first. She’s free now, but only in the most technical sense, the way a dog thinks he’s free until he tries to leave his yard and gets zapped by an electric collar. “I can’t,” she says. “I gotta stick around here for a while.” “Then tell them to come visit you,” Missy says. Ashlyn glances a few rows ahead where Ali sits, chatting with Kelley. Ali had suggested that same idea at first. “We have to call them,” she said, pulling an address book out of her kitchen drawer. But Ashlyn told her she wasn’t ready yet, and Ali had reluctantly put the book away. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Ashlyn finally says. “Why not?” “We don’t really talk.” Missy frowns. “They probably miss you,” she says. “I’d miss my mom—” “But that’s different,” Ashlyn says. “How?” “Your mom’s a good person.” “So are you, Coach,” Missy says. Ashlyn turns back to the window. Ali probably thought that Ashlyn had been the one to reject contact, the way she’d cut Ali off. But Ashlyn is too ashamed to tell her that it was the other way around, that her family had refused her phone calls, that they’d moved to Florida to get away from her. This is the convenience of prison. You build a prison in some rural town, out in the middle of nowhere. Never in a city, never near a city, but in some forgotten shithole no one would ever stumble upon without searching for it. You lock up all the bad people in a little box and you hide that box, so none of the good people ever have to look at it. The good people can move on with their lives and forget about what has been locked inside. This is the reality of prison: nobody sees you. *** The first time Ashlyn told Ali she loved her, they were sixteen, riding the bus back from a weekend tournament where Ali had just played the worst game of her life. She’d known that college recruiters would be in the stands, but somehow, she’d waited until the championship match to let that fact screw with her completely. She’d frozen under the pressure. She’d been beaten by the forwards repeatedly; she’d given up a dangerous free kick, and late in the second half, she’d gotten twisted around in front of the box and nearly scored an own goal. The only thing that kept the game close was that Ashlyn had played the finest game of her life. She’d cleaned up all of Ali’s mistakes, and after, when the team won, the recruiters crowded around Ashlyn in the tunnel heading to the locker room. Ali knew she should feel proud of her girlfriend but she felt sick at herself for blowing it. Not just because she’d nearly handed that game to the opponent, but because she was certain she had ruined any chance she might have of playing college soccer. Now Ashlyn would receive offers from all over, and Ali would be lucky if she could play for the local state college. When she told Ashlyn as much, Ashlyn wrapped an arm around her and pulled her close. “Then I’d play there too,” she said. “I’m going wherever you go.” Ali scoffed. “So if Anson Dorrance asks you to play for him, you’ll tell him what? That you can’t because you’re following your girlfriend to bumfuck nowhere?” “I’m serious, Al.” Ashlyn kissed her cheek. “I love you. I’d follow you anywhere.” Later, she wouldn’t remember how unromantic the whole setup had been; her sulking on a crowded school bus, the both of them sweaty, their thighs sticking to the plastic seats. Someone behind them was blasting Eminem on a boombox, the whole bus celebrating the championship win. But Ali and Ashlyn had remained in their own world, where the only thing certain about their future was that the two of them would be together. And when Ashlyn had turned down her UNC offer, that future had seemed even more certain than when Ashlyn had whispered it to her on a crowded bus. That was twenty years ago, but the memory returns to Ali sharply as she rides to Norfolk. Maybe it’s the upcoming tournament (although she’s now the chaperone sitting at the front of the bus) or maybe it’s because a few nights ago, Ashlyn had told her she loved her. She hadn’t meant it, not really, but Ali still can’t stop thinking about it. “I can’t believe you convinced Coach Hottie to come along,” Kelley says. “I thought you said she keeps to herself.” Kelley has been needling her for weeks to invite Ashlyn out for drinks. A girls’ night, she’s called it, even though Ali knows what type of night Kelley really hopes it’ll turn into. She bristles at the thought, even though she knows she’s being unfair. She’s told Kelley, again and again, that she and Ashlyn are just friends. That what they had long ago is now long over. So who is she to feel upset if Kelley wants to ask Ashlyn out? Still, she does, and she’s beginning to feel uneasy about inviting Ashlyn on this whole weekend trip in the first place. “Well, she cares about Missy,” she says. “And the team.” “Oh, I’m sure that’s the only reason,” Kelley says. She’s been teasing Ali ever since the bus pulled away from the park. Ali hadn’t wanted to tell Kelley about the phone call but the three of them will be supervising this trip all weekend and it didn’t seem fair to not give Kelley a head’s up, just in case things are weird. So far, it hasn’t been. Ali glances over her shoulder to where Missy and Ashlyn sit a dozen rows back. Then she folds her arms across her chest. “It just slipped out,” she says. “It’s like when you accidentally call a teacher Mom.” “I’m sorry,” Kelley says, “but I have never accidentally told an ex I love her. She didn’t mean to say it. But she meant what she said.” Ali sighs, leaning against the window. So what if what Kelley’s said is true? Maybe Ashlyn does love her. They’ve always loved each other, in one way or another. The problem is what comes next. The problem is what to do about this, if anything. And right now, the only thing she can think to do is to try to make it through the weekend. She has twenty girls to supervise. She has no time to think about love. “Can I just ask,” Kelley says, “what happened to you guys? I mean, why did everything fall apart?” So many versions of this story she could tell. The unreturned phone calls and unanswered letters, or the day she’d finally decided she needed to let go. Even though it killed her to hold on, when she’d sent her final letter, part of her had still believed that she would receive a response. If nothing caught Ashlyn’s attention, then surely this letter, promised to be her last, would. She’d told herself she was letting go when she slipped that letter into the mail, but she didn’t, not truly, not until six weeks had passed with no response. The grief hit her suddenly, her loss final and complete. Or maybe the falling apart had happened sooner then that, when the police pulled up to Ashlyn’s dorm, or the night before, when Ashlyn stalked a man to his car. Or even further back when, on an ordinary night, a truck had followed them from a movie theater. She doesn’t know when everything fell apart, and worse, she doesn’t know whether, if none of these things had happened—if Ashlyn had just called the police and reported the carjacker’s truck, if the night he followed them, they’d just stayed in to rent a movie instead—whether she and Ashlyn would have fallen apart anyway. Like her marriage, like every relationship she’s had since Ashlyn went away. Maybe the problem isn’t the years Ashlyn has spent behind bars. Maybe the problem is Ali. Maybe there’s something broken in her, something hiding beneath the surface that would have eventually wormed its way into their relationship. Something wrong in her that eventually pushes everyone away. But Kelley is still waiting for an answer. So Ali gives the simplest one. “Time,” she says. “Just time.” *** That weekend, Ali feels time beginning to collapse. She hadn’t truly considered, when she’d first invited Ashlyn, that this weekend would be the most time they’d spent together in years. Not the weekly practices and games she’s grown used to, not even the occasional dinner or movie night or phone call. But hours, hours spent wrangling the girls in the hotel lobby, passing each other on the bus during head counts, handing out snacks at half-time, falling into an easy orange-slicing and Gatorade-pouring rhythm. She hadn’t considered the sheer strangeness of running into Ashlyn at breakfast, how her heart would clench when she’d see Ashlyn and Missy eating together, their heads bowed over a shared newspaper. Mostly, she hadn’t imagined how normal all of this would feel, even though it should not feel normal at all. Months ago, she’d thought she’d banished Ashlyn to the recesses of her memory. Now she spends her evenings slowly strolling the halls with Ashlyn, partly to enforce curfew, but mostly because it’s the only time all day that the two can be alone. “You know she has a room by herself,” Kelley says one night before bed. “You could always just sleep there.” “Why would I want to do that?’ “Do you really need me to explain it to you?” Ali scoffs. She can hardly imagine anything less romantic than hooking up with an ex in a hotel filled with twenty children she’s supervising, including her own daughter. But that’s immaterial to Kelley, who has begun fluttering around Ashlyn herself. Kelley joking with Ashlyn in the bathroom line, Kelley casually touching Ashlyn’s arm during conversations, Kelley squeezing onto the bench beside Ashlyn during lunch, teasing her, prying for stories about the past. “I get a feeling that you were a bad influence,” she tells Ashlyn, so coyly that Ali wants to puke. “Me?” Ashlyn says. She glances up at Ali, who gives her a reassuring smile. She doesn’t know. Of course she doesn’t know. When Ashlyn relaxes, it dawns on Ali that they are still capable of this, communicating silently the way they used to. Kelley laughs. “Yes,” she says. “In high school. I bet you got this one in all kinds of trouble.” Ali rolls her eyes, picking at her salad. “I wasn’t that square, you know.” “You were a little,” Ashlyn says. “Remember the pool?” “Wait, what happened?” Kelley asks. “What pool?” Ashlyn tells Kelley the story about the summer before senior year of high school when the two had lifeguarded at their local pool, how she had convinced Ali one night to break into the pool after dark, how Ali needed to be cajoled to hop the fence, how she’d been so nervous they’d get caught that she barely enjoyed their minor rebellion. Ashlyn leaves out the part of the story Ali most remembers: how as soon as they’d gotten into the pool, they’d shed their clothes. Ali had been afraid to get caught doing a little more than taking a midnight swim. But from the little smile that Ashlyn gives her at the end of the story, Ali can tell she remembers too. “I wonder if Coach Hottie wants a nightcap,” Kelley says later. “Maybe I should go ask her…” “Do whatever you want,” Ali says. “I don’t care.” But then Ali notices that Ashlyn doesn’t hate the attention. In fact, she seems to like it. She smiles when Kelley sits beside them at the dinner table. She laughs when Kelley teases her. She doesn’t even tense up when Kelley touches her arm. “Come on, Coach Hottie,” Kelley tells her once, and Ashlyn blushes. Why wouldn’t she be flattered? Kelley’s hot and funny. She’s a good person. They both are. Would it be the worst thing in the world if they dated? But Ali hates how the thought of Ashlyn dating anyone else makes her feel like a petty, insecure teenager. She’s not a jealous person. She’d never been a jealous wife, angry when Will talked to other women, obsessive about his whereabouts. Then why does the thought of Kelley stopping by Ashlyn’s room at night make her so sick, she can barely sleep? *** In the mornings, Ashlyn walks. She wakes up hours earlier she needs to and she takes a long walk around downtown, past the hotels and coffee shops and restaurants. She walks to remember, although to remember what, she’s not exactly sure. She’d visited Norfolk plenty of times as a kid, piling in the minivan beside her brother, shoving him across the seat as they fought over who got to play GameBoy. When they arrived at Aunt Nancy and Uncle Dave’s, she’d jump out the van and run to play with their old border Collie. She remembers these things but the memories feel encyclopedic, like she’s recalling scenes from a movie she watched long ago. A movie that stars an actor that looks like she once did, but as she walks around the city, she’s only reminded that those memories belong to a different person. That childhood, that past, all of it somebody else’s. When she returns to the hotel, she bumps into Kelley in the lobby, who invites her to get coffee. Ashlyn glances at the elevator. “Should we get Ali?” she asks. “She’s in the shower.” Kelley loops an arm through Ashlyn’s. “Come on. We’ll just bring her something back.” She’s never been alone with Kelley before. Since returning to Outside, she’s never alone with any woman, really, besides her parole officer. And Ali, but that’s different. She knows Ali. She’s always known Ali. But Kelley makes her nervous. She has the type of easygoing personality that Ashlyn would have once been drawn to, but now, she finds it disorienting. She’s not an easygoing person, not anymore, and she always feels like Kelley is amused by her seriousness. At the coffee shop, Kelley nods toward an empty table. Ashlyn hesitates, accepting her drinks from the barista. She thought they’d just bring the coffee back to the hotel. “Just for a minute,” Kelley says. “Don’t tell me you’re eager to get back to all the kids.” Ashlyn smiles, lowering herself into the seat across from her. “They’re not so bad,” she says. “Nice of you to help out Ali like this,” Kelley says. “I worried about her during the divorce. It’s not easy raising a kid on your own.” Ashlyn wraps her hands around her coffee cup. “Was it bad?” she asks. “The divorce.” “Well, Ali’s tough. You know that. So she handled it well. But Will just did not want to let her go. So that was hard to watch.” Kelley pauses. “What about you? Have you been married before?” Ashlyn laughs. “No.” “What?” Kelley smiles. “What’s so funny about that question?” “Because I—” But she stops herself. The truth is too pathetic to admit. She hasn’t dated anyone in over fifteen years. She’s only been in one relationship her entire life. She’s still hung up on the girl she fell in love with when she was a kid, even though this girl had no problem moving on without her. She doesn’t resent Ali for this. She’d wanted her to move on and find happiness with someone who could love her back, someone who could give her the type of life she deserved. But Ashlyn wonders, again, if it was a mistake to return to Dumfries. Maybe she should have gone someplace new and made a fresh start. How is she ever supposed to move on when all she does is see Ali all the time? But she doesn’t tell Kelley any of this. She pushes away from the table and suggests they go back to the hotel. Ali’s coffee is getting cold. *** On the last night of the tournament, when the girls have gone to bed, Ashlyn gets hit on at the hotel bar. She’s drinking a beer by herself, waiting for Kelley and Ali to come down from their room. The girls had placed second, which was worth celebrating, and besides, as Kelley puts it, they’ve survived a weekend trip with twenty eleven-year-olds which is perhaps worth celebrating even more. Ashlyn takes another sip of her beer, surprised by how normal this night feels. It shouldn’t. She’s never had a night like this before. She’d been Inside before she could legally drink and Ali had always been too paranoid to try their fakes at a bar, so they’d gotten their booze from grimy frat parties and older teammates. She’d felt strange, walking up to the bar and ordering, and she hadn’t even known what to ask for. Not the cheap bear she’d downed by the dixie cupful in Kappa Sig. Should she even order beer? Maybe liquor would seem more mature. Whiskey. Bourbon. But the man beside her ordered some craft beer so she’d asked for the same, beginning to reach for her wallet, but the bartender just nodded, not even asking for her ID. Of course he didn’t, she told herself. Look at you. You’re almost middle-aged. She’s almost middle-aged and she’d never ordered from a bar before. Jesus Christ, would she ever catch up? “Waiting for your wife?” a woman asks. Ashlyn doesn’t even glance up, assuming the woman is talking to someone else. But she feels the woman’s presence beside her, and when she finally glances up, she sees a pretty woman with curly black hair looking back at her. “What?” Ashlyn says. “Your wife,” the woman repeats. “The cute brunette. That’s your daughter, right? The goalkeeper? She’s good.” “No, that’s my friend,” Ashlyn says. “I mean, her mom! The keeper’s my friend’s daughter. I’m just helping out.” The woman smiles. Ashlyn can’t remember the last time a strange woman smiled at her this directly. She feels her neck grow hot. “Oh,” the woman says. “Well, in that case, can I buy you a drink?” Maya, as the woman introduces herself, is the mother of one of the girls on the third-place team. She teaches ninth grade math in Richmond, she’s divorced with two daughters, and she likes to touch Ashlyn’s hand when she speaks. She’s flirty in a direct, intentional way that unnerves Ashlyn. She can’t stop blushing every time Maya looks at her, every time Maya cracks a joke or gives her a compliment. “Sorry,” she finally says, staring down into her beer. “This never happens to me.” “Oh, I doubt that,” Maya says, smiling. “I’m sure women flirt with you wherever you go.” Ashlyn laughs, blushing harder. Is this true? She tries to remember. Had there been a time when strange girls liked to flirt with her? Maybe the occasional girl at a party, but for most of her life, around Dumfries at least, everyone had known that she and Ali were a package deal. When she’d first arrived at college, one of the team captains pulled her aside and told her that while it was fine to date within the team, she expected the two of them to keep it professional. No drama if things blow up. Ashlyn just laughed. Things wouldn’t blow up, not between her and Ali. But the team captain had shaken her head. “No one stays together with her first girlfriend,” she’d said. In her first two years of college, Ashlyn watched as, one by one, all of her friends broke up with high school boyfriends and girlfriends. Part of her wondered if she was missing out, somehow, if part of the college experience was going someplace new and starting over and dating new people. But her curiosity in this possibility was only intellectual. She wondered and then she dismissed the thought. She and Ali were still going strong, she’d reasoned, because there was just something special about them, something that nobody else had. “Not really,” she finally says. “I haven’t met somebody new in a while.” “Ah,” Maya says knowingly. “Just got out of a relationship?” Here’s the most exciting thing about Maya: she knows absolutely nothing. She lives in a city nearly three hours away. She’s never heard of a Dumfries murder that sent a college student away to prison for most of her life. She probably couldn’t even locate Fluvanna on a map. She certainly knows nothing about the woman sitting in front of her, the woman who could be from anywhere, who could have spent her life doing anything at all. So Ashlyn just nods. She tells Maya about her life. Not her real life but the one she invents because she can. She has just gotten out of a longterm relationship. Yes, it’s hard to start over again but it was time, she just needed some space, you know? Before that? Where had she been? Well, after college, she’d bounced around for a while. She’d lived all over. In California for a bit, then she’d gone overseas. Doing what? Oh, just working odd jobs here and there. Now she’s back in her hometown. Just to be closer to family, you know? Yeah, her parents are getting older, it’s good to be close to home sometimes, you never know how much time you have left. *** That night, Ali has one too many glasses of wine. She orders her first glass as soon as she and Kelley wander down to the bar and she spots Ashlyn talking to a pretty woman. A random stranger, she thinks, just making small talk, and when she and Kelley find a table, she starts to get up to tell Ashlyn she’s here when Kelley touches her hand. “I think that lady’s picking her up,” she says, laughing. Ali laughs too. The whole idea seems preposterous. Not a stranger finding Ashlyn attractive—she’s spent enough time this weekend watching Kelley drool to grow accustomed to that idea—but the fact that Ashlyn might be interested. “Jesus, she’s subtle,” Kelley says, as the woman leans toward Ashlyn and touches her hand. “I can see those fuck-me eyes from here.” Even from their table across the bar, Ali can see that Ashlyn is adorably flustered. But why? Is she embarrassed by the woman’s attention? Uncomfortable? Flattered? If she were uncomfortable, then why would she sit there talking to her so long? Ali drains her second glass of wine and then her third before Kelley touches her arm. “Maybe pace yourself?” she says. “We do have to ride for hours with a bus full of kids tomorrow.” “I’m fine,” Ali says, waving the waitress over. “You’re jealous,” Kelley says. “Will you just admit it?” The waitress pauses by their table, and distractedly, Ali waves her on. Jealous. Why can’t she admit that she’s jealous? Because that’s what she’s feeling, isn’t it? That’s what she’s been feeling all weekend. Why else would she start chugging wine just because she saw Ashlyn talking to a strange woman? Why else would Kelley’s trolling get under her skin? “It’s embarrassing,” she finally says. “Why?” “Do you still get jealous over your high school girlfriend?” “No,” Kelley says. “But I’m not still in love with my high school girlfriend.” Ali groans. “Stop.” “Admit it!” Kelley says, leaning closer. “Your little phone call the other day. She meant it and you wanted her to mean it—” “Fine, okay! I wanted her to mean it.” She stares glumly at her empty glass. The only thing worse than admitting that she is jealous is admitting that Kelley is right. Kelley leans back in her chair, smiling smugly. “See, now doesn’t that feel better?” she says. “No,” Ali says. The truth hasn’t set her free; if anything, it’s only made her even more confused. And it hasn’t changed anything. Ashlyn is still flirting at the bar with someone else. “Then walk over there and claim what’s yours,” Kelley says. But that idea bothers her. The idea that Ashlyn is something for her to claim, that idea that Ashlyn is hers in the first place. Maybe Ashlyn was, once upon a time. But that was decades ago. Isn’t it a good thing for Ashlyn to move on? Shouldn’t Ali want this for her? Wouldn’t it be selfish—cruel, even—to want anything else? Finally, the woman leaves the bar and Ashlyn makes her way over to their table. Ali tries to smile as Kelley teases her. “Look at this stud,” she says. “Thought you’d never join us.” “Sorry,” Ashlyn says, pulling up a chair. “I got a little tied up.” “I’ll say.” Kelley nods at the slip of paper in Ashlyn’s hand. “And she gave you her phone number too?” Ashlyn smirks. “No,” she says. “Her room number.” Kelley whoops, patting her on the back, and Ashlyn laughs, blushing a little, which would be cute if Ali didn’t feel her own skin grow hot. She tries not to think about the fact that even though Ashlyn laughs off the come-on, she doesn’t throw the paper away. Instead, she slips it in her pocket before ordering another beer. Is she planning to visit this woman when the night’s over? Why wouldn’t she? The lady is hot and interested in her. And how long has it been since Ashlyn has spent the night with anyone? Doesn’t she deserve this, a fun night with a stranger? A temporary reprieve from her loneliness? Doesn’t everyone? The right thing to do—if Ali were a decent person and a good friend—is to encourage Ashlyn to date. To hope that she finds love. To free whatever part of her feels like Ashlyn’s love still belongs to her. To free whatever part of her still feels like she belongs to Ashlyn. The healthy thing to do is to walk away. So late that night, when she walks Ashlyn to her room, she asks about the woman at the bar. “You could still go talk to her,” Ali says. “I’m sure she’s still awake.” Ashlyn smiles. “You sound like Kelley,” she says. She doesn’t say what Ali hoped she might: that she has no interest in that other woman, that she’d only been talking to her earlier to be polite. Ali takes a shaky breath and starts down the hallway, before she feels Ashlyn grab her hand. “What’s wrong?” she asks softly. Of course Ashlyn knows something’s wrong. After all these years, Ali thinks, how does she still know me? “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m trying.” “Trying what?” “To be a good friend to you.” “What?” Ashlyn steps closer. “You are, Al. What’re you talking about?” “I just can’t stand it. The thought of you wanting someone else.” She stares down at the hallway carpet. There, she’s finally said it. She should’ve known that this would happen. How did she ever think that she could spend so much time around Ashlyn and not feel old feelings returning? Returning, as if they’d ever left. In college, Ashlyn always laughed off the attention of other girls. Why would Ali feel jealous? Didn’t Ali know that she only had eyes for her? That she’d always wanted her, that it didn’t matter what other girl tried to flirt with her? This was before Ali lost her, before Ali even realized that it was possible to lose her. Now Ali is older and wiser. She knows all the different ways that you can lose someone you love. And she feels like she’s already lost Ashlyn in almost every way imaginable: Ashlyn disappearing behind a prison cell, Ashlyn cutting off communication, Ashlyn transforming one night into a person Ali never thought her capable of being. She can’t imagine losing her again, this time to someone who might make her happier. She feels Ashlyn inch closer. “I don’t,” Ashlyn says quietly. “You will,” she says. “You will someday and I want you to—” But Ashlyn steps closer. She tentatively places one hand on Ali’s waist, then another. She moves slowly, deliberately, like a dancer trying to remember the steps from an old routine. But Ali remembers. She touches the back of Ashlyn’s neck and gently pulls her in for a kiss. She feels stuck, frozen in time. Reckon Chapter Notes Alright, alright, early update--since you guys asked so nicely ;) Over the next week, Ashlyn tries not to think about the kiss. Tries, because in spite of herself, her mind keeps cycling hopelessly back to it. At work, she’ll bend to pick up a crate of petunias and feel Ali’s fingers on the back of her neck, her own hand gripping Ali’s waist. She’s not sure how long the kiss lasted. Time is finicky like that. But they’d kissed until down the hallway, a door swung open and Ashlyn sprang away, like a teenager afraid to get caught by her mother. She felt even more mortified by the possibility of Missy catching them kissing in the hallway. But it wasn’t Missy, just two other girls, and by the time Ali had fussed at them for sneaking out after curfew, Ashlyn slunk into the stairwell and climbed the flight of stairs to her own room. She shouldn’t have run off like that. But the girls nearly catching them made her panic about what they’d just done. What if the girls had seen them? What if they told Missy? What would she think? Even more than that, what was Ashlyn doing? She hadn’t meant to kiss Ali. She’d known Ali was upset but she had no idea it was because of the woman at the bar. Then Ali confessed she was jealous and they kissed. Now what does any of it mean? That Ali still loves her? That she’s territorial? What is Ashlyn supposed to do about any of this? At work, she lifts, her head swimming with possibility. Life isn’t supposed to be this confusing. But Outside always is. And just when she thought she had a handle on things, Outside refracts into a dozen new pieces, each presenting new complications. So she does what she knows best. She withdraws. When they’d returned to Dumfries, she declined Ali’s offer of a ride home and instead took a bus. She’s resisted the urge to call Ali. She tries to focus on her work. But Ali returns to her, again and again. Kissing her felt strange, then exhilarating, then familiar. For those imperceptible moments, she’d felt like her old self again, the years shedding off of her, everything Inside has taken from her returning in full bloom. In that moment, she’d felt again like a person she can never become, then the clock struck midnight and she turned back into whatever she is now. The kiss felt like a painful reminder of how far they’ve grown from another. She almost wishes it had never happened. Almost, because in spite of herself, she can’t stop thinking about kissing Ali again. On Thursday, she runs into Ali in Parker’s Hardware. She’s carrying a bag of topsoil over her shoulder when she hears Missy call her name. She turns to find Missy trotting toward her, a big duffel bag swinging from her shoulder, and following behind her, Ali. Ashlyn nearly drops the topsoil, the bag bursting on the floor, dirt spilling everywhere. She shifts it to her other arm as Missy collides with her, throwing her arms around her waist. Behind her, Ali gives Ashlyn a small smile. She seems normal. Why can’t Ashlyn be normal about this too? “Hi,” Ali says. “Just taking this one to meet her dad.” “We’re going camping,” Missy announces. “Cool,” Ashlyn says. “Watch out for the bears.” She’s joking, or trying to, but Missy’s eyes widen as she turns to her mother. “There won’t be bears, right?” she asks. “She’s just teasing,” Ali says, squeezing Missy’s shoulder. When Missy scampers off to her father’s office, Ashlyn shifts the topsoil to her other arm. Her arms burn from holding it, but she doesn’t want to set it down. Setting it down means this conversation will last longer and she already feels flustered, her skin tight and prickly. She can’t even look at Ali. Why can’t she look at Ali? “Well, thanks for helping out last weekend,” Ali says. “I hope you had some fun?” She smiles and Ashlyn’s stomach flutters. This is her opening. This is her chance to say something about the kiss, something flirty and indirect. That’s what she would’ve done, at least, once upon a time when a kiss wasn’t a cataclysmic event that sent her heart pacing with stress. But now she just feels tongue-tied and she regrets the kiss even more. How had she ever thought that she was capable of something like this? Flirtation. Romance, even. She’ll just end up making a fool out of herself, if she hasn’t already. “Sorry,” she mumbles. “I gotta—” She gestures toward the topsoil in her arms. Ali’s smile fades. “Of course,” she says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to keep you.” When Ashlyn brushes past her, she glances toward the gardening section and sees Will Parker standing in his office, staring back at her. He’s watching her. Not just her but he’s watching her and Ali talk. Does he know about their past? What if he finds out? Would he be angry that his exwife convinced him to hire her old lover? Would he be jealous if he knew that Ashlyn had kissed his ex-wife, that she can’t stop thinking about kissing her again? Will Parker does not seem like a vindictive man, but he loved Ali once and if he still loves her, who knows what he might do? Ashlyn needs this job. If she loses it, she’ll violate her parole and she could end up back Inside. She knows what she should do, the smart thing to do. Stay the hell away from Ali. Run away from her if she needs to. Then keep her head down, stay quiet, and do her work without drawing any attention to herself or giving Will Parker any reason to let her go. For once, she wants to leave trouble alone. For once, when it comes to Ali, she wants to listen to her head. *** The first time Ashlyn ever kissed her, Ali ran home. She hadn’t meant to panic but she couldn’t help it; one minute, she was sitting beside Ashlyn on her living room couch, like she’d done hundreds of times, and the next, Ashlyn leaned over and kissed her. The moment itself—the kiss, even—was unremarkable and that’s partly what surprised her. She may have understood if they’d found themselves somehow in a romantic situation. Then a kiss may have been warranted. But on a night when they’d been lounging around in gym shorts, watching made-for-TV movies? Of all nights, this was the moment Ashlyn chose to cross the line in their friendship, a choice neither of them could ever un-do? “Well, it’s not like I planned it,” Ashlyn told her later. She grinned, stretching her arm out on top of the couch. Ali rolled her eyes, but she slid into the crook of Ashlyn’s arm. It amazed her, after a few months of dating, how natural this already felt. “No kidding,” she said. “What? Did you want something more romantic?” “A little warning would’ve been nice.” Ashlyn laughed. “I didn’t even know I was gonna do it. I just couldn’t stand it anymore.” “Stand what?” “Not kissing you.” Now Ali understands this. She understood the moment she pulled Ashlyn toward her in the hotel hallway. She understood throughout that entire sleepless night when she lay in bed, only able to think of when she might kiss Ashlyn again. But she also understands why Ashlyn is running from her. Why, the next morning on the bus, Ashlyn had barely said anything past hello, a reticence so pronounced that even Kelley noticed that something was wrong. Ali had no choice; she told Kelley about the kiss. “I think I ruined everything,” she said. Kelley scoffed. “Oh, please. She kissed you back, didn’t she?” Ali wishes it were that simple. But she knows that she was wrong for kissing Ashlyn in the first place. Ashlyn isn’t ready. She’s still trying to make her way in an increasingly complicated world and the only thing that kissing her accomplished was complicating her world further. So Ali understood why, when she’d run into her at Parker’s Hardware, Ashlyn wouldn’t even look her in the eye. She understood, but it still hurts. Now Missy’s gone for a week and Ali has nothing else to do but sit around thinking about what a mess she’s made. Part of her, she realizes, had hoped that kissing Ashlyn would fix things. Like a fairy tale. A kiss would reverse the damage, return them to their former selves, turn back time. But the kiss has only ruined the careful friendship they’d been building, and now Ali has no idea how to repair it. That evening, she gives in and calls Kyle. He listens to her story quietly, although she can already imagine his expression on the other end of the phone. He’s never had a poker face. “Go ahead,” she says when she finishes. “Tell me ‘I told you so.’” “I’d never do that,” he says. “Bullshit.” “Okay, I would, but not about something like this.” He pauses. “How are you, Ali? Are you okay?” “I’m fine,” she says, even though they both know she doesn’t mean it. She misses her daughter. She misses Ashlyn. On her living room couch, she curls her knees into her chest and stares out the window at Missy’s goal in the cul de sac. “I didn’t ruin everything, did I? Tell me it’ll be okay.” “It’ll be okay,” Kyle says. “It might be weird at first but it’ll be okay. Come on, after everything you two have been through? It’s just one little kiss.” She lets out a sigh. Kyle is right. In the grand scheme of things, in the context of everything she and Ashlyn have been through, what does one kiss matter anyway? She can always apologize for it and chalk it up to the wine. You know how I get after a few glasses, she could say, laughing at herself and Ashlyn might laugh too, and just like that, everything could be fine. But she knows, to her at least, it wasn’t some meaningless kiss. And that’s what scares her the most. *** At her check-in, Ashlyn studies Alex Morgan’s wedding picture. The framed photograph sits on the edge of her desk, Alex gorgeous in her white gown, her husband smiling beside her. They’re standing outside on the coast somewhere, probably California. A beach wedding, maybe. God, the beach. Inside, Ashlyn used to spend hours dreaming about the beach. Back during those early years when she allowed her mind to wander, she would imagine herself lying out on warm sand, the water lapping her ankles. Ali beside her, Ali always beside her, asking her to rub sunscreen into her back. She would get out, she promised herself, and she would make it up to Ali, all that lost time. She would take her on vacation—to California, maybe, or Hawaii—and they would do nothing except lie out on a beach, where there no cells and no walls, only sand and sun and stars. Inside, she dreamed of all the things she would do once she was free. The cities she’d visit. The food she’d eat. She didn’t know how bewildering Outside would become, how much energy she would spend toward keeping her life small and safe. “How’d you meet?” Ashlyn asks. Alex glances up from the paperwork on her desk. She follows Ashlyn’s gaze to her wedding picture and smiles. “College,” she says. “We both went to Cal. We bounced around a little after school but then one day, we ran into each other out here. And that’s that.” “So you found each other again.” Alex smiles. “That’s a nice way of putting it.” She finishes signing off Ashlyn’s paperwork and hands her a copy. Ashlyn stares at the paper in front of her. She’s free to go now. She should take the form and leave. Alex has other appointments that day, other parolees waiting to meet with her. But she feels as frozen as she’d felt in the hotel hallway when Ali pulled her close. “I kissed someone,” she says quietly. “I think I shouldn’t have.” “Oh.” Alex sets the paper on the desk. “Why not?” “Because I can’t,” she says. “I can’t do things like that anymore. I’m not a person who can—” She stops when she feels Alex touch her hand. “You’re capable of love,” Alex says. “Prison may have taken a lot from you but it didn’t take that.” On the bus ride home, Ashlyn thinks of everything she’s lost when she was Inside. The birthdays and holidays, her brother’s wedding, the birth of her nephew. Her parents growing older. The very world shifting and changing. All the small moments that life is made of, the moments she can never get back. Time, her most precious possession, and sixteen years of it has been lost to her forever. She sighs, leaning against the window. She can’t afford to be foolish now, but how can she afford to be wise? How can she afford to wait? She doesn’t have any more time to lose. *** That night, Ali does what she’d promised herself she wouldn’t: she calls Ashlyn. Her stomach flutters as she listens to the phone ring. What’s the matter with her? It’s just a phone call. It’s just Ashlyn. It was just one little kiss. She repeats these words inside her head to steady her nerves, but her stomach still dips when Ashlyn picks up. “Hi,” Ali says. “I just wanted to remind you that Missy’s still with her dad? So she won’t make it to her lesson this week?” God, why is she phrasing everything like a question? If she’s delivering information, then why does she sound so damn uncertain? She should sound more confident if she wants Ashlyn to believe this is her true reason for calling. But even to herself, her excuse is embarrassingly flimsy. Of course Missy’s absence isn’t the real reason she’s called. She could have reminded Ashlyn in a brief text. Of course Ashlyn will see right through this. “Oh, that’s right,” Ashlyn says. “Thanks. I probably would’ve forgot.” Ali pauses, waiting for her to continue, but she doesn’t. She clenches the phone as an excruciatingly silent moment passes. Is this their new normal? All because Ali couldn’t behave like an adult and control herself? “Ash, I—” “Can I just say something?” Ashlyn blurts. “Okay,” Ali says. Again, Ashlyn is silent on the other end, but from her hesitance to speak, Ali can already fill in the blanks. Ashlyn likes her, but only as a friend. Ashlyn cares about her, but what they had was so long ago, really, you couldn’t expect her to still return those feelings, could you? Ashlyn loves her but she just got out of prison, she wants to explore her options, Ali can’t possibly think that Ashlyn would want to go her whole life only dating her. “Maybe,” Ashlyn finally says. “Maybe we could do something.” “Do something?” Ali doesn’t understand. Do something about what? The mess that she’s made? “Yes,” Ashlyn says. “This weekend?” It takes Ali a moment to realize what Ashlyn is saying. A date, genius. She’s asking you out. “Oh,” she says. “I mean, if you want to—” “No, of course,” Ali says quickly. “We definitely should. What do you have in mind?” “We could…get food? Somewhere?” Ali sinks into the couch. She feels so relieved, she could cry. Ashlyn sounds just as tentative and unsure as she’s felt the past few days. Ashlyn’s nervous; Ali’s nervous too. Maybe all of this is normal for a first date. But is this even a first date? Isn’t it ridiculous to think of it as that? Ali still remembers remember their first official date. How a week after that harried kiss on the couch, Ashlyn took her to the pizza parlor and after, they went for a long walk along the lake. The night might have been an ordinary night for them, if it were not for that earlier kiss. One little kiss had changed everything, tinting the entire evening like a shade. The pizza parlor seemed different, Ali nervously eating across from Ashlyn. The night sky twinkled brighter when Ashlyn reached for her hand. Even the lake seemed wider when they’d sat on a hill, overlooking the water, before they’d kissed again and again until they hurried home before curfew. That one little kiss had opened the floodgates. Afterward, it seemed silly that they hadn’t kissed before. Since then, they’d been on countless dates, but it was all so long ago. Are they resetting? Starting over? Does she want them to? “Do you have a place you like?” Ashlyn asks. But Ali can only remember the spots they used to visit in high school. Chili’s and T.G.I. Fridays, the pizza parlor, the arcade. She isn’t sixteen anymore. She bites her lip, then feeling bold, she says, “Or you could just come over?” *** The first time she’d ever visited the Krieger house, Ashlyn was amazed. It looked, and felt, like a house where a real family lived, the type of house you’d only see on a television show. The big white house, the perfect lawn, the flowers blooming in the backyard. She’d only been a child then, too young to understand the trouble brewing inside. Mr. and Mrs. Krieger quietly splitting apart, Kyle’s self-loathing eventually morphing into a life-threatening addiction. She came from a family where conflict existed openly, where her parents yelled at each other, where she and her brother took out their anger by wrestling on the living room rug. So she didn’t understand that a terse glance exchanged across the kitchen table could spell doom, that a boy retreating to his room could try to destroy himself. To her, the Kriegers were perfect. It made sense. Ali Krieger was perfect, so naturally, she came from a perfect family, from a perfect house. As Ashlyn grew older, the Krieger house itself seemed to transform. In high school, it became a landmine-filled desert, as she and Ali searched for places in the house where they could make out without being discovered. Ali’s bedroom lost its appeal after the institution of the open door rule, and besides, Ashlyn admits, it became a little thrilling, the threat of getting caught. Now, Ashlyn realizes as she stands on Ali’s porch with a bottle of wine, she finds the Krieger house that she grew up in blending into the house it is now. Missy’s house, which feels like a different home altogether. When Ashlyn rings the doorbell, she still half-expects to hear Missy running to answer. But Ali answers, wearing a tight black dress that makes Ashlyn’s mouth run dry. “Hey you,” Ali says, smiling. “Come on in.” Amazing how quickly this house can transform. Ashlyn steps inside and she feels an electric charge she’s never noticed before. With Missy, this would have been a movie night, pizza and candy on the couch, Missy sprawled out in between them. But without Missy, who knows what type of night this might be? She slides onto the counter stool, wiping her dampened palms against her jeans. “It’s weird,” she says. “I keep expecting to hear Missy come running in.” Ali smiles. “Me too,” she says. “She’s only gone a few days, but it’s embarrassing, how much I miss her. I don’t know what I’ll do when she leaves for college.” “Maybe she’ll stay close by.” Ali laughs. “She’ll break her mother’s heart and move to, like, Kenya. She’s a lot braver than I ever was.” Sometimes Ashlyn wonders if this was their biggest mistake. Not straying farther from home. You’re supposed to be safer, the closer you are to family, but maybe if both of them had ventured out a little farther, or even just Ashlyn. If she’d gone to UNC, then maybe neither of them would have gone to the movies that night. Maybe they would have both been in their dorms, talking to each other on the phone, and Hardy Jones would have passed that stretch of deserted road and kept living the rest of his miserable life. Or, maybe Ali would have gone to the movies anyway, but she would’ve gone with somebody stronger, somebody who wouldn’t have been felled by a single punch, someone who could actually protect her. Somebody better. It’s sick to think like this, she knows. You can try all you want to reconfigure the past, to shift the tiles around until they resemble a nicer picture. It’ll never change a thing. You’ll only drive yourself crazy thinking about it. So she tries not to think about it. She tries to focus on this night, which she has begun reluctantly thinking of as a date night. She hasn’t been on a date in a while, but what other type of night could this be? The wine, Ali’s dress, the delicious meal they share together, talking at the kitchen table. After, they finish off the wine on the living room couch. The night’s winding down, and Ashlyn becomes increasingly aware that she should do something. It’s that point of the date, isn’t it? She should hold Ali’s hand or kiss her, shouldn’t she? But she feels frozen on her end of the couch. It’s embarrassing. She’s spent sixteen years surrounded by hardened criminals, but this is what terrifies her, kissing Ali. Finally, she can’t take it anymore. She sets her half-empty glass on the table. “It’s late,” she says. “I should probably go.” “Oh.” Ali looks startled. “Right. I didn’t realize—well, let me walk you out.” Twenty years ago, Ashlyn would’ve been able to think of something to say. Something clever, something sweet, even. She would apologize for pulling away after that kiss in the hotel. She would explain that it wasn’t because she regretted kissing Ali, but because she’s afraid. She’s afraid of everything now. And she hates this about herself as she waves goodbye to Ali and starts down the porch steps. But she pauses when she reaches the bottom. The thought of returning alone to her apartment after a night like this makes her sick. “Ash?” Ali says. “What’s wrong? Did you forget something?” She steps barefoot onto the porch, hugging herself. She looks concerned, and in that moment, Ashlyn feels something inside herself thaw. She takes the steps slowly, one at a time. When she reaches Ali, she stares down at her feet, unable to even look at her. “I don’t want to go,” she says. “Okay,” Ali says. “What do you want then?” “I want—” She forces herself to look into Ali’s eyes. “I want to kiss you.” *** She doesn’t know how they end up in the master bedroom. How one kiss leads to another, which leads to Ali leading her up the stairs, how she finds herself kissing Ali in the doorway of her parents’ bedroom. She doesn’t even realize this at first. She’s too lost in the kiss, the gentle press of Ali’s body against hers, to even register anything about her surroundings. She doesn’t open her eyes until she’s fumbling with the zipper on Ali’s dress and she sees the large oak bed, the stately nightstand, the painting of a garden hanging overhead. “Holy shit,” she whispers. “We’re in your parents’ room.” Ali laughs. “Please never say that again.” She turns so Ashlyn can unzip her. Ashlyn watches the smoothness of Ali’s back appear as she gently guides the zipper down its track. Her heart paces as the dress pools around Ali’s ankle. Even though Ali’s parents haven’t slept here for years, it still feels forbidden, like they’re teenagers again, fooling around when nobody’s home. “I keep thinking they’re gonna walk in and catch us,” she says. Ali turns, and Ashlyn loses her train of thought at the sight of her in only a black bra and panties. Ali smiles, slowly unbuttoning Ashlyn’s shirt. “No one’s here but us, baby,” she says. “It’s only us.” As soon as she can, Ashlyn flips off the light. She’s no longer a twenty-year-old in her athletic prime; forget what prison has done to her body, she’s not even ready for Ali to see what time has done. She’s surprised that Ali seems shy too, that she’s almost apologetic about the stretch marks on her stomach. “You can blame Missy for that,” she jokes, and Ashlyn imagines Ali pregnant, glowing, full of life. She kisses her way down Ali’s stomach. “It’s beautiful,” she whispers. “You’re beautiful.” Here’s one thing that time hasn’t taken: she remembers Ali’s body. She remembers how to kiss her the way she likes, to suck on her neck, to tease her nipples, how to make her moan. She remember’s Ali’s body like you remember the lyrics to a song you haven’t heard in years. She remembers because Ali’s body is a song she could never forget. She takes her time, slowly kissing her, until she can tell that Ali can’t take being teased much longer. She tugs off Ali’s panties and begins to kiss her inner thigh when she suddenly stops. “Whoa,” she says. “When’d you get that tattoo?” A tattoo, right along her hip bone! Ashlyn laughs. Never, in a million years, would she have guessed that Ali would have a small tattoo here of all places. She can’t even imagine Ali in a tattoo shop somewhere, lying on a table while a grimy dude tatted her in such a private place. But Ali looks unamused. She’s tired of talking. “Junior year,” she says quickly. “Now can you just—” Ashlyn smiles, kissing Ali’s neck again. “Can I just what?” she says. She can’t help it; she loves to hear Ali beg. Ali smirks, pulling her in for another kiss. “Can you just fuck me?” she says. *** Here’s another thing that time hasn’t taken: she still loves making Ali come. She lifts her face from between Ali’s thighs, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She wishes that she could remember this moment forever, the way Ali looks now, naked and sated, lying against her sheets under the moonlight. She kisses her again. “I missed that sound,” Ashlyn says. “What sound?” “That sound you make when you come.” Ali laughs. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says coyly. “Oh yeah? Want me to show you again?” She isn’t prepared for what happens next. Ali laughs, then rolls over, flipping Ashlyn so that she’s on her back and the sudden feeling of somebody on top of her makes her flinch. She feels powerless, the bed beneath her hardening into concrete, the body on top trapping her. She clenches her eyes shut, her breath halting. “Ash?” Ali rolls off of her. “What’s wrong? Are you okay? Did I—” “It’s fine,” she says. “I just—you just caught me off guard, that’s all.” “I didn’t mean—” “It’s fine,” she says again. “Really.” She rolls over onto her side, her face burning. What’s the matter with her? Why can’t she be normal, just this once? Instead, she had to freak out and ruin the entire night. She doesn’t even understand what happened, why the feeling of Ali on top of her made her feel so panicked. It’s Ali, she tells herself. She wouldn’t hurt you. Why do you think she would hurt you? Is this what Ashlyn has to look forward to for the rest of her life? Her body spontaneously revolting, panic hovering slightly beneath the surface just waiting to erupt through her skin? Is that what Inside has done to her, turned her into a ticking bomb that can ignite, at any moment, with fear? “Ashlyn,” Ali says. “Can you look at me? Please?” She sounds miserable, like it’s her fault somehow, which only makes Ashlyn feel worse. She knows now what she’ll do. She’ll wait for Ali to fall asleep, then she’ll quietly gather her clothes and slip out the door. Then she won’t have to face her in the morning. She won’t have to talk about what happened. But she imagines Ali waking up without her and feels horrible just thinking about it. She lets out a long breath, then rolls over to face her. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s not you, I just—I don’t know—” Ali touches her cheek. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay. What do you need?” She needs so many things. A body that only does what she tells it to, a mind that isn’t consumed by panic. A life that amounts to something, one that she can be proud of. But she doesn’t say any of this. She kisses Ali, then she takes Ali’s hand and slips it down the front of her boxers. “Make me forget,” she says. Seeing Chapter Notes Thanks again for all the love, guys! I'm pretty overwhelmed by the response to this story so far but I appreciate all your comments and kudos. Ready for more? In the morning, Ali awakes from a beautiful dream. In this dream, she’d invited Ashlyn over for dinner. They talked and ate and Ashlyn started to leave—in this dream, Ali had felt sick watching her go—when suddenly, she’d changed her mind and came inside. In this dream, they made love for hours, and it was sad and sweet at the same time, so sad and so sweet that it all feels completely real. Ali never has dreams like this; the vivid ones are never blissful. Still, when she rolls over in bed, she expects to find the other side empty. Instead, she finds Ashlyn sleeping, her blonde hair fanned on the pillow. Last night suddenly returns to Ali, a night that felt too miraculous to be real, the same way this morning, waking beside Ashlyn, feels like an extension of a dream. But it’s not. It’s real. And she’s almost afraid to move, almost afraid that she will somehow undo this perfect moment she has found herself in. But she gently kisses Ashlyn’s forehead, then slips out of bed. It’s eight; Will promised he’d have Missy home at noon. If she showers now, she can go downstairs and make Ashlyn breakfast. They’ll have time to talk about what last night meant before Missy comes home. Ali knows what it meant to her, but with Ashlyn, she’s never sure. Sometimes sex is just sex. How can she blame Ashlyn for that, for just wanting a release? How can she blame Ashlyn for wanting to keep things simple? As she showers, she tries to think about what she’ll say but halfway through shampooing her hair, she hears the door slide open. “Can I join?” Ashlyn asks. Her voice is low, sexy. A thrill runs through Ali at the sight of her. But she just shrugs. “I suppose,” she says. “To save water.” “Right.” Ashlyn smiles, stepping inside the shower. “For the water.” Soon, all of her questions about whether last night would be a one-time thing evaporate. Soon, soaping each other down turns into Ashlyn kissing her against the shower wall, gently stroking her as Ali moans into her shoulder. Soon, her plans for the morning—breakfast, their talk—fade from her mind and she can think of nothing else besides how she can ever go back to a life where she doesn’t begin every morning like this. Then she hears the front door slam, a familiar cadence of feet running up the stairs. She freezes. Ashlyn stops too, confused, but before Ali can speak, she hears her bedroom door swing open. “Hey Mom!” Missy hollers. “I’m back!” She’s early. Her daughter is home early. For the first time since Ali has known him, her exhusband has actually managed to be early for something. If Ali weren’t currently naked in the shower with her ex-girlfriend, she might have even laughed. As she currently is, she’s only mortified. She clamps a hand tight over Ashlyn’s mouth. “I’m in the shower!” she yells, as loudly as she can. “Just—I’ll come down in a sec, okay?” “O-kay,” Missy says slowly. The door shuts again. Ali lets out a breath, pulling her hand away. Maybe Missy didn’t hear them. Maybe she hadn’t noticed the state of the bedroom, the mussed sheets, the two sets of clothes strewn on the floor. How observant could Missy be? This is the same kid who can’t remember her house key half the time. She loses her gloves on the playground every winter. At least once a month, Ali has to email Missy’s teacher for a homework assignment that Missy forgot to write down. It drives her crazy when Missy doesn’t pay attention, but for once, Ali hopes that this will work in her favor. Ashlyn still cringes. “Do you think she—” “I don’t know,” Ali says, “but you should probably—” “I know, I’ll go.” Ashlyn pauses. “Al, last night was—” “Can we talk later? I’m sorry, I promise we will, I just don’t want her to come back up—” “Don’t worry,” Ashlyn says. “I’ll go out the back way. She won’t know I was ever here.” *** As a mother, Ali Krieger prides herself on a few things. One, she’s never spanked her child. (No matter how much her in-laws mock her hippy, dippy parenting methods, she has always remained opposed to corporal punishment, as an attorney and as a mother.) Two, in her past three years as a single mother, she has managed to maintain a healthy work-life balance, and when one side of that scale has tipped, it has always been the side devoted to Missy. And three, she has also managed to maintain a healthy amount of privacy when it comes to parenting. She wants a close relationship with her daughter, of course, but Ali still believes that there are certain boundaries that should remain between parent and child. So when she and Will had filed for divorce, she’d tried to protect Missy the best she could from the unpleasant details. She never vented to Missy when Will irritated her. She never confided in Missy when she was feeling upset. And when, a year after her divorce, she’d finally begun to date again, she never introduced Missy to any of the men she went out with. Granted, none of those dates led to anything serious. If they had, she would have told Missy eventually, but how long eventually might have taken, she still isn’t sure. There’s something about revealing that aspect of her personal life to her daughter that makes her feel queasy. She’s never wanted to be the single mother who brings boyfriend after boyfriend through her home. What if Missy gets attached to one of them? And what if the relationship crashes and burns? Then she’ll have to coax herself and her daughter through heartbreak. No, it’s easier to do things her own way. When Missy’s at her father’s, she might meet a man for dinner. If she likes him enough, she might go home with him. She might even see him once or twice more. But her rules are simple. No sleepovers at her place. No dropping by unexpectedly. And no introductions to Missy. To most men, these rules were simple to follow, preferable even. It was the best of both worlds: you got to bag the hot mom without having to worry about dealing with the kid. The rules made life easier for Ali, too. She slept with these men to stave off the loneliness, but she never seriously expected any of these relationships to grow into something real. She might have a fling or two, sure, but she fully expected that she would never remarry, that she and Missy would ride off into the sunset together. She certainly never expected that her high school girlfriend might spend the night, and that in the middle of a shower quickie, her daughter might nearly discover them. “Shut the fuck up!” Kelley hisses when Ali finally tells her. Ali shushes her, glancing over her shoulder. Missy and Tristan are playing soccer in the backyard, far out of earshot, but even from the living room, Ali feels paranoid that Missy can hear. “What do you think?” Ali asks. “Is my daughter completely traumatized?” Kelley snorts, picking up her coffee. “I thought you said she didn’t see anything.” “She didn’t!” “But she could’ve heard something.” Kelley smirks. “Those shower acoustics, you know.” Ali covers her burning face. She doesn’t even know why she has decided to tell Kelley any of this, not just about her sleeping with Ashlyn but also about them almost getting caught. Maybe she just wants someone to assure her that this is normal. That she’s not a bad mother, somehow, for violating her own rules and allowing someone to sleep over while her daughter was gone. Kelley laughs, jostling Ali’s leg. “Kriegs,” she says. “Relax. I’m sure she has no clue.” “Still.” Ali groans. “What was I thinking?” “I’m pretty sure we both know what you were thinking,” Kelley says. “I mean, you’re the one who invited your ex over for dinner.” “But not because I—” Ali stops herself. Is Kelley right? Had Ali invited Ashlyn over because she’d hoped the night might end in bed? Worse, is that what Ashlyn thinks? That her entire dinner invitation had been a ploy to seduce her? “You don’t have to be embarrassed about it,” Kelley says. “Sometimes you just gotta scratch that itch.” But that’s the problem, isn’t it? Last night would be simple if it were like the other trysts Ali has had over the past few years. An easy release, a fun time with an attractive somebody she never planned to see again. But she wants to see Ashlyn again. She needs to see her again, and she has no way to do this while still enforcing her rules. She could try to sneak around, maybe, to spend the night at Ashlyn’s when Missy is away. But Missy has already met Ashlyn. Even more than that, Missy cares about Ashlyn. What will happen if Ali tells Ashlyn that she wants to pursue a relationship? What if it doesn’t work out? Missy would never forgive Ali for driving away her coach and her friend. But even before all of that, how is she even supposed to tell Missy that she wants to date Ashlyn? Long ago, when she’d first realized her feelings for Ashlyn, Ali had snuck around the library, reading a book for teenagers about how to come out to your parents. She never imagined then that twenty years later, she would need to learn how to come out to her child. “What’s the matter?” Kelley asks. She’s no longer laughing, which is how Ali knows that she must really look upset. She bites her lip. “It wasn’t just sex,” she says. “Not for me.” Kelley pats her thigh. “I know,” she says. “I don’t get why you’re acting like that’s a problem.” “I mean, Missy—” “Missy loves Coach Hottie,” Kelley says. “And you clearly do too. You’re a mother, Ali. You’re not dead. You’re allowed to want something beyond your kid.” Ali glances out the window again at Missy, who chases Tristan to the plastic soccer goal. She wonders how Kelley has managed to make it all sound so simple. For the first time, she begins to think that maybe it is. *** The first time she and Ali had sex, Ashlyn had been caught off guard. They’d been dating for two months by then but they still hadn’t done more than kiss. Ali wanted to take things slow, so Ashlyn agreed, even though every night she left Ali after hours of making out, she felt like her entire body was radiating with desire. “Don’t get mad at me because you got blue balls,” her brother Chris would say whenever she snapped at him. She groaned, tossing a pillow at him. She could wait—she promised Ali she would wait as long as she needed—but part of her worried that there was a reason why Ali seemed so unwilling to have sex. Maybe Ali only liked her as a friend. Maybe she saw kissing as an extension of that friendship, but sex was going too far. Sex transformed a relationship into something else, something unrecognizable, and maybe that was the step that Ali was unprepared to take. It hadn’t occurred to her that Ali was just scared. Unlike Ashlyn, she’d never slept with a girl before, and unlike Ashlyn, she felt more terror than desire. Then one night, while they watched a movie in Ashlyn’s den, Ali quietly muttered “Fuck it” and suddenly climbed on top of Ashlyn’s lap. Ashlyn had been so startled, she’d spilled her bowl of popcorn. “Let’s do it,” Ali said. “Do what?” Ashlyn asked. “You know. It.” She leaned down and kissed her, but Ashlyn wrenched herself away. “What?” she squeaked. “Like, right now?” “Your parents won’t be home for a while.” “But now?” Ashlyn said. “I mean, we’ve just been sitting here all day watching TV—don’t you want it to be, I don’t know. Special.” She was too embarrassed to say what she really thought: that she wanted their first time to be special. She’d imagined that one day, Ali would alert her that she was ready, so she could plan an unforgettable night. A fancy dinner, a moonlit walk, flower petals sprinkled on the bed. Not a romp on the lumpy den couch while Back to the Future played in the background. “Who cares about all of that?” Ali said. “Let’s just rip the band-aid off.” “Geez,” Ashlyn said. “Glad that’s how you think about having sex with me. Let’s just get it over with, huh?” Ali sighed. “That’s not what I mean.” “Well, it’s what you said.” “I just—” She bit her lip. “I’m scared, Ash.” “Scared? Of what?” “That I’ll—I don’t know, that I won’t be any good. That I’ll disappoint you. That you’ll—” Ashlyn kissed her cheek. “You could never disappoint me,” she said. “Then can we just do it?” Ali asked. “Please. I’m just so sick of worrying about it.” It wasn’t romantic. It was awkward and fumbling at moments, their eagerness far outmatching their skill. But after they both sputtered to an orgasm, sweaty and panting and holding each other while they found their breath, Ashlyn brushed back Ali’s hair from her forehead, realizing that even though there had been no fancy dinner or moonlight or flower petals, their first time had been special. She had grown closer to Ali in a new way. She’d learned what she looked like under her clothes, what parts of her body she wanted to hide, how her skin tasted. She’d learned what Ali’s face looked like when she was lost in pleasure. And she knew there was only more to learn, that she had nothing but years ahead of her to learn how to make Ali feel loved. The last time she and Ali had sex, Ashlyn was also caught off guard. She spends the week that follows in a daze. At work, she tries to focus on lifting, but Ali returns to her, Ali moaning in her ear, Ali’s fingernails digging into her back. Ali slipping inside of her until she felt as if her whole body would split open, right down the seams. How could something she hadn’t done in so long still feel so natural? Loving Ali is an instinct that has never left her, no matter how hard she’d tried to excise it. It’s embedded in her muscles and tissue, all the ways Ali needs to be touched. The real problem is that Ashlyn doesn’t know what any of this means. What does hooking up with an ex ever mean? That you miss her? That you still have feelings for her? That you’re lonely and she’s available, and why not? What could be more convenient than sex with a person you already know, who knows you, who knows what you like? Is that what Ali thinks? What else could this have meant, besides ex sex? Ali doesn’t want to date her. How could she? She saw how panicky Ali was when she thought that Missy might have discovered their tryst. How quick Ali was to usher her out the back door so that Missy would never know. How could Ali ever date someone she doesn’t want her daughter to know about? And how could she ever tell Missy about Ashlyn? Still, even though Ashlyn knows their night was only sex, she can’t stop thinking about it. By the time Missy’s lesson rolls around on Sunday, Ashlyn tries to cast the previous weekend out of her mind. She manages to act normal enough when Ali drops Missy off at the park; she waves, commanding herself to stop staring as Ali drives away. She tries to focus on Missy, who seems unusually tense. She ignores Ashlyn’s directions. She talks back. And toward the end, when Ashlyn steps in goal to demonstrate a technique, Missy sends a rocket right at her face. Fortunately, Ashlyn has quick enough reflexes to deflect it, but she’s not wearing gloves so the shot sends needles of pain up her wrists. “Jesus!” she says, laughing a little. “You turning into a striker on me?” “Are you doing it with my mom?” Missy asks. “What?” Ashlyn manages. “Are you?” Missy glares at her, hands posted on her hips. This is a side of Missy that Ashlyn has never seen before, and her antagonism startles Ashlyn as much as her initial question. “What?” she says again. “I mean, why would—” “I saw you leaving last week,” Missy says. “Like you were sneaking out. Tristan says that means you’re doing it.” “We’re not!” Ashlyn says quickly. She feels her face burning. “I just came by early, that’s all.” “Then why was your hair wet?” “I just—” Ashlyn pauses. “I was helping your mom. Fix her shower.” Later, Ashlyn realizes that she could have offered a much simpler lie. That she had come by the previous night, stayed late, spent the night in the guest room and showered before she left. But she’d been so frazzled by Missy’s sudden interrogation that she hadn’t been able to think sensibly. And besides, it’s too late anyway. Missy knows. She has to know. It didn’t take much detective work to figure it out, especially with the help of Tristan O’Hara. Of course Kelley’s daughter is savvy enough to pick up the clues of a secret affair. “You told her you were fixing the shower?” Ali asks later on the phone. Ashlyn called her as soon as she’d gotten home. As embarrassed as she felt about the whole conversation, she knew she had to warn Ali so that she wasn’t ambushed too. Maybe they could talk beforehand and get their stories straight. But she can tell even over the phone that Ali thinks that she’d handled this like a moron. “I panicked!” Ashlyn says. “This has never happened to me before.” “Um, me either. I’ve never let someone I was seeing spend the night.” Ashlyn pauses, curling her knees up against her chest. “So are you?” she asks. “What?” “Seeing me.” Ali lets out a low laugh. “It depends.” “On what?” “On whether my daughter is scarred for life after walking in on her mom having shower sex.” Ashlyn sighs, leaning against her headboard. She still can’t get over how angry Missy seemed earlier. She doesn’t understand it. Missy likes her, doesn’t she? Even as Ashlyn has struggled to interpret her relationship with Ali, she has always known where she stands with Missy. But maybe Missy only likes her as a coach. Maybe it’s different if Ashlyn becomes the person who wants to date her mother. Maybe Missy still holds out hope that her parents might reunite and she only views Ashlyn as an interloper. Or maybe—and this is what Ashlyn most fears—Missy can sense that there is something wrong with Ashlyn, that she’s not the person she pretends to be. “I fucked everything up, didn’t I?” Ashlyn asks. She doesn’t only mean her conversation with Missy. But Ali laughs again. “It’s fine, honey,” she says. “Just let me talk to Missy, okay? Then we’ll go from there.” “Okay,” Ashlyn says. “And Ash?” “Yeah?” “I do,” Ali says. “Want to start seeing you, I mean.” Ashlyn’s stomach flutters. How can Ali do this to her? Turn her into a shy sixteen year old again. “Me too, Al,” she finally says. “Me too.” *** In college, Ali’s more politically-active friends had occasionally asked her to tell her story for National Coming Out Day. She always disappointed them by saying that she didn’t really have one. She had never given a rousing, emotional speech, announcing to her family her new sexual identity. She never even thought of her relationship Ashlyn in terms of identity. So when they’d started dating, she never told her family that she was gay or even bisexual. She didn’t tell them anything, actually. Her mother discovered when she’d gone upstairs with a load of laundry and pushed open the door to find the girls kissing on the bed. “Oh,” she’d said, quietly backing out the door. For five minutes after, Ali buried her face in her hands, embarrassed and terrified about what her mother would say, when her mother returned, set the laundry down, and propped the door open. And that was it. Of course, in the years that had followed, she and her mother shared many conversations about Ashlyn. But Ali never labeled herself and her mother never demanded that she explain herself. She was Ashlyn Harris’ girlfriend; that seemed to be the only label she needed. Then she wasn’t, then she became Will Parker’s wife, then his ex-wife, and now that she sits across from the dinner table from her daughter, she realizes that she has no idea how to explain her relationship with Ashlyn. That’s the convenience of labels. One handy word that could neatly encompass who she is and who she wants. But nothing feels neat about her past with Ashlyn, which is the most difficult part. “I want to talk to you about Ashlyn,” she finally says. Missy rolls her eyes, pushing her green beans around on her plate. “I already know,” she says. “No, I mean—” Ali pauses. “We used to date. When we were just a few years older than you. We dated and we went off to college together. Then we…well, we went our separate ways for bit.” Missy is quiet for a minute. “So you’re gay,” she finally says. “No,” Ali says. “I just—it’s complicated, you see? I don’t label myself. You don’t have to, honey. You can just love who you love.” She tries to touch Missy’s hand, but Missy pulls away. “Why’d you lie to me then?” she asks. Here it is, the question she’s been fearing. She never wants Missy to think that she’d obscured her past from her because she felt ashamed about dating a woman. But she’s still not ready to tell Missy about that night. So she just says, “Because it’s painful, baby. Because when things ended between us, it really hurt. It still hurts to talk about.” Missy is quiet again. “Like when you and Dad divorced?” she asks. “Yes,” Ali says, “just like that.” It’s not true. Nothing has hurt as much as losing Ashlyn. But she has to explain it in terms that Missy will understand. She touches her hand again, but this time, Missy doesn’t move. “So does that mean you guys are dating again?” she asks. “No,” Ali says. “I would never—I mean, I know she’s your coach and I would never start dating her without making sure that you’re okay with it first. You’re the most important person in my life.” Ali doesn’t receive her answer until later that night when Missy lingers in her bedroom after saying goodnight. “I like Coach,” Missy says. “But I don’t like that you guys lied to me.” Ali swallows, setting her book on the covers. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I hate lying to you.” “I’m not a baby anymore. You can tell me things.” Ali smiles at Missy’s indignation. In a couple of years, Missy will be a teenager. She will earn a learner’s permit and start researching colleges and go on her first date. She’s growing up, more rapidly every time Ali thinks about it. She can handle more than Ali thinks she can. So that night, Ali pats the bed beside her and when Missy climbs under the covers, she tells Missy a story. She tells her a story about two girls who met on the pitch and became best friends, who, over a period of years, slowly and quietly fell in love. She tells her daughter this story with all the bad parts written out. In this version, there is no pickup truck lurking in the dark, no bloody 2x4s, no prison. She tells her daughter a fairy tale with no dragons or monsters, only princesses and magic and eternal love. *** That next Friday, Ashlyn spends the night again. Ali invited her over for dinner. Rather, as Ali said when she’d called, Missy had invited Ashlyn over for dinner. “We talked,” Ali said. “She gave me her blessing.” Ashlyn still feels nervous the entire bus ride over. Does Missy truly approve of Ashlyn dating her mother? Or has she just said anything to keep her mother happy? Ashlyn hates the idea of Missy grudgingly tolerating her. She hates the idea that her presence might somehow drive a wedge between a mother and daughter. Missy doesn’t hug her when she answers the door. She doesn’t say much at all, until she and Ashlyn end up in the kitchen together while Ali goes to pay the pizza boy. “I don’t care if you date my mom,” Missy finally says. “You don’t?” “You just can’t hurt her.” Ashlyn swallows. She remembers, years ago, having a similar conversation with Ali’s mother. She’d broken that promise the first time. She can’t allow herself to fail again. She holds out her hand, accepting the girl’s small hand in hers. “Deal,” she says. Slowly, the night begins to feel like any other movie night. Missy picking some superhero movie —why is every movie about superheroes nowadays?—and sprawling across the couch, her head in her mother’s lap. This time, Ali leans against Ashlyn’s side, her head resting on Ashlyn’s shoulder. It amazes Ashlyn, how that little contact could make her feel more alive. This time, they carry a sleeping Missy to bed, then Ali reaches for Ashlyn’s hand, leading her to her bedroom. “What about Missy?” Ashlyn whispers. “Don’t you think we should…I don’t know. Wait a little.” Ali kisses her. “It’s been sixteen years,” she said. “I’m sick of waiting.” *** At four-thirty, Ashlyn awakens to the sound of Ali screaming. She jolts up in bed, confused and disoriented about where she is. She recognizes Ali’s scream before anything else because how could she not? The sound is unforgettable, embedded deep in her brain. In solitary, it had looped over and over again, filling the silence. She hears Ali screaming and she sees her, bloodied and scared, pinned under Hardy Jones’ knee. But Ashlyn is not outside along a deserted road. She isn’t in her apartment. She’s not even Inside. She waits for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, her heart pacing loudly, and she slowly registers the old wooden furniture, the painting behind her, her clothes folded on the dresser. The Kriegers’ bedroom. No, Ali’s room. She’s in Ali’s room, and Ali is …she turns quickly, expecting somehow to see Hardy Jones in the darkness, his hands around Ali’s throat. But Ali’s in bed beside her, crying, clutching a fistful of her sheets, her body writhing like she’s in pain. Ashlyn grabs her shoulders and shakes her. “Ali!” she says. “Wake up!” She’s louder than she ought to be. She’ll wake Missy, but she can’t help it. Ali’s night terrors have always horrified her. She could never conceive of a nightmare that vivid or how awful it must be for Ali to be trapped inside her own head. She shakes Ali again and she finally stills, so suddenly that Ashlyn gently rolls her over on her back. Ali glances up into her eyes. She looks dazed at first, then her eyes fill with even more tears. “Oh fuck,” she whispers. She grabs her glasses off the nightstand and starts out the room. Ashlyn stumbles out of bed to follow her, but as she starts down the hallway, Missy’s door opens and the girl appears. “What’s wrong?” Missy asks. “What happened?” “Nothing,” she says. “Your mom just had a bad dream.” “Again?” Missy says. Ashlyn pauses. “What do you mean ‘again’?” The night terrors had gone away, hadn’t they? Ali had written her this when Ashlyn had first gone Inside, how she’d finally found herself able to sleep through the night again. At the time, this tiny note encouraged Ashlyn that she had done the right thing after all. She’d made it impossible for Hardy Jones to ever hurt Ali again, and subconsciously, Ali must have realized this. She must feel safer if the nightmares were gone. She must have finally started to heal. But Ashlyn feels numb as Missy tells her about the nights she’d awoken to hear her mother screaming. She ushers the girl back to bed, then walks downstairs, expecting to find Ali in the kitchen. But the screen door to the backyard is open. On the patio swing, Ali sits hugging her knees, a glass of water on the table beside her. Ashlyn steps outside, pulling the door shut behind her. She shoves her hands into her pockets. “I thought you said the nightmares were gone,” she says. “They were,” Ali says. “Then why didn’t you tell me they were back?” Ali sighs, rubbing her temples. “It’s really not so bad,” she says. “Jesus, Al—” “I swear, Ashlyn. It’s only been a few over the last couple of months. My therapist thinks that something is triggering them.” Ashlyn feels her gut sink. “Me,” she says quietly. “I’m the trigger.” How else can you explain it? The nightmares returning in the same months that she has returned to Ali’s life. Maybe seeing Ashlyn’s face again has inextricably tied Ali’s mind to the night of their attack. Maybe Ali can never again look at Ashlyn without thinking, in some capacity, of the man who hurt her. Ali must know this herself, doesn’t she? Why else would she be so reluctant to tell Ashlyn about the nightmares if she didn’t think, even a little, that Ashlyn might be the cause? But Ali grabs her hand. “No,” she whispers. “No, don’t say that—” “It’s true. I should’ve never come back. You were fine when I was gone.” She stares at the ground, trying to pull her hand away, but Ali only tugs her closer. “I wasn’t fine,” Ali says. “I never stopped missing you. I never stopped loving you.” In her first years Inside, Ashlyn sometimes wondered at which point Ali would no longer love her. This what before she realized that any thoughts of Outside were torture, that it was sadistic to wonder at all about Ali’s life. Before she tried to kill the part of herself that still thought of Ali incessantly, before she tried to protect herself by transforming into a person void of love. Back then, she imagined when Ali might fall out of love. Surely, it would be before her sixteen years were up. Long before then, even. What else could you expect? Love isn’t a video game; you can’t just hit pause and return to it years later, everything exactly as you’d left it. No, love is a living, breathing creature, and like any living creature, if you don’t feed it, it dies. Ashlyn could try her best to love Ali from Inside. She could write her letters and call, she could speak to her at visiting hours, but a love like that could never be healthy for either of them. It would always be malnourished and weak, and she loved Ali too much to offer her a love like that. So she starved their relationship. She withdrew, killing their love quickly and mercifully, and even though it never quite died for her, she was certain it had for Ali. Eventually, Ali would grow angry at her for pulling away. Or maybe time would do the trick. Ali would grow older and her first love would seem distant and juvenile. Or she would meet someone new, another person who would become the great love of her life, overwriting whoever had occupied that position before. No matter how it happened, Ashlyn was sure of one thing: Ali would stop loving her. So she has no idea what to say when Ali confesses that she hasn’t. Years ago, she would’ve told Ali that she loved her back. She would admit that her slip-up on the phone months ago embarrassed her so much because she had meant it, not because she hadn’t. She would tell Ali that it scares her, how after everything she’s endured Inside, her love for Ali has remained. If Inside couldn’t kill those feelings, then what can? What is a person like Ashlyn ever supposed to do with a love like this? She isn’t the type of person anymore who could imagine that such a love exists, let alone that a woman like Ali might feel it towards her. So she says nothing as Ali gently pulls her closer. She kisses Ali on the porch swing, then she pulls her close into her arms. She holds her, gently rocking the both of them until Ali finally falls asleep. Cover Over the next two months, time slips away. Ali doesn’t notice this at first because you never notice time when you’re happy. And she is. Blissfully happy, the type of happiness she didn’t think was possible for a woman her age. Not the quiet contentment she’s used to, but the type of unreserved happiness that only belongs to the young. It startles her, the way happiness creeps up on her. She wakes up smiling because Ashlyn is lying in bed beside her. At work, she loses her train of thought in the middle of a meeting because Ashlyn texts her, do you need me to pick up anything on my way home? Home, she says, and neither of them correct it because the Krieger house has steadily become Ashlyn’s home. She hasn’t moved in—not yet—but she has a key and she spends the night half the week. Sometimes Ali comes home late from work to find Ashlyn and Missy cooking dinner together. Sloppy joes or grilled cheese or nachos, the type of junky meals that Ali would never pass off as a real dinner, but she always pauses in the doorway, listening to them chat, their voices making the house feel more alive than it has in years. Soon weeks turn into months. Soon Ali receives an email reminder about a friend’s wedding that she doesn’t even remember RSVPing to. How can that be? How can time have slipped so easily through her fingers? But she knows how. She turns toward Ashlyn who lies beside her, sprawled on her stomach. She wraps an arm around Ashlyn, kissing the back of her neck. “Wake up, sleepyhead,” she whispers. Ashlyn groans good-naturedly. Ali laughs, kissing her again. She suspects that Ashlyn was already awake. She’s a lighter sleeper now, that’s one thing Ali’s noticed. Years ago, Ashlyn had slept through the loud keg parties thrown in their dorm, but now, Ali can’t even slide out of bed without Ashlyn cracking open her eyes. She props herself up on her elbow, threading her fingers through Ashlyn’s hair. “I have to go to a wedding in two weeks,” she says. “Wanna be my plus one?” Ashlyn is quiet and for a moment, Ali thinks she didn’t hear. Then Ashlyn turns toward her. “A wedding?” she repeats. For a moment, Ali feels stupid. She and Ashlyn have only been dating for a couple of months. Maybe it’s too soon to ask Ashlyn to join her at a wedding. Weddings spark all kinds of relationship anxiety for people. Will bringing Ashlyn to a wedding freak her out? Will she think that Ali is trying to hint that she wants to get married again? Does Ali even want that? She suddenly regrets mentioning the wedding at all, for mentioning anything that might disrupt her perfect happiness. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I know it’s too soon for that—” “No, it’s not that.” Ashlyn bites her lip. “I mean, I can’t exactly wear this.” She plucks at her faded gray t-shirt. Ali smiles. “Let’s go shopping then,” she says. “I mean, I don’t really have the money right now to buy something nice.” Again, Ali feels stupid. How had she not thought of this? Did she just imagine that Ashlyn had formalwear lying around? “So let me treat you,” she says. Ashlyn sighs. “Al—” “Please. I want to.” “I don’t want you to feel like you have to pay my way.” “I don’t,” Ali says. “Please. Just this once. Consider it…a birthday gift.” She never wants Ashlyn to feel like she thinks of her as some type of charity case, but she can’t help it. She wants to spoil her. She wants to give her every possible thing she might ever want, all the little things she’s gone without for the past sixteen years. She wants to give Ashlyn everything she wants because she deserves it. It’s not charity; it’s recompense. The world owes Ashlyn, and Ali is willing to be the one who repays her. She strokes her hair again and Ashlyn laughs. “It’s nowhere near my birthday,” she says. Ali laughs too. “A belated one then,” she says. “For one of the birthdays I’ve missed.” Ashlyn smiles, rolling her eyes, but she pulls Ali in for a kiss. Ali sneaks her hands up Ashlyn’s shirt, stroking her skin. “Come on,” she whispers. “Let’s get you out of these clothes.” *** At the mall, while taking her girlfriend shopping, Ali discovers that her ex-husband will also be attending the wedding. She texts her friend Molly with a cute “two more weeks!” message and doesn’t check her phone again for an hour. Instead, she slips suit jacket after suit jacket onto Ashlyn’s shoulders. She’s forgotten how difficult it is to find men’s wear that doesn’t look boxy and awkward on a woman’s body. Years ago, she’d learned this the hard way when prom had led to a series of frustrating shopping trips. “Can’t she just find a nice dress?” Ali’s mother asked, and Ali balked on Ashlyn’s behalf. No, she couldn’t just find an nice dress because she wasn’t the type of girl to feel comfortable in one and she’s not that type of woman now. The problem is that Ali no longer remembers Ashlyn’s suit size and Ashlyn doesn’t remember it either, so they spend a half hour trying to figure it out. “This one feels okay,” Ashlyn says, smoothing down the lapels of a navy blue jacket. “But do you like it?” Ali asks. Ashlyn glances at her through the mirror. She looks almost shy. “I’m sure I’ll like anything you get me, Al,” she says. “But I want you to love it,” Ali says. She steps out of the fitting room to fetch more options. If she had more time, she would just have a custom suit made. But Ashlyn would probably fight her on it. She’d reluctantly agreed to allow Ali buy her a suit, but she won’t pick anything fancy. Ali had to steer her away from the discount rack, and she’d barely slipped the first jacket onto Ashlyn’s shoulders before Ashlyn twisted, trying to search for a price tag. Ali doesn’t know how else to explain that she doesn’t mind spending the money, that she’s happy to do it. Part of the reason she works so hard is to give the people she loves what they want. But that sounds pathetic, even to her, like she’s the type of person who feels like she has to buy someone’s love. She picks up a black suit jacket, imagining how it might hang off of Ashlyn’s body. Then she glances at her phone. A new text message from Molly: Can’t wait, girly! So glad you and Will can both make it! Will. Of course. How has she forgotten that he might be attending this wedding too? One of the messiest parts of a relatively non-messy divorce is the fact that over a period of years, a couple amasses a good amount of mutual friends. Sometimes the friends split neatly, the way Kelley, despite her fondness for Will, refused to even shop at Parker’s Hardware at first, until Ali reassured her that she would not consider it a sign of treachery if Kelley wanted to buy topsoil from her ex. But other couple friends get more complicated, particularly the ones she rarely sees. She has no idea how often Molly keeps in touch with Will, but apparently it’s often enough for her to think to invite him. Ali’s stomach clenches. She and Ashlyn had previously discussed how to reveal their relationship to Will. They’d decided that things were too new to tell him yet, much to Ashlyn’s relief. She was not excited about telling her boss that she was dating his ex-wife. Ali tried to reassure her that Will wasn’t a petty man, and besides, from the stories Kelley had told her about running into Will at bars where he liked to entertain pretty young blondes, he had since moved on himself. Still, the wedding suddenly seems more fraught. She should just skip it, Ali decides. Tell Ashlyn she’s realized that she can’t make it. But when she steps back inside the fitting room and sees Ashlyn wearing a dashing charcoal gray suit, she pauses, overwhelmed. “What?” Ashlyn glances over her shoulder. “Does it look stupid?” “No,” she says, hugging her from behind. “You look like a million bucks.” Ashlyn laughs. “This suit probably costs a million bucks. I’ve never worn something this nice.” Ali doesn’t even glance at the price tag as she slides the jacket back onto its hanger. “I don’t care,” she says. “You deserve it.” *** Inside, Ashlyn missed the stars. She hadn’t expected this at first; you could never truly know what you might miss until you’d been deprived of it completely. Of course there were some things she expected to miss. Freedom. Her family. Soccer. Ali. But other things crept up on her, a sudden sense of loss digging inside of her. At night, she would lie on her bunk, staring at the splotchy ceiling, trying to imagine a world beyond it. Maybe if she stared hard enough, she could bore a tiny hole, no bigger than a pinprick, and catch a glimpse of the sky. She craved the stars because she could never have them. In the daytime, she could wander out to the yard and watch the clouds floating above the metal fence. But at night, she had nowhere to go beside her cell, where she tried to fall asleep amid the sound of girls crying, girls fucking, girls doing whatever you did when it was dark and you were alone with your thoughts. Inside, nights are the loneliest time. She’d never imagined that, months after her release, she might be lying on the soft grass in Ali Krieger’s backyard, staring up at the stars. She’d also never imagined that she wouldn’t be lonely, that an eleven-year-old girl might be lying beside her, pointing out the constellations she knows. She’d never imagined any of this because she is living a life now that would have seemed impossible Inside. Not just impossible, but almost cruel to even imagine. But it isn’t. Nothing about her life is cruel now and that’s perhaps the hardest part to believe. “How’d you know that you liked my mom?” Missy asks. “When you were my age.” She curls on her side toward Ashlyn, who looks away. She still can’t stand it sometimes, the full brunt of anyone’s attention. “What do you mean?” she says. “How’d you know you liked her liked her?” Missy says. “Oh.” She shrugs. “I don’t know. I just felt sort of weird around her. Like excited but scared. And it drove me crazy when she liked anyone else.” “How’d you know she liked you?” In the darkness, Ashlyn blushes, remembering that frantic kiss on the living room couch. “She told me,” she finally says. “Well, how am I supposed to know if someone likes me?” Missy asks. She’s still cagey about her crush, even though she’s begun revealing more and more to Ashlyn. What does it mean, she asks, reading text messages aloud. What does it mean if a person says ‘I miss you’? Or if a person always sits next to you at lunch? Or if they send you lots of smiley faces? What does it mean? Ashlyn likes that Missy confides in her, that Missy asks her for advice, and she doesn’t want to push her away by pushing her too far. Still, she knows what Missy is really asking. How can you tell if a girl likes you back? “She’ll tell you,” Ashlyn says. She pauses, wondering if she’s overstepped. But Missy doesn’t correct her, so she continues. “She’ll let you know and if she doesn’t like you, it’s okay. You’ll meet so many other girls.” “Did you?” Missy asks. “Did I what?” “Meet other girls. Besides Mom.” Ashlyn pauses. “No, but it’s different for me.” “How come?” “I’m just weird like that,” she says. As much as she enjoys feeling like a wise purveyor of relationship advice, Ashlyn knows this is her clear shortcoming. What does she know about dating, really? She’s only dated one woman in her entire life; she barely has any experience herself. “You’re a penguin,” Missy says. “What?” “Didn’t you see March of the Penguins? It’s super old, everyone’s seen it.” “I’m not that into movies,” Ashlyn says. She makes a mental note to look it up. “Well, it’s about penguins and how they find one other penguin and stay with them forever,” Missy says. “That’s what you are.” Ashlyn laughs. “I guess so.” “But Mom isn’t because she married Dad. So maybe some people are penguins and others aren’t.” Ashlyn stares up at the sky, wondering if this might be true. Maybe there is just something intrinsically different about her. Maybe, even if she hadn’t gone inside, she would have turned out this way, loving Ali forever. Would Ali have loved her back? Or would she still have been drawn to others? It’s foolish to think about this. If Ali hadn’t met Will, there would be no Missy and Ashlyn doesn’t want to imagine a world where the girl doesn’t exist. Still, she feels embarrassed by how it still hurts sometimes, thinking about the years Ali spent happily with someone else. In an hour, Missy goes inside to get ready for bed and Ali comes home from work. Ashlyn is starting to think about going inside herself when she hears the screen door slide open and Ali plops on the grass beside her. She’s wearing a classy gray skirt, but she sits on the grass naturally, as if they’re both twelve again and chatting on the pitch before practice. Ashlyn smirks. “You’re gonna get your clothes dirty,” she says. “I don’t care,” Ali says. “I want to lie here with you.” She turns toward Ashlyn, who rolls onto her side to face her. Ali touches the back of her neck then kisses her softly. “I have to tell you something,” she says. “Okay.” “You won’t like it.” Ashlyn kisses her again. “Then don’t tell me,” she murmurs. “You know that wedding,” Ali says. “Well, Will’s going.” Ashlyn hates thinking about Will. She’s known that eventually, he’ll discover her relationship with Ali and for weeks, she wondered if it would be better if it happened sooner, instead of her worrying about its inevitability. She hadn’t imagined Will might learn about them quite this soon, though. But now he’s going to the wedding. He’ll see her show up as Ali’s date. He’ll know they’re together. “We don’t have to go,” Ali says. “I know it’s weird.” Weird isn’t even the half of it. The problem is that Ashlyn feels as if she has to go. She can tell that Ali wants her to, and Ali’s already spent so much money on that suit. Ashlyn can’t disappoint her now, especially not for a stupid reason like the fact that her ex-husband will be there. Bailing on the wedding because Will is attending is like admitting that she’s afraid of him, and even if she is a little, that fact is something she could never admit to Ali. “I want to go,” Ashlyn says. Ali pauses. “Are you sure? I mean it, I can just—” “I want to, Al,” she says. “Honestly. I want to go with you. And he’s gonna find out eventually, right? So maybe you should just tell him first.” She kisses Ali’s forehead. She can’t hide from Will forever. Dumfries isn’t big enough. He’ll discover their relationship soon enough and maybe it’ll be better to get it over with. Maybe Ali can talk to him first and he’ll understand. “Okay,” Ali says. “I can do that. Are you coming inside?” “I think I’ll hang out here for a little.” Ali pushes herself to her feet. “Not too long, okay?” she says. “You’ll get sick.” Ashlyn smiles. “Okay.” She’d never imagined that anyone might worry about whether she got sick, that anyone might care about her like this. She’d never imagined anything about this improbable life she’s now leading and it all feels so fragile and miraculous that she refuses to let Will Parker take it away. She rolls back onto her back, staring as the lights twinkle overhead. *** Ali Krieger has always hated the term ‘co-parenting.’ Its relentless optimism, its progressiveness, its insistence that parenting is a task that can be neatly and dispassionately divided between two people. As unfeminist as it might be to admit, she has always expected that the brunt of the parenting would fall upon her shoulders. Her mother had told her as much when she and Will started trying for a baby. “Just make sure you want this,” her mother warned, “because no matter how good a husband Will is, nine times out of ten, you’ll be the one waking up in the middle of the night to feed a crying baby.” And sure enough, her mother was right. Will tried, in that tepid way men try to do things that they ought to do but somehow still feel they deserve special recognition for even attempting. A few times, Will would groan, rolling out of bed and trudging wearily to Missy’s room, but more times than not, he’d tap her on the shoulder and murmur, “Baby’s crying.” She didn’t mind it, as much as you couldn’t mind being woken up throughout the night. She liked being the one who comforted Missy, who held her in the rocking chair while she slowly fell back to sleep. Still, she’s known from the beginning that co-parenting with Will is a myth so she hasn’t been surprised, after the divorce, that it remains such. That she still manages the day-to-day of Missy’s life, with Will appearing occasionally, like a special guest star on a television show who isn’t on every episode but whose name still flashes across the credits. He isn’t a bad father, she wants to be fair about that. But he isn’t hands-on with Missy, now the way Ali is, or not even, she’s beginning to realize, the way Ashlyn is. This thought dawns on her that Saturday at Missy’s soccer game, when she watches, from the stands, as Ashlyn kneels on the sideline to tie Missy’s cleats. The gesture is pragmatic—Missy can’t do anything with her gloves on—but Ali’s chest tightens because the gesture, somehow, feels tender and maternal as well. “Well, look at you two,” Kelley says, plopping next to her on the bleachers. “Domestic Danielles.” Ali rolls her eyes. Kelley has teased her incessantly about how quickly she and Ashlyn have started shacking up. Ali resents the phrasing—it sounds so cheap and tacky—but she finds it hard to dispute. She can’t help it—she likes having Ashlyn around, likes waking up beside her, likes knowing that if she has to work late, Ashlyn can fix Missy dinner and look over her homework. Not just that—she could hire a babysitter for just that—but she likes knowing that Ashlyn cares about Missy, that Missy will have someone to come home to. This is the biggest downside of taking the lion’s share of parenting. It’s impossible to do it all, and Ali has spent far too many nights feeling guilty about her long work hours. Now she feels better knowing that when she gets home, Ashlyn will be on the couch with Missy, that when she steps inside and says “Hey baby”, both of them will look up. “You don’t have to justify it,” Kelley says, as if she can read her mind. “I’m glad you’re happy, Kriegs. It looks good on you.” Ali laughs. She is happy, and that’s the strange part. She’s happy in a way she hasn’t imagined she might be. Ashlyn rejoins her in the stands, and for the rest of the game, she leans into Ashlyn’s side, resting a hand on her knee. Ashlyn watches the game intently, occasionally murmuring advice to herself that she wants to share with Missy. But the whole afternoon feels so normal, so perfectly domestic that Ali imagines a life in which she and Ashlyn spend all of their Saturdays like this. In her mind, Missy grows older and taller, graduating to an elite club worthy of her talents. Ali grows older too, Ashlyn as well, silver beginning to glint through their hair, as they watch from the stands while Missy plays college soccer, she gets drafted, she plays professionally, she starts for the national team. Ali’s so wrapped up in this fantasy that she doesn’t even notice Will at first. Then Kelley nudges her side. “Hey, isn’t that…” “Jesus,” Ali says. “What?” Ashlyn turns toward her, alarmed. “What’s wrong?” “Nothing, honey,” she says. She smiles, squeezing her leg. “I’ll be right back, okay?” She can barely remember the last time Will has attended one of Missy’s soccer games. He’d tried to fake interest in it at first, but Will has always been more of a basketball fan. He likes sports with relentless action, so he’d been disappointed when Missy had denounced basketball and decided to focus fully on soccer. Worse, she’d chosen a position where she can’t even score, where on a good night, she won’t touch the ball at all. Will also wasn’t one for the camaraderie required of soccer dads, chatting with the other dads in the bleachers, coordinating snacks with the other parents. So he’d chosen his weekends with Missy, based on when she didn’t have games so he wouldn’t have to deal with any of it. Yet here he is, down on the field, leaning against the fence as he watches the final minutes of the game. “What a surprise,” Ali says, once she picks her way over to him. She doesn’t mean to be passive-aggressive, although it comes out that way. She can’t help it. It’s always bothered her that Will can’t even pretend to muster a little enthusiasm for something that matters so much to Missy. After all, during their marriage, Ali’d managed to care a little about the things that mattered to Will. If she had a dollar for every conversation she’d sat through about potting soil and lumber prices and gardenias. Will shrugs. “Just wanted to check my girl out,” he says. “She’s getting good.” “Well, Ashlyn’s a great coach.” “Oh yeah.” He glances into the stands, squinting. “I forgot that was still happening.” Ali folds her arms across her chest. Will’s complete dismissal of Ashlyn almost makes her want to laugh, until she realizes that this will only make it harder for her to have the talk she needs to with him. But she pushes all of this out her mind when the final whistle blows and Missy comes running over. She pulls both her parents into a group hug that Ali only endures for her daughter’s sake. “Wow, you were great out there!” Will says, mussing Missy’s hair. “Nothing got past you.” “Thanks!” Missy says, breathlessly turning to Ali. “Can we go out to dinner?” Ali smiles. “I’m sure your dad wants to take you someplace, baby.” “You should come too, Ali,” Will says. “When’s the last time we all did something together?” Truthfully, she can’t remember. When she’d married Will, she’d never imagined that their family might be divided someday, the way her own parents eventually splintered, that her child would have two bedrooms and learn two sets of house rules and split holidays. She doesn’t regret leaving Will but she hates that this is Missy’s reality, especially now, when Missy smiles up at her, begging her to join them. But what about Ashlyn? Is she supposed to just leave her here? Ask Kelley to drop her by the house and make Ashlyn wait up for her to return from lunch with her ex-husband? In the end, Missy’s smile breaks her down. “Okay,” Ali says. “We can all go to dinner.” “Yes!” Missy cheers. “What about Coach?” Ali blanches. Will just laughs. “You want to invite your coach?” he asks, nodding at the balding man gathering the equipment. “No, not him,” Missy says. “Ashlyn. Can she come too?” Will glances up into the stands. “I’m sure she has other plans for today,” he says. “Is she sleeping over tonight?” Missy asks Ali. She can’t help it. She blushes. Maybe, if she were a better liar, she could have invented a believable coverup. How Ashlyn’s apartment had flooded so she had been staying in the guest room. But Missy’s question is phrased so casually, that Will has to infer that this is a typical arrangement. And when the smile fades from his face, she knows that he has. *** At Olive Garden, Ali puts on her happy face. She’s amazed by how easily she falls back into this old role, how quickly she and Will resume their parts as Happy Family. They’d perfected their acting while their marriage was crumbling: angry whispers hushing when they heard footsteps, silence defrosting when Missy entered rooms. She didn’t realize until later that this role came so naturally to her because it was one she’d watched her own parents play. She barely noticed the fighting because they hadn’t wanted her to. As a sulky teenager eventually witnessing her parents’ divorce, she’d resented them for lying, for pretending their marriage wasn’t dying. But as a parent herself, she understands the desire to protect your child from the harshness of life. So she’d carried on a similar facade until the morning she’d quietly slid Will the divorce papers. And even though their marriage has long been over, she still feels compelled to pretend that everything is fine as she and Will take Missy to dinner after her game. Will pretends too, although she can feel him quietly seething. He hides his anger better than she does. He laughs at Missy’s jokes. He teases Ali for barely picking at her salad. He asks Missy for a play-by-play on her big save, listening rapt while she recaps. But when Missy goes to the bathroom, he leans across the table. “I thought we agreed,” he says. “On what?” Ali asks. “That we would keep our fuck buddies away from Missy.” She grips her water glass tighter. Before they’d filed for divorce, before they’d invoked lawyers and hashed out custody arrangements, she and Will had arrived at a few agreements. They would never drag Missy into their disputes or force her to pick sides. They would make sure she spent time with both of them. And they would protect her from anyone they chose to casually date. She’s kept up her end of the bargain, and Will has done the same. Still, he’s angry and she feels suddenly defensive. “She’s not a fuck buddy,” she says. “Whatever she is,” he says. “How would you feel if I brought some random chick around our daughter?” “She’s not some random—” She pauses. “You know what? I don’t have to explain myself to you.” “Like hell you don’t. You wouldn’t like it, if I had some girl spending the night while our daughter slept next door.” “Jesus, Will! She’s not a stranger. Missy knows her.” “And I don’t like being tricked into hiring whoever you’re sleeping with—” “I wasn’t—” She spots Missy heading back to the table. “You know what? Let’s just talk about this later.” On the drive home, she quietly fumes. How dare Will insinuate that she’s a bad mother for dating someone? Doesn’t she deserve this, one shot at happiness? She isn’t letting a person she met off the internet into her house. She’s known Ashlyn nearly her whole life. Of course she trusts her around her child. But Ali knows that this isn’t why Will’s mad. She’s thought about this before and admitted to herself that she hates the idea of Will dating another woman seriously. She always imagines Missy’s future stepmom as younger and hotter, the type of fun mom who allows Missy to stay up until midnight and feast on junk food and try alcohol and drive before receiving her permit. She’s imagined weekends of Missy returning to her reluctantly and the very thought breaks her heart. Ali realizes that her ex isn’t pining over her, not the way Ashlyn thought he would. Will isn’t jealous; he’s territorial, worried that his position in his daughter’s life is under attack. Ali suddenly feels naive for thinking she could have a casual conversation with Will and inform him about her new relationship. He doesn’t want Ali to date anyone who might replace him. What is she supposed to do about that? When Missy runs upstairs to change for bed, Ali finds Ashlyn lying in the middle of the backyard. She hadn’t even know Ashlyn let herself in. She’s thrilled by the surprise, but she still hesitates to join her. Maybe Ashlyn wants to be alone. What is she thinking about when she lies outside and stares up at the stars? Ali used to feel Ashlyn’s own thoughts enter her head, like a never-ending current, and now she never knows what Ashlyn is thinking. The mystery of it all frustrates and entrances her. She sits on the grass beside her. “I thought you went back to your place,” she says. She doesn’t say back home. She wants Ashlyn to think of this house as her home. She’s thought, once or twice, about asking Ashlyn to move in. It’s too soon, it’s too soon, she always tells herself. But she’s waited sixteen years for this. How can it ever be too soon? “I was waiting for you,” Ashlyn says. She smiles, and Ali’s stomach flips as she lies beside her in the grass. She wants to preserve this moment of perfect peacefulness, but reality, as always, draws nearer. “He knows,” she says. “Will knows, honey.” Ashlyn’s smile fades and she rolls onto her side, facing away. She does this now when she doesn’t want to talk about something. She curls away, as if her back becomes a wall that seals her off from everything. It startled Ali at first, how quickly Ashlyn could pull away from her. But now Ali only scoots closer, wrapping her arms around Ashlyn’s waist. “It’s okay,” she whispers. “It’ll be okay—” “It won’t,” Ashlyn says. “He’s probably pissed and he’ll let me go and then what am I supposed to do? You know what will happen to me—” “You have to trust me,” Ali says. “You have to trust me to take care of it. You have to trust me to protect you.” She doesn’t know the last time anyone has protected Ashlyn from anything. Not the police who’d arrested her, not the lawyer who barely defended her, not even the prison guards, Ali discovered one night, when she spotted a strange scar on Ashlyn’s back. She’d been cut by something jagged, the scar tissue growing bumpy where her skin had been smooth. Ali imagined the worst: fistfights and brawls, gang jumpings, stabbings, broken ribs, black eyes, razors puncturing Ashlyn’s skin. But she’s never asked her where the scar came from. She doesn’t ask because she’s scared to know the truth. She’s afraid of what she’ll uncover, the trauma that lies deeper than a scar. She can’t change what happened to Ashlyn in prison. But she can prevent her from ever going back. She can make sure she follows the conditions of her parole. She can make sure Will doesn’t get in the way. Ashlyn finally nods, pulling Ali’s hand to her lips then resting it over her heart. Ali snuggles closer, kissing her neck. Ashlyn smells like grass and dirt, like soccer, like earth, like the very world. Normal The night before the wedding, Kyle Krieger pays a surprise visit. He’s flying into Ronald Reagan airport, connecting to New York, but he has a long layover. So before picking Missy up from Kelley’s house, Ali and Ashlyn meet him for dinner. Ali told her she didn’t have to join if she didn’t feel up to seeing Kyle. “I know he can be…a lot sometimes,” she said, which still didn’t prepare Ashlyn for Kyle squealing when he saw her and throwing his arms around her neck. He seems happier than she remembered, more assured of himself. He’s moved to Los Angeles and become a minor celebrity, Ali told her. He’s famous on the internet. Ashlyn hadn’t even known it was possible to become a celebrity on the internet, but Ali assures her it is. She used to be the recognizable Krieger sibling, the one whose name drew familiar smiles around Virginia. Now when she goes to the optometrist, the doctor asks if she is Kyle Krieger’s sister. How quickly fame disappears with time. How quickly the world forgets who you are. Ashlyn wishes this were true. She wishes the world could completely forget about her, that she’d emerged from Inside blank and nameless. Instead, one quick search of her name can pull up all of her sins. She wears them around her neck and feels them weighing her to the ground. At dinner, Kyle keeps staring at the two of them and grinning, shaking his head. “I can’t believe it,” he says. “I just can’t believe it, the two of you back together again.” Ali laughs. “Kyle, stop,” she says. “You’re being weird.” She squeezes Ashlyn’s hand under the table. Ashlyn squeezes back. She notices Ali checking in on her sometimes, little touches to makes sure that she’s okay. She is, but she feels herself being nudged even further Outside, further than she ever thought she’d go. When she’s alone with Ali and Missy, she feels safe, like she’s encased behind a protective bubble. But now she feels Outside pressing on that bubble, pushing from all sides. Kyle takes a picture of them before he leaves. Ashlyn doesn’t remember the last time she’s taken a picture, not counting her mug shot. Ali pulls her closer and she tries to smile. Kyle coos. “How about…” He begins tapping on his phone. “‘She got that old thang back.’” Ali frowns. “Kyle, no,” she says. “Don’t post that.” “Why not?” he says. “It’s just Facebook.” “I know, but—” She glances at Ashlyn. “We’re not ready to be so public yet.” He sighs. “Fine, at least let me message it to Chris—” “No,” Ali says, “you can’t. The Harrises don’t know.” He laughs. “That you guys are back together?” he says. “Why are you acting like it’s some big dark secret? They’ll be thrilled—” “No,” Ashlyn says quietly. “That I’m out.” Kyle’s eyes widen. “What?” he says. “They think you’re still—but how? How could you not tell them?” She pushes away from the table. She knows that her actions are unthinkable to him—they would’ve been unthinkable to her too before Inside. In college, she’d never gone longer than a few days without calling home. She’d never conceived that years would go by, decades even, and that the more time that passed, the more impossible it seemed to ever reunite. Her family could find her if they wanted to. She was sure of it. But why should she reach out to them if they weren’t looking for her? Why should she give them another chance to reject her? She wanders outside the restaurant. She doesn’t know where she’s going, she just needs to get out of there, away from Kyle and his questions. He insists on acting like everything is normal—his excitement at seeing her, his cheerfulness about witnessing his sister reunite with an old flame— which only reminds Ashlyn of how abnormal this all is. She isn’t some long lost love returned from sea—she’s a felon with a family who left her to languish behind bars. She leans against the railing, staring off into the darkened parking lot. She doesn’t even hear Ali step outside until she feels her arms around her waist. “I’m sorry,” Ali says. “You know he didn’t mean anything by it.” “I know.” “We’ll tell them when you’re ready, okay? There’s no rush.” We, Ali says, and Ashlyn feels slightly comforted by the thought. Maybe reaching out to her family won’t be so bad with Ali at her side. Of course it won’t. Nothing’s so bad with Ali at her side. She pats Ali’s hand. “Okay,” she says. “The picture’s cute,” Ali says. “I saved it so now every time I look at my phone, I’ll think of you.” Ashlyn laughs. If there’s anything she’s learned, it’s that the only thing people do nowadays is look at their phones. Ali tilts her phone screen toward her. In the photo, Ali’s arm is draped across her shoulders. They’re both smiling. To a perfect stranger, they look like a sweet couple. To a perfect stranger, Ashlyn looks happy. To a perfect stranger, she looks normal. *** That night, Ali asks her to tie her up. In the darkness of the bedroom, Ashlyn pauses mid-kiss. The question throws her, the way that sex with Ali often surprises her. She hadn’t known what to say, for example, when Ali confessed that she likes having her hair pulled. “Since when?” she’d wanted to ask, but she didn’t because it was a stupid question, one that she didn’t want to know the answer to. She hated these moments between them when she feels as if a curtain has been lifted, revealing to her the expansiveness of the time that has passed. She doesn’t want to think about Ali’s lovers, the people who have touched her and taught her all the new things she likes. She already recognizes that the dynamic between them has shifted; now Ali is more experienced, more adventurous, while Ashlyn feels like a fumbling virgin around her. She is the traditionalist, satisfied with steak and potatoes, while Ali wants to explore the entire menu. Ashlyn is terrified of boring her, so she says yes to everything. So she pulled Ali’s hair, amazed by how much Ali enjoyed it. After, she’d collapsed on top of Ali, who held her close, caressing her back. “You can be rough,” Ali said, smiling. “You’re not gonna break me.” This perhaps bothers Ashlyn the most. She doesn’t want to be rough when she’s making love to Ali. She doesn’t want to hurt her, even if that pain causes Ali pleasure. She hates the fact that Ali likes rough sex now, that someone in her past has taught her how to like it. Why does Ali think that Ashlyn would like doing these things to her? Does she assume that sixteen years in prison has turned Ashlyn into a more aggressive lover? Because she still can’t bring herself to let Ali top her? Does she seems like the type of person now who would get off on hurting a woman? “You want me to do what?” she says. Ali smiles, kissing her again. “I just think it’d be fun,” she murmurs. Fun. That’s how Ali frames everything she wants to try. She thought it’d be fun for Ashlyn to fuck her with a strap-on, so Ashlyn had, even though she’d felt silly with a purple dick hanging from around her waist. It had been fun—despite her insecurities, sex with Ali always is—but it still bothers her that Ali asks her to wear it more and more often. Before, Ali never asked to use toys. She seemed perfectly satisfied with what Ashlyn could do with her fingers and tongue. Why does sex suddenly need all these bells and whistles? Is Ashlyn not enough? “But why?” she asks. “I don’t know,” Ali whispers. “It just turns me on.” Ashlyn feels a throb of desire. She can’t help but admit that the image of Ali, naked and defenseless, turns her on too. But she immediately feels guilty for even entertaining such a thought. How could the idea of Ali’s vulnerability arouse her? She has seen Ali defenseless before, and there was nothing sexy about it. So how could she even think of doing something that would make Ali so vulnerable again? She does the only thing she can think: she deflects. She slips her fingers inside Ali’s panties. “Seems like you’re turned on enough,” she says. *** After, Ashlyn can’t sleep. She lies in bed, holding Ali, listening to the sounds of the house settling. Listening also, she must admit, for Missy’s footsteps, for any indication that Missy might still be awake. She still hasn’t gotten past the weirdness of having sex when there’s a kid next door. The first time, Ashlyn had barely been able to focus, constantly pulling away to glance at the door behind her. Ali just laughed. “The door’s locked, babe,” she said. “I know, but—” Ashlyn glanced over her shoulder again. “What if she hears us?” Ali smiled. “Well, that’s what happens when you date a mom,” she said. “You learn to be quiet.” Ashlyn has, although she still hasn’t completely overcome her shyness. What other choice does she have, though? She can’t ask Ali to spend the night at her place—they couldn’t leave Missy alone overnight—and Missy only sleeps at her father’s place a few weekends out of the month. So quiet sex it is, and then afterwards, always a strange, silly sense of guilt as she holds Ali and tries to fall asleep. She can never fall asleep quickly here. Maybe it’s still the strangeness of sleeping in a new place. Or maybe if it’s her persistent fear that she will fall asleep and awake to Ali screaming. It hasn’t happened again, not since that first night, but Ashlyn still snuggles closer, holding Ali tighter. She’s surprised to feel Ali stroking her arm. She’d assumed that Ali had already fallen asleep. “Are you sure you’re okay with this?” Ali asks. “Okay with what?” “The wedding.” She hates thinking about Will. She’d almost prefer it if he would grab her one day and punch her. Inside, her first and last fistfight had ended in stitches and solitary. The fight itself had been unglamorous, scrappy and frantic and fought for petty reasons. In the movies, prison fights are displays of bravado and strength, tiny wars waged over territory or reputation or status. But in prison, most fights happen for stupid reasons. Someone steps on your foot. Someone stares at you too long. Someone brushes past you. These reasons are not the real reasons for fighting, of course. Ashlyn swung the first punch because a woman cut in front of her in the breakfast line. She’d never been aggressive Outside—not off the pitch, at least—so her rage surprised her. When her first punch connected, she felt a small thrill, the closest thing she’d felt to power in months. She suddenly understood why some prisoners fought so much, how hitting flesh could make you feel the tiniest bit alive. The fight ended as quickly as it’d begun. The woman shoved her into a table, and the jagged metal edge dug into her back, breaking the skin. The guards hauled her to the infirmary for stitches, then to solitary. When she returned to general, she couldn’t even remember the face of the woman she’d fought. It didn’t matter. She’d stood her ground, so the other inmates knew not to mess with her now. But even more so, it didn’t matter because she had no desire to fight ever again. She wouldn’t do anything again that could return her to that white cell, alone in her own head. Despite her short-lived fighting career, she misses this about Inside, how easy it was to settle conflicts. A quick shove if someone disrespected you. A hard punch to the gut if you felt slighted. This terrified Ashlyn at first, how swiftly nothing could lead to violence. But now she misses this simplicity. If Will just punched her, at least she’d know where they stood. She knows how this will end. He’ll fire her, and she’ll be sent crawling back to that jobs counselor, begging for work. But each day, he doesn’t fire her, and her anxiety remains, pooling steadily in her stomach. She tries her best to stay out of his way, to limit their interactions and not give him an additional reason to let her go. But she can’t avoid him forever. She can’t even avoid him at this wedding tomorrow. “It’s fine,” she says. “I’ll be fine.” Maybe this wedding will melt the ice a bit. Maybe if she can chat with him outside of work, she can convince him that she’s a good person, that she means no disrespect. She has played this game before. She knows how to defer to people who need to feel powerful. She will ingratiate herself to Will, if that’s what she needs to do. She’ll do whatever she needs to do to keep her job, to follow her parole conditions, to prevent a judge from sending her back Inside. She’ll do whatever she needs to do to stay here with Ali. *** In college, Ashlyn had always loved a good party. She’d always known how to find one too, much to the chagrin of Ali, who’d tried to convince her to stay in and study. So Ashlyn would dutifully accompany her girlfriend to the library on Saturday night, but before she even cracked open her textbook, she was craning her neck, listening to someone in the study group next to her talking about a party. This was before everyone carried a phone on them at all times, back when you had to find a party the old school way. Flyers on the dorm bulletin board, word-of-mouth. And Ashlyn was never too shy to walk up to a crowd of strangers and ask where they were headed for the night. She was never shy about anything then. She was the type of person who walked into a party and heard friends cheer her name. Now, though, nobody cheers when she follows Ali into her friend Molly’s wedding. Worse, everyone stares. She can’t tell exactly why but she has a few guesses. Maybe she looks stupid in this expensive suit, like a mutt wearing a Cartier collar. Maybe no one understands why Ali might be on the arm of a woman who seems skittish and nervous, constantly wiping her clammy hands against her pants. Maybe no one knew Ali has a girlfriend period, which explains the tiny shock that registers on faces each time Ali guides her over to introduce to a new group. It makes sense. No one knows about her from before, and for the past few months, she and Ali have existed in their own private bubble. Now the bubble has popped and Ashlyn feels like she’s floundering, struggling to breathe into the air. “What do you think so far?” Ali asks. In the line for the bar, she wraps her arms around Ashlyn’s neck. She’s more publicly affectionate now than she used to be, which Ashlyn both loves and hates. Hates, because affection still does not come easily to her, public or not. And loves, because it makes her feel like Ali is proud of her, like she wants everyone to know that they belong to each other. She gives Ali’s waist a squeeze. “It’s good,” she says. “Your friends are nice.” Ali laughs. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I know nobody wants to party with a bunch of lawyers.” Another thing that makes Ashlyn nervous. Lawyers. Everyone here is a lawyer. She distrusts lawyers, naturally, even though she’s in love with one. At least Ali doesn’t wear her lawyer-liness openly. She sometimes forgets that Ali is a lawyer, until she dashes off to court in the morning or asks Ashlyn to watch Missy while she works late to finishes a brief. But the lawyers at this wedding are the types of capital L lawyers that Ashlyn hates. The type to exchange business cards during a wedding reception, to make golf plans or joke about billable hours. She feels like they’ll be able to smell the ex-convict on her, Inside clinging to her skin like an odor she can never scrub away. “It’s okay,” she says. “I just don’t wanna say something dumb and embarrass you.” Ali kisses her. “You could never embarrass me,” she says. After a while, Ashlyn begins to believe this. She tries to say as little as possible, smiling politely while Ali chats with her friends, and after a while, she begins to loosen up. The drink helps, a glass of whiskey that she sips slowly as the night carries on. Soon she begins to feel a little like her older self, chiming in to the conversation, even cracking a joke or two. At one point, she leaves to refill their drinks and overhears one of Ali’s friends teasing her. “Who knows?” the friend says. “Maybe you’ll be walking down the aisle again soon…” “Maybe,” Ali says with a goofy smile, and Ashlyn feels her stomach flutter. Is Ali serious? Is this something she wants? All of it: the big white dress, the minister, the fancy reception after? The idea of a wedding terrifies Ashlyn. Stuffing herself into formalware so all those strange people can stare at her. Who would she even invite? Her family, who think she’s still spending her days in a prison cell? No, a wedding sounds awful, but the thought of marrying Ali doesn’t. In fact, it sounds nice. She’s thought about it before, of course. In college, she’d even imagined proposing to Ali on their graduation day, like they were some old-timey couple and one of them was going off to war. She knew she couldn’t actually marry Ali—gay marriage was illegal then—but she still envisioned a commitment ceremony, rings, a gathering of their family and friends. When she’d been released, she’d eventually learned that gay people could marry now, that they were doing it all over, that what once had been a fraught political issue was now banal and even uninteresting. Still, she’d never thought she would actually get married. The idea still seems foreign to her, but when she glances over at Ali, she tries to imagine it. My wife. How would it feel to call Ali her wife? The whole evening is going well—better than she could have ever expected. She hasn’t seen Will yet and part of her even hoped that Molly had been mistaken. Maybe Will changed his mind about attending. Ali has just introduced Ashlyn to Molly and Cal, the bride and groom. Even though the two have a other guests vying for their attention, they seem particularly interested in the woman that Ali has brought as her date. “So how did you two meet?” the bride asks. “We grew up together,” Ali says. “Ashlyn was my first love.” Molly coos, and Ashlyn tries to smile, even though her ears burn. She’s still not used to being the center of attention. “So what do you do, Ashlyn?” Cal asks. That’s when she spots him, Will Parker lingering across the room, his arm around a young, blonde’s waist. At first, Ashlyn relaxes a little. At least Will has brought a date of his own. Maybe Ali’s right, maybe Will has completely moved on. Maybe he has no reason to feel bitter about Ashlyn dating his ex. She feels Ali’s arm slip around her waist and give her an encouraging squeeze. “I work at the hardware store,” Ashlyn says. “Parker’s Hardware?” Cal laughs. “Wow. That’s gotta be awkward.” “Just for now,” Ali says, “until she gets on her feet.” She does this sometimes, answer on Ashlyn’s behalf. Ashlyn nods, even though she’s never realized her job was supposed to be temporary. Of course it is. The job was a favor. She can’t expect to work for her girlfriend’s ex-husband forever, can she? She’s supposed to be searching for a better job, a job that makes more money. She can never admit that she’s satisfied in the store room, that she doesn’t want to do anything else. She certainly can’t admit that she doubts she could even find a different job, that working in the storeroom is the best she can probably do. She can’t admit any of this, not to these people, these lawyers with their fancy clothes and expensive cars, and not, she suddenly realizes, to Ali. Ali, who can’t even conceive of Ashlyn’s lack of vision, who would find her lack of ambition unthinkable. “Well, Will’s a bigger man than me,” Cal says. “No way would I hire Molly’s ex.” Ali rolls her eyes. “We’d fallen out of touch when she first started at the store,” she says. “I hadn’t seen her in over fifteen years.” “Really?” Molly says. She turns to Ashlyn. “What were you up to after you left Dumfries?” Before she can answer, Ali butts in. “Oh, she just traveled a bit,” she says, “all over.” She smiles, so Ashlyn just nods, forcing a smile too. Then someone clinks a fork against their glass and the bride and groom return to their table for the toasts. Ashlyn can’t concentrate. She feels foolish for thinking she could ever belong here in Ali’s world. Is this what she has to look forward to? Following Ali to fancy parties, wearing expensive clothes that Ali buys for her because she could never afford them otherwise. Ali speaking for her, excusing her crappy job, excusing her years away from Dumfries, finding ways to smooth down all of her rough edges until Ashlyn becomes safe and palatable enough for her friends. Her past clings to her like an odor, and she’s spent the night watch Ali flutter around and spray her with perfume. She might distract everyone for a moment with a flowery fragrance, but soon enough, they’ll smell the stink. *** Ali Krieger has always loved weddings. She can’t help it—it’s the romantic in her, and perhaps less exciting, the part of her that loves details and craves order. Weddings seem to blend together both sides of her brain, the emotional and the rational, in a way that few things do. For a while, in fact, after her retirement, she’d considered becoming a wedding planner. Then she’d felt the urgent pull of the law, a desire for justice that felt more essential than her love of a perfectly coordinated table cloth or uniquely arranged flowers. Still, she loves attending weddings, even though she’s hit that point of her thirties where more of her friends are ending marriages than beginning them. At Molly and Cal’s wedding, she wanders back towards the hall from the bathroom, noticing the tiny foil stenciling leading to the reception hall when she bumps into Will. He’s sitting on a chair outside the open doors, nursing a drink. “You clean up nicely,” she says. He glances down at his outfit and shrugs. She recognizes the suit—it’s one she bought him. “So do you,” he says. “Where’s your blonde?” He laughs. “Went to make a phone call,” he says. “Where’s yours?” Now she laughs. She glances inside the hall where she spots Ashlyn sitting at a table by herself. She’s struck by how lonely she looks. She’d thought that when she went to the bathroom, Ashlyn might continue a conversation with the people nearby. But instead, she’s retreated to a table near the back of the hall, away from everyone else. Of course she has. She doesn’t know any of these people. Half of them are lawyers so pretentious that Ali can barely stand to be around them. Of course Ashlyn feels awkward. She starts to rescue her, then pauses. “I’m sorry,” she says. “You were right. I should’ve told you.” Will sighs. “Look, I want you to be happy,” he says. “But I can’t be the last one to know something, especially not when Missy’s involved.” “I know,” she says. “It won’t happen again.” “I’m not some caveman,” he says. “As long as Harris keeps my storeroom orderly, I won’t cause her any trouble.” She’s more grateful for him in this moment than she has been in years. She squeezes his shoulder. “It wasn’t planned,” she says. “I wouldn’t—I mean, when I asked you to help her out, I didn’t know—” “I know,” he says. “The heart wants, all that jazz.” She smiles, squeezing his shoulder again as she starts back into the reception hall. She feels lighter already. Now she can reassure Ashlyn that everything will be alright. That Will isn’t the petty, vindictive ex that Ashlyn has feared. Now she can reassure herself. As she makes her way to Ashlyn’s table, the DJ starts playing a slow Frank Sinatra song, and Ali, overwhelmed by the romance of it all, reaches for her girlfriend. “Dance with me,” she says. Ashlyn laughs a little. “I don’t dance,” she says. “It’s a slow one. All you have to do is hold me.” On the dance floor, she wraps her arms around Ashlyn’s neck while they slowly sway to the music. Ashlyn is wooden, carefully shifting her weight from foot to foot. Ali kisses her cheek. “I talked to Will,” she says. “He’s fine. Everything’s fine.” “Good,” Ashlyn says. But she doesn’t sound as relieved as Ali expected. She won’t even look up at her, still staring at her feet. “What’s wrong?” Ali asks. “I just feel like everyone’s staring.” Ali smiles. “Because you’re so cute,” she says. She’s trying to be flirty and sweet, but Ashlyn’s face falls. “Don’t,” she whispers. “What?” Ali asks. “What’s wrong?” Now she’s barely moving herself. Haven’t they had a nice evening? Hasn’t she just shared good news, that Will plans to leave them alone? Then why is Ashlyn upset? Even though they’re holding each other, she can feel Ashlyn’s desire to pull away. It scares Ali, how easily Ashlyn runs from her. She holds onto her tighter, rubbing the back of her neck. “What’d I do?” she asks again. “Please, baby. Talk to me.” “Don’t do that,” Ashlyn says. “Don’t act like we’re a normal couple.” “What’re you talking about? We are—” “We’re not,” she says. “I’m not. I’m not like other people. You keep acting like I am. You keep talking to people like I am—like I’ve been away all these years traveling through Europe or something.” Ali has imagined a version of her future where she tells everyone the truth. Will and Kelley and all of her friends. This is Ashlyn, my girlfriend. She’s spent sixteen years in state prison for killing a man. Even though she knows the stigmas attached to felons are unjust, even though she understands this on an intellectual level, she still cannot imagine admitting to everyone she knows that the woman she loves is an ex-con. What will they think of her? What type of woman dates a convicted murderer? Even worse, what type of mother allows a convicted murderer around her young daughter? Ali can already picture the shock and horror. She can hear the murmurings of her colleagues at Wilson, Paul & Associates, where, upon hiring her, the partners had asked if she associated with anyone who had a criminal past. What would the partners think if they knew she went home each night with a felon? She hates that these selfish thoughts pass through her mind but they do. She wants to protect Ashlyn, yes, but she wants to protect herself as well. “I’m sorry,” she says. “What do you want me to tell them?” Ashlyn bites her lip. “I don’t know,” she finally says. “I just hate that you have to lie to the world to be with me.” She pulls Ashlyn closer. “I love you,” she says. “I don’t care about the world.” Ashlyn holds her tighter and Ali barely notices that they aren’t dancing at all, that they’re standing still on the dance floor, holding each other, while the party carries on around them. *** That night, Ashlyn ties Ali up. Not because Ali wants her to, although she does. Not because it sounds sexy, although it does. Not because they return home from the wedding a little drunk, although they do, and not because Missy is away at the O’Hara’s for the weekend, although she is, and for the first time in weeks, they’re free to fuck as loudly as they want. Not because of any of these reasons but for one that Ashlyn would never admit: she feels pathetic and powerless and she needs to feel completely in control of something, even if it’s Ali’s pleasure. So when they reach the bedroom, she tugs off her tie with one hand and with the other, she guides Ali to the bed. Ali seems surprised by her assertiveness, but she smiles as Ashlyn climbs on top of her, moaning a little as Ashlyn’s thigh wedges between her own. Ashlyn kisses her, pinning Ali’s hands above her head, then she reaches up with her necktie, fastening a knot around Ali’s hands and the bedpost. “Too tight?” she asks. Ali shakes her head. “Tell me if it is,” she says. She’s never done anything like this before, but it scares her, how easily she falls into this role. And it does feel like a role, like she’s playing the part of a dominating lover. She isn’t supposed to like this. She’s supposed to hate it, which is also why she’s decided to it tonight; she still feels, sometimes, a strong desire to punish herself. But she doesn’t hate it. In fact, she loves it. She loves watching Ali’s body writhe beneath hers. She loves kissing her way down Ali’s stomach, teasing her until there’s nothing she can do about it. She loves making Ali come once, twice, three times, as Ali tugs at her restraint, whispering that she can’t take anymore. She loves that Ali can’t touch her. And she loves that when she finally unties Ali, both of them spent, Ali pulls her close and tells her that it was the best sex she’s ever had. “Why do you like that so much?” Ashlyn asks after. It’s late, far later than when they normally stay up. She didn’t know she still had it in her, a late night, multi-round session. She’s realized that a big part of an adult relationship is admitting that you’re often too tired to do anything more than sleep. Ali lies beside her, nestled in the crook of her arm. She smiles. “I don’t know,” she says. “It’s just exciting to me.” “But why?” “It turns me on,” Ali says, “knowing that you could hurt me but you never would.” That night, Ashlyn can’t sleep. She keeps hearing Ali’s words flickering through her brain. You could hurt me, but you never would. If this thought turns Ali on, then is that what turns Ashlyn on too? The idea that she could hurt Ali? Is this who she is now? A person so hungry for a tiny bit of power that she has to exercise it over the woman she loves. And what makes Ali so sure that she would never hurt her? What makes Ali so sure about anything? Hasn’t Ashlyn proven once already that she is not to be trusted? She could hurt Ali. She doesn’t want to but she could. That’s what scares her the most. Brink Ashlyn Harris has always wanted children. Growing up, she’d blamed this on the fact that she was the youngest child in her own family. What she wanted, she thought, was a little sibling, one who would look up to her and follow her around, always getting underfoot the way she always managed to get in Chris’ way. But as she grew older, she realized that she just liked children. All of her earliest jobs involved them somehow: supervising kids at day camp, teaching swimming lessons at the YMCA, lifeguarding all summer and wading in to rescue a flailing kid who’d wandered to the deep end of the pool. She wanted children of her own someday. It was the most conventional thing she allowed herself to want, in a life that she knew would be anything but conventional. She wanted to travel the world and play soccer. She didn’t want a husband, a steady office job, a house with a white picket fence, any of the things her mother had always wanted for her. But she did, somehow, want children, even though she knew she’d never make them the traditional way. Still, when she pictured her future, she saw herself rocking a baby, waking up with a toddler’s feet in her face, carrying a kindergartner on her shoulders. Inside, this had been another vision of her life that died. Now children unsettle her. She needs predictability and order, and children are loud and jumpy and impulsive. In Parker’s Hardware, she crosses to the other side of the aisle when kids skitter past. Children make her nervous, because of their rashness and their vulnerability. A child tripped in front of the gardening tools once, and when she bent to help him up, his eyes widened. She pulled away immediately. He looked terrified, and she wondered if children could detect something elemental about her that adults could not, if only a child could get to the essence of who she was. The only exception is Missy. Maybe it’s Missy’s openness. Maybe it’s the way that Missy reminds Ashlyn so much of her younger self, or maybe it’s just the fact that Missy is Ali’s daughter. But she doesn’t feel nervous around Missy. In fact, she feels more comfortable around Missy than she does around most people. Missy understands her oddness, her reticence, her reluctance to hug. Ashlyn doesn’t show her fondness for Missy in obvious ways. She doesn’t think she’s capable of this anymore, that easy playfulness she used to show to kids. But she tries to show her affection in other ways, like when Missy complains that she’s run out of space on her bookshelf. The next day, Ashlyn brings home a small bookshelf from Target and the two spend the evening assembling it. She directs Missy to sort out the screws and bolts, while she unfolds the instructions. In the corner of the bedroom are stacks of Missy’s books, including a set of thick multicolored books. Harry Potter, Ashlyn realizes. All seven. She’s never seen a complete set before. “You have all of those?” she asks. “My mom bought them for me,” Missy says. “And you read them all?” Missy laughs. “Of course,” she says. “Twice, actually.” Ashlyn bites her lip. She wants to ask Missy how the book ends, but she feels too embarrassed to ask. The books are for children. She’d only read them Inside because she’d had nothing else to do. It would be shameful to ask to borrow them now. “How come you don’t have kids?” Missy asks. Ashlyn shrugs, holding out her palm. Missy drops in a screw. “Just never did,” she says. “Did you want to?” “I used to,” she says. She focuses on fitting the screw into the tiny hole, working it in deeper with her screwdriver. Sometimes she wonders if she could tell Missy the truth about her life. Not now, but someday. She’ll have to tell her eventually, won’t she? Missy will get older and wiser. She’ll grow suspicious about these unaccounted years. She’ll ask questions. Maybe it’d be better to tell her now while she’s young. Maybe, if Ashlyn tells her now, Missy will understand. That sometimes you do terrible things for good reasons, and it doesn’t make those things any less terrible. But she says nothing, of course. She can’t stand the idea of Missy looking at her differently. “Just don’t,” Missy says. “Don’t what?” “Have a kid.” She frowns. “Why not?” “Because you have me.” Missy gives her a goofy smile, and Ashlyn laughs. “Well, I don’t want any other kid,” she says. “Good,” Missy says. “Good,” she says. *** That night, Ali asks her to move in. She’s not sure what exactly precipitates the question. Maybe it’s something Ali’s been mulling over for a while, or maybe it’s the fact that Ali came home while Ashlyn and Missy were finishing up the bookshelf. She smiled in the doorway, watching them, and even Ashlyn admitted that the whole moment felt insanely domestic. Either way, she isn’t prepared for Ali’s question, especially not since Ali asks it after Ashlyn has rolled on top of her, kissing her neck. “What?” she says. Her hands are pushing up Ali’s t-shirt, but she tries to focus on their conversation, her head foggy with lust. Ali smiles, her fingernails trailing down her back. “It just makes sense, right?” Ali says. “I mean, you’re over here all the time anyway and you could save on your rent—” “You really want me to?” she says. “Live here, I mean.” She can’t help it—she’s surprised. She and Ali have never lived together, even though in college, they’d spent so much time in each other’s dorm room that their respective roommates were shocked to come home and find one of them alone. But actually living together is something else altogether. She tries to imagine it: waking up beside Ali each morning, kissing her forehead as she rolls out of bed; sorting through her clothes in the closet, her t-shirts wedged against Ali’s suits; cooking Missy eggs for breakfast and helping her study for her vocabulary tests; returning home here each day when she gets off of work. Could she do this? Could she be around someone else all the time? Hasn’t she spent sixteen years surrounded by other people? Shouldn’t she have her own space now? What if she needs to retreat, to be alone? “I know it’s soon,” Ali says. “But I want you here. I want to come home to you every night.” She strokes the back of Ashlyn’s neck and leans forward to kiss her. Maybe Ashlyn’s wrong. Maybe she doesn’t need to be alone. Maybe she’s only been alone for the past sixteen years, even though she was constantly near other people, which is the worst type of loneliness. Maybe what she needs now is a home. She nestles into Ali’s neck. Why would she ever feel nervous about moving in? Why would she ever need to escape from here? The Krieger house has always been her retreat. Ali has always been home. *** The plan is simple: next weekend, Ashlyn will move in. The logistics of moving her out of her apartment will be as easy as moving her in. She hardly owns anything worth bringing with her. The more complicated part is telling Missy. Surprising her with a life development had backfired last time; this time, Ashlyn wants to be upfront about it. This time, Ashlyn asks Ali to let her approach Missy with the news. So the next afternoon, when Ali has a late meeting, Ashlyn offers to pick Missy up from school. She waits at the bus stop outside of Parker’s Hardware when she gets off work. You know I love your mom, she imagines herself saying. And you too, Missy. I love you too. So how would you feel about me living with you? She feels weirdly hopeful that Missy will be supportive of the idea; she’s more nervous about the idea of having to express her feelings so openly. Before, she’d never hung up with Ali before saying “love you.” Now, when Ali says “I love you”, she can only manage a “me too.” Words used to come so easily to her. Now she feels them gumming up inside of her, like water trapped in a stopped faucet. She’s so caught up in what she’ll say to Missy that she doesn’t even notice that the bus is running late. A five minute delay turns into fifteen by the time she reaches Missy’s school, so she sends her a quick text that she’s on her way. But when she arrives at the school, she doesn’t see Missy. She sits on a planter, watching crowds of students pour out, and by the time the crowds have thinned to a steady stream, she still doesn’t see the girl. This time she calls her. Missy doesn’t answer. She sighs. What’s the point of giving a kid a cell phone if she doesn’t even pick up? Maybe Missy stayed after school to talk to a teacher. Maybe she’s still on her way. She waits another five minutes, then calls again. Still no answer. This time, she calls Ali. “I’m in a meeting,” Ali whispers. “I’ll call you back.” “It’s Missy,” she says. “She’s not here.” She tries to stave the panic out of her voice but fails miserably. Ali pauses and then she hears her heels clacking against the floor, a door shutting behind her. She must have stepped out into the hallway. “What?” Ali asks. “What do you mean?” “The bus was late and when I got here—I don’t see her and she’s not picking up her phone—” “Okay,” Ali says. “Calm down. I’m sure she’s with one of her friends. I’ll try them—call her again, okay?” “Okay,” she says. “Okay.” Ali’s right—Missy’s probably just off with a friend, isn’t she? Maybe she’s too distracted by her conversation to hear her phone ring. Or maybe her phone’s at the bottom of her backpack and she just hasn’t been able to get to it yet. But even Ashlyn doesn’t quite believe this. Missy’s always glued to her phone, texting someone or giggling at a picture someone has posted. When has she ever heard Missy’s phone ring and not seen the girl jump to answer? Her own phone buzzes and she answers it quickly. “Missy?” she says. “It’s me,” Ali says. “None of her friends have seen her. I’m coming, okay? Just stay there.” Now Ali sounds worried and now Ashlyn enters full-blown panic. She paces in front of the school entrance, her chest tight. What if Missy’s in trouble? What if she’s hurt, all because Ashlyn had been late to pick her up? Missy waiting for her in front of the school, a pickup truck slowly pulling up beside her, the man behind the wheel coaxing her inside. His face—how could she ever forget his face?—in the rear view mirror. A long drive, a remote stretch of road, this man devising new ways to hurt her. Maybe I’ll kill you, he’d said, so calmly Ashlyn didn’t doubt his sincerity. But he hadn’t. He’d left her for dead, which at times, has seemed worse. She doesn’t know how much time passes. She doesn’t even remember how many times she calls Missy, each phone call going to the answering machine. But she’s calling again when she hears someone yell her name. She turns. It’s Ali. She looks frazzled, holding her phone to her ear. “Any sign?” she asks. Ashlyn swallows, shaking her head. She’d thought the hardest thing she’d ever had to do was tell Ali’s mother about the attack. In the hospital, while Ali had been unconscious, her mother asked Ashlyn what happened. She’d already given her report to the police. She’d been matter-of-fact then, almost completely unemotional, but she couldn’t even look Ali’s mother in the eye. She knew what Mrs. Krieger wanted to know—exactly how violent had the attack been? Had there been a sexual assault? There hadn’t, but Ashlyn was ashamed to admit that even if there had been, she would have been powerless to stop it. Walking Mrs. Krieger through the attack was a new nightmare, a recitation of all the ways she’d failed to protect Ali. What she didn’t know then was how much harder it would be to later admit to Ali that she has no idea where her daughter is. That she, somehow, has failed to protect Missy also. Ali looks sick but she nods. “I’ll go talk to the playground monitor,” she says. “Just stay here, okay?” But before Ali disappears behind the fence, Ashlyn sees her. Missy waves as she heads toward her down the sidewalk. Ice cream. She’s eating ice cream. She wasn’t in the back of a strange man’s pickup. She must’ve wandered down the street to get a snack. Ashlyn can’t help it. Something inside of her breaks. She’s relieved, yes, but she’s also angry. Angry at herself for imagining the worse, at Hardy Jones for teaching her to think like this, at a world where a girl can’t get ice cream without worrying that a man will hurt her. At Missy for not worrying more, for not realizing the dangers that surround her. She wants to pull Missy into a hug. Instead, she grabs her wrist and yanks her close. “Don’t you fucking do that!” she says. “Don’t you ever fucking do that again!” She doesn’t realize that she is screaming until Missy drops her ice cream and starts to cry. She suddenly sees herself through Missy’s eyes: red-faced and angry, hunched over her and shaking her arm. She releases her, stunned when she sees red fingerprints where she’d grabbed the girl’s wrist. She hadn’t meant to grab her that hard. She hadn’t meant to yell. She hadn’t meant to scare her so badly that Missy backs away from her, right into her mother’s arms. Ali kneels beside her, pulling her in close. She glances at the redness on her wrist, then back up at Ashlyn. “What’s the matter with you?” Ali says. Ashlyn slowly backs away from the two of them. Missy still crying into her mother’s shoulder, Ali holding her and glaring at Ashlyn warily, the way you watch a dog who might bite. She backs away until she suddenly starts to run. She doesn’t know where she’s going. She hasn’t run in years. But she runs for as long as she can, until she ends up at across town. Then she stumbles to a bench and starts to cry. She can’t stop the images looping in her head: Missy shrinking away from her in terror; Ali gathering her daughter close to protect her. To protect her from Ashlyn. What is the matter with her? She doesn’t know. She never knows. *** The first time Ali was questioned by the police, she’d listened in disbelief as they described the murder of a man named Hardy Jones. She’d never known her attacker’s name; she almost felt shocked to learn he even had one. A name made him seem less capable of such senseless violence. A name made him seem human. But she was most shocked to listen to the detectives describe the actual murder, a murder they claimed that Ashlyn had committed. The gas station surveillance video did not capture the act itself, but, the detectives claimed, it caught Ashlyn emerging from the dark, returning to her truck for a plank of wood, and stepping into the darkness again. Later, this detail would bother Ali the most. How calculated it was. She could have understood if Ashlyn had been under duress, if the man recognized her and tried to attack again. Then she could have understood reaching for a weapon and defending yourself. But she’d retreated to the truck for a weapon. She could have easily walked away, but she made a deliberate decision in that moment to confront the man. She’d aimed at his head. She’d aimed to kill and she’d succeeded. It wasn’t just that Ali had never conceived Ashlyn to be capable of violence. She’d also never imagined her capable of such deliberate violence, violence that any rational part of her brain would have told her to avoid, violence rooted somewhere beyond all rationality. She’s always felt grateful that the camera hadn’t captured the killing, that during the trial, she’d never had to watch Ashlyn swing a 2 x 4 at a man’s head. But she thinks about this the day she witnessed Ashlyn grab Missy. The whole evening is a rush of emotion. At home, she tries to comfort Missy, who keeps crying. “Why did Coach scream at me?” she asks, again and again, and Ali just holds her closer, unable to find the words to explain it. She’s seen Ashlyn angry before, but she’s never seen her like that, her body consumed with a indecipherable rage. She wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t witnessed it herself, how swiftly Ashlyn had transformed into someone who screamed into a crying child’s face. What would’ve happened if Ali hadn’t been nearby? Would Ashlyn have kept screaming at Missy? Would she have hit her? Years ago, Ali saw one of Missy’s coaches yell at her on the field. Even though Ali knew this was part of athletics—even though she’d been yelled at by her fair share of coaches before—she couldn’t stand watching another adult yell at her kid. She’d climbed down from the bleachers and yelled back into his face. Later, after she’d sufficiently embarrassed herself and her daughter, she couldn’t believe what she’d done. But she couldn’t help it. Motherhood awakened a primal part of her, an intense, innate need to protect her young. So when she’d seen Ashlyn grab Missy, she wanted to shove her away from her child. For a brief moment, she’d wanted to hurt Ashlyn, and this is what scares her the most about violence, how easily you can become a conduit. She doesn’t mean to tell Will what happened, but when he arrives after finally listening to her series of frantic voicemails, she knows she has to. He listens quietly while she tells him about the afternoon, then he stands, patting down his pockets. “She’s done,” he says. “Will—” “Come on, Ali!” he says. “You can’t seriously defend someone who put her hands on our kid.” “I’m not!” she says. “But she really needs this job and…I just want to talk to her first, okay? Don’t do anything. Just let me talk to her first. Please.” She hates this, how even in all of her hurt and betrayal, she still wants to protect Ashlyn from Will. She can’t blame him for being angry. She can’t blame him for not wanting to see Ashlyn Harris around his store. She can’t imagine facing Ashlyn right now either. But she still doesn’t want Will to blindside Ashlyn. He sighs. “Fine,” he says. “But I don’t want her around Missy ever again.” She swallows. His demand is so absolute, so final, that she wants to protest. But how can she? What defense can she possibly raise on Ashlyn’s behalf? Every time she closes her eyes, she sees Ashlyn hunched over Missy, shaking her wrist. Is this who Ashlyn becomes now when she’s upset? Is this what would have happened if Ashlyn had moved in? Ali’s skin tightens just thinking about it. All the nights she’s worked late, all the nights she’s left Missy alone with Ashlyn, she’s never once worried that Missy might not be safe. But she should have. A good mother would have. She’d thought she was being careful but she had been so blinded by her own heart that she hadn’t even protected her daughter’s. “Maybe she was just scared,” Kelley says. Late that night, Ali calls to cancel Tristan’s sleepover that weekend. She feels awful about it but she’s too emotionally exhausted to even think about entertaining another child. She doesn’t know why she tells Kelley about Ashlyn’s meltdown. Kelley encouraged her to pursue Ashlyn in the first place, so maybe she’s looking for someone to blame. But Kelley won’t even blame Ashlyn. “I’m not saying it’s okay,” Kelley says. “But I would’ve been freaking out too if I thought I lost someone else’s kid.” Ali sighs, hugging her knees to her chest. “You didn’t see her,” she says. “I’ve never seen anyone look that angry before.” “I’m sure she was just panicking,” Kelley says. “She’s new to this, Kriegs. You can’t expect her to know how to handle a parenting crisis.” Maybe Ali might believe this if Ashlyn were someone else. She could blame Ashlyn’s reaction on the stressful afternoon. Her inexperience with parenting. She’d been stressed and she’d lashed out. Isn’t that human? Hasn’t Ali yelled at Missy out of frustration before? Hasn’t everyone? But Ashlyn isn’t someone else. She’s a woman who has spent the past sixteen years behind bars. She has been altered forever by that experience; it’s foolish to expect otherwise. How could a woman survive nearly two decades in state prison without fundamentally changing? She thinks again about the strange scar on Ashlyn’s back. In her mind, Ashlyn was the victim of a cruel beating. But maybe Ashlyn had thrown the first punch. Maybe this is who she’d been in prison and maybe that undercurrent of violence still runs within her. Or maybe—and this is what Ali fears the most —she hadn’t become violent in prison at all. She had been violent long before. After all, in college, she’d bashed a man’s skull open and then climbed in Ali’s bed that night like nothing had happened. Maybe violence has always been inside of her. Maybe the woman Ali saw today is the person Ashlyn has always been. *** In solitary, Ashlyn lapsed into her worst memories. Amazing how the mind works, amazing how, when left alone in silence, your mind fills in the blankness with the thoughts that haunt you the most. The final fight between her parents, before her father left for good. The practice before the NCAA quarterfinals match where she tore her ACL, forcing her to sit out the biggest game of her life. She returned to that night, of course, particularly the moment when Ali suddenly fell unconscious and Ashlyn faced the terrifying possibility that she might be dead. Even though she felt the steady pulse around Ali’s neck, Ashlyn cried, realizing she needed to make an impossible decision. Should she leave Ali by the side of the road and try to find help? Or should she stay with Ali and hope help found them? Leaving Ali bloody and unconscious on a deserted road was unthinkable, but so was hoping someone discovered them while Ali couldn’t wake up. What if the beating had caused bleeding in her brain? What if she was falling into a coma or worse? What if she never woke up? Ashlyn still isn’t sure how long she left. But in solitary, she relived this moment, stumbling along the brush, waving frantically to the cars who passed by, until one person, a kind farmer, pulled over. In solitary, she never felt the relief that followed when she’d cradled Ali in her lap as the farmer drove them to the hospital, or even later, when Ali finally opened her eyes. In solitary, there was no relief. Only memories, the blank walls of her cell transforming into screens where she watched her worst moments loop. She feels the same way the day after she hurt Missy, except in this looping memory, she’s not the victim, but the aggressor. Again and again, she screams at Missy and grabs her. Again and again, Missy cries, trying to pull away from her. Again and again, Ali gathers Missy close to protect her. What’s the matter with you? Again and again, Ashlyn hates herself. She knows what she ought to do. Call Ali to apologize. But as simple as it sounds, she knows that she can’t call. No words exist that will explain what she did. Missy’s probably terrified of her now. And Ali? Ali hates her. Plain and simple. She grabbed her daughter until she cried. Of course Ali hates her. Again and again, she watches Ali glare at her as she’d pulled her daughter into her arms. She’d never seen Ali look at her like that before. Angry and a little betrayed, as if she had been fooled somehow. As if she were just now seeing Ashlyn for the very first time. She considers calling in sick for work, but what would she do instead? Sit around in her apartment hating herself? No, work will at least be a distraction, and right now, any distraction is good. But she regrets this decision during her lunch break when Will steps into the break room. He pauses in the doorway, and as soon as their eyes meet, her stomach sinks. He knows. “You better thank your lucky stars for Ali,” he says. “Or your ass would be out on the street this morning.” Thank Ali? Ali convinced him not to fire her? But why? She tries to understand: Ali told Will, knowing it would upset him, yet she talked him out of firing her. None of this makes sense to Ashlyn. Ali hates her. Why would she still try to help her? Will steps toward her. He’s angry—of course he’s angry. He’s clenching his fists at his side and again, Ashlyn wishes he would just hit her. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “You stay out of my way,” he says. “And if you ever put your hands on my kid again, I’ll kill you.” She almost wants to laugh. Will Parker, the nice hardware man, threatening her. Doesn’t he know who she is? Doesn’t he know what she’s done? He’s just like everyone Outside: he’ll talk a big game, sure, but when it comes down to it, he’s not a violent man. He doesn’t have it in him. If he’d spotted Hardy Jones at that gas station, he would have done the sensible thing and called the police. But she’s different. She’s always been different. She’s a rabid dog and Hardy Jones just let her off her leash. That night, she gets drunk. She doesn’t mean to, at first. She hasn’t been truly drunk since college, and even then, her drunkenness was lighthearted and silly, tossing back a few too many beers until she wound up dancing on a pool table in her sports bra. Tonight’s drunkenness is mean and dark. She sips Jack Daniels on the rocks, one whiskey after another until her head starts to feel fuzzy. Before, she’d drank to have fun. Now she drinks to numb herself. She wants to drink until she feels like she is wrapped in cotton, protected from the world. She wants to drink until she feels nothing at all. And she’s almost there when she feels someone tap her shoulder. She doesn’t turn around at first—the last thing she needs, some douchebag wanting to blab at her about his troubles —then the stool beside her scrapes against the floor and she sees Kelley sit down. “I would buy you a drink,” Kelley says, “but it looks like that’s the last thing you need.” She smiles, nodding at the three empty glasses in front of Ashlyn. Ashlyn suddenly feels ashamed. What is she doing? She must look completely pitiful: a thirty-six year old getting plastered on a weeknight. “I don’t feel like talking,” she says. She stands, reaching for her wallet, but the ground wobbles beneath her. Kelley touches her shoulder and guides her back to her stool. “Relax,” she says. “Ali told me what happened. And for what it’s worth, I’m on your side.” “You shouldn’t be,” Ashlyn says. “I was horrible.” “You were scared,” Kelley says. “We all do things we’re not proud of when we’re scared.” If only it were that simple. Ali had been afraid too, but her instincts were to hug Missy, not hurt her. What is the matter with Ashlyn? Why couldn’t she respond like a normal person for once? She stares down into her whiskey. “I don’t wanna talk,” she says. “I just wanna watch the game.” She’s hardly paying attention to the Nationals game, but it seems like a good enough way to get rid of Kelley. But Kelley’s undaunted. She flags down the bartender and orders a beer. She nods at Ashlyn. “And put it on her tab,” she says. Ashlyn knows what Kelley is doing. She doesn’t want to let Ashlyn drink alone. The responsible thing to do would be to call it a night. But Ashlyn orders another drink, and by the time the baseball game is over, she’s almost too drunk to stand. Kelley hooks an arm around her waist and helps her into her car. In her apartment, Kelley eases her onto the bed and she flops back on the pillow. “The room’s spinning,” she says. Even when she closes her eyes, the room is spinning. Kelley just laughs. She carries over a glass of water. “I bet,” she says. “Why don’t you have some water?” “I haven’t drank this much since college.” “Then take these too.” Kelley hands her two Advil. “You’ll thank me in the morning.” She does what she’s told, swallowing the pills and gulping half the water. Kelley kneels in front of her, unlacing her sneakers and setting them under the bed. She stands, hesitating for a moment, then she begins unbuckling Ashlyn’s pants. “Not exactly what I had in mind when I thought about getting you out your pants,” Kelley says, “but let’s get you comfortable, okay?” She tugs off Ashlyn’s pants, then lifts the covers, helping her into bed. Ashlyn curls toward her, overwhelmed by her kindness. Why is Kelley taking care of her? Doesn’t Kelley know by now that Ashlyn is a bad person? Doesn’t she know that Ashlyn ruins everything she touches? “You shouldn’t be here,” she says. Kelley sits on the edge of her bed. “Why?” “Because. I’m not a good person. I hurt people.” “You didn’t mean to,” Kelley says. “You need to call Ali, sweetie. You can’t just sit here punishing yourself forever.” “I meant to,” she says. “I hurt a man. That’s why I had to go away—” “Shh,” Kelley says, brushing back her hair from her forehead. “Just go to sleep, okay? Everything will be better in the morning.” *** The next evening, Ali calls her mother. She hates calling her mother when she’s upset. Her mother will know as soon as she answers the phone—I can hear it in your voice, she always says, which sounded absurd until Ali became a mother herself—and Ali will end up spending the entire conversation trying to convince her mother that she isn’t so sad, that life isn’t so bothersome after all. Her sadness will only upset her mother, who Ali will feel the need to comfort, launching the two of them into an insane cycle of reassurance and when Ali hangs up, she’ll only be more upset than she had been in the first place. Still, even though Ali already foresees this inevitability, she picks up the phone and dials her mother’s number. She’s just spent a miserable few days trying to comfort her daughter, who’s done nothing but sulk around the house and ask questions about Ashlyn. “Is Coach still mad at me?” she’d asked earlier that morning on the drive to her soccer game. Ali swallowed, gripping the wheel tighter. “She wasn’t mad at you,” she said. “She was just upset, honey.” “But is she still coming today?” “I don’t know, sweetie. I don’t know.” If she were being perfectly honest, in spite of everything, she still expected to see Ashlyn in the stands that morning. Ashlyn hadn’t missed one of Missy’s games since she’d attended the very first one. She certainly wouldn’t miss this one, right? It would be her mea culpa. She would slink into the park, apologetic and earnest. Ali would still be mad at her, but Ashlyn appearing would at least show that she’s trying to make things right. But Ashlyn never came, and even though Ali was dreading seeing her, her absence only upset her further. Why wasn’t Ashlyn trying to apologize? Why hadn’t she called to say that she was sorry? How could she do this: hurt Missy and betray Ali, then disappear into her own life. Ali felt stupid for being surprised. Of course Ashlyn could do this. She’d done this to Ali before. The game was hard to watch. Missy played horribly. Her team was routed 4-0, and each time the ball sailed past her, Missy kicked the goal post in frustration. Soon the coach benched her and put in the backup keeper instead. Ali wrung her hands, willing the game to finish. She thought the game might be a healthy distraction. Now she would spend the rest of Saturday soothing her daughter’s bruised ego. Worse, Kelley kept wanting to talk about Ashlyn. “She’s not in a good place,” Kelley said. “You need to talk to her, Ali.” She’d told Ali about running into Ashlyn at a bar, how Ashlyn had gotten so trashed that Kelley practically had to carry her up her building stairs. Ali had never known Ashlyn to do this—drink to drown her sorrows—but then again, when she’d first known her, Ashlyn’s sorrows were few. She hated the idea of Ashlyn turning to alcohol to cope. She hated the idea of Ashlyn poisoning herself to survive. “She kept saying weird things,” Kelley said. “Like that she hurts people and that’s why she went away?” Ali turned back toward the field. “I don’t know what that means,” she said. “She must’ve been really drunk.” She doesn’t tell her mother all of this when she calls. She already regrets burdening her, but she needs to talk to somebody who knows the whole story. Not Kelley, who for all her good intentions is clueless. So she tells her mother about Missy’s disappearance and the ensuing panic, about Ashlyn’s sudden rage. When she finishes, her mother is quiet on the other end. Ali can imagine the words about to come out of her mouth: didn’t I try to warn you that this could happen? Didn’t Kyle? Ali hears their words cycling through her head. Don’t you think she should talk to someone? I don’t want to see you get hurt again. How well do you really know Ash? It’s not like she went away to summer camp. You have to think about Missy. Ali blinks back tears. How is it possible that everyone saw what might happen before she did? “I know you’re shaken,” her mother says. “You just want to protect your little girl. But I saw how heartbroken Ashlyn was when Missy only scraped her arm. You really think she’d want to hurt her?” Ali lets out a deep breath. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know anything any more.” “You do,” her mother says. “You know Ashlyn. She loves you and she loves your girl. She was scared, Ali. She doesn’t want something bad to happen to Missy, the way it happened to you.” Ali’s stomach sinks. “Mom—” “I know you don’t like to talk about it. You say that you’re over it but you’re not, honey. And Ashlyn isn’t either. That night destroyed her—” “Mom, please,” she whispers. “I blamed myself too,” her mother says. “I just knew there was something I should’ve done differently, something I should’ve told you that would’ve protected you. I’m not excusing Ashlyn’s behavior. But love and fear, it all changes the brain. It makes us do things we normally wouldn’t.” Ali curls toward the couch pillows. She’ll never know what Ashlyn experienced that night. She remembers how sick she’d felt when the man cold-clocked Ashlyn. What if Ashlyn hadn’t woken up? What if she’d held Ashlyn in her arms all the way to the hospital? What if she’d wandered through the halls to find Ashlyn’s mother, Ashlyn’s blood stuck to her clothes? What type of person would she be right now? Maybe her mother is right, maybe love and fear change the brain. Maybe love and fear are opposite sides of the same coin. Maybe you don’t really love someone without fearing that you might lose her. She doesn’t have to like what Ashlyn did but she can understand it, how love is the most primal emotion, how love can push you past all rationality. Maybe this has always been Ashlyn’s problem: love pushes her to the brink. Later that night, she drives to Ashlyn’s apartment. She knocks on the door three times; there’s no answer, so she starts to leave when she hears the floorboard creak. “Ash?” she says. “I know you’re in there.” No response. She sighs. She can’t force Ashlyn to speak to her, but she thinks about what Kelley said about the previous night and she fishes in her purse for her spare key. She has to let herself in, even if it’s just to make sure that Ashlyn is alright. When she unlocks the door, she steps into the dark apartment. She pauses, waiting for her eyes to adjust, and then she spots Ashlyn sitting on her carpet in the corner of the room, hugging her knees to her chest. Who knows how long she’s been sitting here in the dark? She looks so small, it takes everything within Ali not to rush over and throw her arms around her. “Does she hate me?” Ashlyn says. She still won’t look up, her forehead pressed against her arms. Ali bites her lip, lowering herself across from her. “No,” she says. “She’s just confused. She’s never seen you like that. I’ve never seen you like that.” “I’m sorry,” Ashlyn whispers. “I’m so sorry—” “I know.” “I just kept seeing her all alone in the back of some guy’s truck. At least we were together, you know? But she was all alone—” “Ash—” “I wish it had been me.” “What?” Ali asks. “What do you mean?” “That night.” Ashlyn finally looks up. Her eyes are bloodshot. “I wish he’d taken it all out on me. You could’ve run off and he would’ve just had me. It would’ve been better that way.” “Honey, he would’ve killed you.” Ashlyn pauses. “It would’ve been better that way,” she says. Ali often fantasizes about that night. She knows that this isn’t healthy—it’s impossible to change the past—but she can’t help it. In her fantasy, she and Ashlyn are driving back from the movie theater. A bright light appears in their rear view mirror. Ashlyn pulls off to the side of the road, and the pickup truck cruises right past them. In her fantasy, she never encounters Hardy Jones. He floats by them like a ghost and they never know any different, never realize how close they were to harm. But Ashlyn’s fantasy is different. In her fantasy, Hardy Jones always exists, but she bears his anger. In her fantasy, he punishes her. This is what she dreams about: a punishment large enough to wipe away her guilt and shame. Prison couldn’t do the job, so in her mind, she tries to turn back time and imagine a night where she pays for her shame, even with her own life. Ali’s eyes well with tears and she reaches for Ashlyn, wrapping her arms around her. “No,” she says. “It wouldn’t have been better, don’t you ever say that. I love you, okay? I need you here. I need you here with me.” Ashlyn finally relaxes in her arms and Ali holds her closer, cradling her. “You can’t keep thinking like this,” she says. “You need to talk to your doctor, baby. You need to find a way to cope.” “I know,” Ashlyn whispers. “And I think—” She pauses, blinking back more tears. “I think we should take a little break. I think…with everything that happened with Missy—” “I know,” she says. “I won’t come around.” “I just—I need to know that you’ll be safe around her, honey. I know that you want to be, I just need to know that you can do it.” “Okay,” Ashlyn says. Ali kisses her hair. She’s spent so many years separated from Ashlyn. She can’t even believe that she’s asking for more time away. But she has to, for the sake of her family. She knows that she’s doing the right thing but that doesn’t make it hurt any less. She holds Ashlyn in her arms and rocks her under the moonlight. That night, when Ali had returned to consciousness, she didn’t remember much of what happened hours before. She didn’t learn until her mother told her later that Ashlyn thought she might have died. How lucky she was to not suffer bleeding in her brain, how lucky she was to walk away with a few cracked ribs and bad memories. She sometimes wonders if her unconsciousness had been a gift. Maybe it was a blessing, not knowing. Maybe the physical pain was her payment. She has paid her debt already, and Ashlyn? Maybe she will always continue to owe. Team Over the next three weeks, Ashlyn visits Dr. Holiday three times. The good news is that when she tells the doctor why she’d stopped going earlier, she learns that she qualifies for a government assistance program that will help pay for part of her sessions. Now the copay won’t break her—it only stretches her to budget meticulously, holding herself accountable for every penny she spends. This is adulthood, she tells herself. She’d been spoiled by Ali’s generosity. Food just appeared in the refrigerator, toilet paper on the rolls, spare underwear in the drawers. At one point, Ashlyn rips a hole in one of her socks, but she doesn’t throw it out. She learns how to twist that hole around in her shoe so that it barely shows. The bad news is that Dr. Holiday still hasn’t determined what exactly is wrong with her. She knew the doctor wouldn’t know instantly, but shouldn’t a head doctor, like any other type of doctor, employ an assessment period and eventually reach a diagnosis? Each week, she sits in Dr. Holiday’s chair, answering her questions. Each week, she hovers over her chair at the end of the hour, waiting for the doctor’s conclusion. But Dr. Holiday just smiles and tells her “See you next week.”After a while, Ashlyn grows frustrated. What’s the point of all of this if she doesn’t learn what’s wrong with her? Why scrimp and save, why portion out time to talk with a stranger if she doesn’t eventually learn how to fix herself? Why do any of this if it won’t lead her back to Ali? “When are you gonna tell me what’s wrong with me?” she finally asks one afternoon. Dr. Holiday gives her a patient smile. “What do you mean?” “Something’s wrong, obviously. That’s why I’m here.” “It’s still early,” the doctor says. “I don’t have a complete picture yet.” “Then give me the incomplete picture.” Dr. Holiday pauses. “I’m looking at a range of trauma disorders,” she said. “I promise I’ll tell you more when I know more.” That afternoon, Ashlyn Googles this on the library computer. Post-traumatic stress disorder is the most popular hit, but all she finds are pages about soldiers returning from war, pictures of men riding in jeeps through dusty deserts. How could this possibly apply to her? Inside is bad, but nothing is worse than the hell of war. Besides, she hasn’t experienced half of these symptoms. Insomnia. Fatigue. Nightmares. The others—hyper vigilance, self-destructive behavior, social isolation—she blames on Inside, not Hardy Jones. And if she developed trauma Inside, then what explains why she killed a man? She wants this diagnosis to get down to the root of her problems. She wants to learn what’s truly wrong inside her so that she can fix it. Two or three times, she considers calling Ali and telling her that she’s started going back to her doctor. She wants Ali to know that she’s trying. But she doesn’t. A little break, Ali called it, and even though she’d said it was for Missy’s sake, Ashlyn knows it’s for Ali’s sake as well. Who could blame her for needing a break? Ashlyn has upended her entire life. Who wouldn’t need a break from that? So she doesn’t call, even though she misses Ali. She misses Ali’s daughter too. During the first week, Missy texted her constantly. Coach, I’m sorry. Are you still mad at me? Ashlyn knew she shouldn’t respond—a break, Ali said—but she hated the idea of Missy blaming herself. So she sent back a response: I’m sorry, it’s all my fault. I have to go away for a bit but you did nothing wrong.. Missy sent her a series of frantic texts back. Go away? Where? Where are you going? Coach? She didn’t respond to these. She would let Ali explain it. She would keep her distance like she’d promised. She would accept her punishment—a life in Dumfries away from Missy and Ali. She would pick up extra shifts at Parker’s Hardware so that she could continue to see her doctor. She would try to avoid Will. But she still can’t keep away from the Kriegers completely. Each Saturday, she ventures deep into the park, almost near the housing complex that surrounds it. She sits on a tall hill by herself and watches Missy’s games. It isn’t a great view; she can’t even see the other goal and only learns when Missy’s team scores by the cheering of the crowd. But she can see Missy, which is the only part that matters. She watches Missy the whole game, even when she isn’t near the ball, even when Missy grows bored in goal, pacing, reaching for her water bottle, fiddling with her towel. She imagines herself telling Missy to pay attention. You can’t get bored. Do you know how many goalkeepers I’ve seen get beat just because they’ve gotten bored? But she doesn’t tell her this, of course. She loves that moment when the ball crosses midfield and Missy snaps to attention. She watches as a forward dribbles, taking on the Missy one v one. Ashlyn juts out her arms, and as Missy makes the save, she almost feels the ball skip off her own hands. *** The hardest part of parenting, Ali Krieger has learned, is explaining the unexplainable. She’d been delighted once her daughter had finally learned to talk, although with speech came an unassailable amount of questions. Why is the sky blue? Why do balls bounce? Why are some people tall and some people short? Where does the sun go at night? Her daughter has always been full of questions, some of which Ali answered easily by explaining light rays or genetics. But others stumped her, like when Missy asked why she and Will were divorcing. Don’t divorced people fight all the time? Don’t they hate each other? But she and Will didn’t, so why did they have to divorce. Ali didn’t know how to explain to her daughter that sometimes marriages ended over big reasons, like infidelity, and other times, times like hers, marriages ended quietly and undramatically. She wasn’t happy with him; when she imagined herself coming home to Will every night for the rest of her life, she felt trapped, not relieved. And it wasn’t because of anything awful he’d done or anything awful she’d done. It wasn’t him and it wasn’t her. It was the two of them together that didn’t work. But how do you explain to a child the nuances of an adult relationship? She barely understood it herself. “But what did Will do, Alex?” her mother kept asking. “No husband’s perfect, honey. You can’t just give up on your marriage.” “I just want more,” Ali said. “I can’t explain it, but I just do. I just need more.” She didn’t fully understand what she’d meant until she found Ashlyn again. Now, in the three weeks that Ashlyn has been gone, Ali finds herself again stumped on how to explain her absence to Missy. Each day, Missy bombards her with new questions. “Where’s Coach?” “She had to go away for a little bit.” “Is she still mad at me?” “She was never mad at you, honey. She was just mad. Sometimes adults just get mad.” “Then why won’t she text me back if she’s not mad at me?” “She’s just…busy. She has to take a little time to herself right now.” “Is Coach mad at you?” Ali pauses after this one. “No,” she finally says. “If she’s not mad at you, then how come she doesn’t come over anymore?” Finally, Ali realizes that she needs to give Missy a real answer, even if it’s an answer she won’t like or understand. So she tells Missy the truth: she and Ashlyn decided to take a break. Missy’s face falls. “So you broke up,” she says. “No, no,” Ali says. “A break is different. It’s like…a timeout.” “A timeout?” “Yes, or it’s like…it’s like when you weren’t playing your best and the coach made you sit on the bench. You weren’t playing but you were still on the team, right? That’s where Ashlyn is right now. She’s just on the bench.” Missy considers this for a minute. “So she’s still on the team?” she asks warily. “Yes,” Ali says. “She’s still on our team.” But she’s not exactly sure that this is the case. She hasn’t heard from Ashlyn in weeks, and even though she asked for this break, the radio silence still worries her. What if she’s pushed Ashlyn away for good? What if Ashlyn realizes, after this break, that she doesn’t want Ali anymore, that she doesn’t need her? And how long is a break supposed to last, anyway? A timeout ends eventually. You can’t leave a player on the bench forever before deciding whether she should be cut. And Ali isn’t sure how long she can exist in this purgatory, this period of waiting. How is she supposed to know whether Ashlyn is safe to bring around Missy? How is she supposed to know whether Ashlyn will ever have another outburst? I don’t want her around Missy ever again, Will had said, and she’d agreed. But she can’t possibly hold herself to this, can she? How is she supposed to exist if she can never be around the two most important people in her life at the same time? On the fourth week, she spots Ashlyn at Missy’s soccer game. Not at the game, actually, but she makes out Ashlyn’s figure on top of a hill overlooking the park. She only notices once Kelley nudges her and then, she finds herself unable to speak. Has Ashlyn been sitting there every weekend? Watching from afar a life she cannot join, like a pauper spying a feast through a crack in the door. “You have to make a decision, Kriegs,” Kelley says. “You can’t just leave her in limbo like that. It’s not fair.” She sighs. Kelley’s right. She has to make a decision, if not only for Ashlyn’s sake then for her own. So that evening, she calls Ashlyn to tell her that she saw her at the game. Ashlyn pauses a long moment. “Oh,” she says. “I wasn’t trying to—I mean, I just wanted to watch—” “She’d be glad to know you were there.” Ali pauses. “She misses you.” “I miss her too.” A silence passes between them, along with the words Ali doesn’t say. And I miss you. I miss you so much, it hurts. “I’ve been seeing my doctor,” Ashlyn says. She admits this almost shyly. Ali leans back against her headboard, hugging a pillow to her chest. “I’m glad,” she says. “Are you feeling any better?” “I don’t know. She said something about trauma. She doesn’t know for sure yet.” “My therapist told me that too,” Ali says. “About my nightmares. It changed us, the attack. It changed us both.” Ashlyn’s silent on the other end and Ali wonders if she’s pushed her too far. She never uses that word or any of its synonyms. Attack. Assault. Beating. Each word conveys a violence she has tried to push past, so in her mind and out loud, she softens her memories with euphemisms. That night. What happened to us. As if her language becoming vague will somehow turn the memories fuzzy as well. But she’s realized that this in itself is a coping mechanism, one that hasn’t served her particularly well. Her mother said so herself. She has tried to pretend that she is over the attack, but she isn’t. She may never be. And it’s unfair to Ashlyn to pretend otherwise. Cruel, even. She needs Ashlyn to know that they are in this together. If they are bonded through trauma, then they are also connected in their recovery. “I want to get better, Al,” Ashlyn says. “I want to get better for you and Missy.” “I know, baby,” she whispers. “I know.” That night, she falls asleep cradling her pillow and thinking of Ashlyn. She does not have the nightmare. She does not dream at all. *** When she’d first started dating Ashlyn, Ali suggested they keep their relationship a secret. She was sixteen and confused, unsure how to tell her family and her friends that she wasn’t the girl they thought she was. She’d never been a secretive child, not the way Kyle was. He always seemed furtive and cagey, vague about his plans, never forthcoming about who he was with or when he’d be back. She later learned that he was trying to cover-up two secrets: his sexuality and his drug addiction. Ironically, the harmless secret—that he liked boys—pushed him to the harmful one. Even though Ali didn’t understand at the time, she never wanted to be secretive like Kyle. Why would she be? What did she possibly have to hide? Then Ashlyn kissed her and suddenly she found herself tumbling down a new, unexplored path. She didn’t know what her parents would say if they knew she liked a girl. Maybe Kyle had a good reason to hide his attraction to boys. Maybe he knew something she didn’t know. So she wanted to hide as well, even though it meant dragging Ashlyn back into the closet. Ashlyn was as supportive as she could be. She knew a queer relationship was new to Ali and she promised to be patient. So they kept up the facade of friendship, resisting the urge to hold hands or kiss in public, and they would have kept up that facade longer if Ali’s mother hadn’t wandered in on their make-out session while bringing up laundry. Finally exposed, Ali was forced to tell the truth. She thinks about this the next weekend when she sneaks out of the house to see Ashlyn. Maybe “sneaks” isn’t the right word. After all, she isn’t a teenager, climbing out her window long after curfew. She isn’t making surreptitious plans for the dead of night. Instead, she arranges to meet Ashlyn on a Saturday afternoon downtown. But it feels like sneaking still because she doesn’t tell Missy where she’s going. She drops Missy off at her father’s for the weekend, and when Missy asks what Ali plans to do, she tells her daughter that she’s going home to catch up on work. She feels guilty as she steers her SUV downtown, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell Missy the truth. She doesn’t know where she and Ashlyn stand right now, and she doesn’t want to give Missy false hope that their break has ended. Perhaps even more, she doesn’t want Missy to mention her date to Will. She hates that she cares what her ex-husband thinks, but she does. Will barely tolerates Ashlyn at the hardware store. He’d be livid if he knew that Ali was seeing her again. He doesn’t know about everything they’ve been through together, how trying to save Ashlyn feels a little like saving herself. So that afternoon, she meets Ashlyn at a place they’re least likely to be discovered: the movie theater. She felt silly suggesting it. Who goes to see a movie in the middle of the day, besides old people and families with children? But during those first secretive weeks of their relationship, the movie theater had been an invaluable cover. Two girls could go on a date to the movies without anyone reading it as such. They could climb to the back row and kiss until they were breathless, and as long as the theater was dark, no one would even notice. For all of her adult life, she’s associated the movie theater with this small act of rebellion, even as she went with men whose hands she held publicly. And she can’t help but think about it now as she makes her way across the empty lobby to Ashlyn. She feels giddy at the sight of her—Ashlyn standing by the concessions stand, hands shoved in the pockets of her jeans, her black baseball cap turned backwards. She tries to hide her smile but Ashlyn smiles too, pulling her into a hug. “I missed you,” she murmurs into her ear, and Ali buries her face into Ashlyn’s neck, grateful for the familiar feel and smell of her. Inside the theater, Ali reaches for Ashlyn’s hands and leads her up the steps to the back row. She isn’t exactly sure why she does this—maybe nostalgia, maybe desire, maybe a need, after the stress of the past month, to feel like the carefree girl she once was. Either way, Ashlyn remembers exactly what it means when they find seats in the back row. She smiles as Ali pushes up the arm rest between them, squeezing into Ashlyn’s side. As soon as the lights dim, they’re kissing and Ali feels sixteen again, thankful for the darkness in the empty theater. She kisses Ashlyn’s neck, her fingers trailing down her stomach until they slip under her waistband. Ashlyn’s breath hitches. “Al,” she whispers. “What’re you doing?” Ali smiles. “I miss you,” she says. “But we’re in public.” “There’s nobody here.” “What if someone walks in?” “I can be quiet,” Ali says. “Can you?” Adult Ali lists all the reasons this is an irresponsible idea. Lawyer Ali rattles off public indecency statutes. But teenage Ali—the girl who still exists, somewhere, inside of her—just wants to have a little fun. And Ashlyn does too. She bites her lip, thinking for a second, then she laughs, shaking her head as she pulls Ali into another kiss. Ali smiles, kissing her back as she quietly unbuckles Ashlyn’s belt. She slips her fingers down her boxers, rubbing her slickness. “You’re so wet,” she whispers. Ashlyn moans quietly. She slides a hand up Ali’s shirt, rubbing a thumb over her hardened nipple, and Ali’s barely started stroking her when a group of four enters the movie theater, feeling through the darkness for seats five rows in front of them. She should stop. She knows she should stop. But she only strokes Ashlyn slower, teasing her. She’s stunned by how turned on she is by the possibility of discovery. She can tell the thought turns Ashlyn on too. She’s biting her lips so hard to keep from moaning that the skin underneath is white. When she finally comes, her legs shake and she grips Ali’s thigh hard until she finally passes through her pleasure. After, Ali licks her fingers clean and Ashlyn smirks, buttoning up her jeans. “You’re bad,” she whispers, before kissing Ali’s neck. Ali doesn’t remember anything about the movie. In the theater, she feels herself transforming back into a teenager again. Back when her biggest secret was that she was in love with her best friend, before she had dark secrets she learned to hide away. She knew something was wrong with her marriage when she could never bring herself to tell Will about the attack. She’d intended to many times. She had even practiced how she might say it: Will, something happened to me when I was young. I just thought you should know. But she never told him. Time passed. The nightmares faded. She found that night easier to push out of her memory. But the secret somehow hung between them, invisible to him but wedging against her always, like a lump caught in her throat. But with Ashlyn, she has no secrets. Ashlyn knows the worst thing that has ever happened to her. Ashlyn loved her in the before and the after, the person who was broken and the person trying to repair the pieces. *** When they step out into the bright afternoon, Ali sees a ghost. She almost doesn’t recognize the woman at first. Her eyes are still adjusting to daylight and her mind is more than a little distracted by Ashlyn rubbing small circles on her lower back. In her post-sex haze, Ali can’t even remember where she parked, which is a problem. She needs to find her car now because she needs to take Ashlyn home and finish what they’ve started. She needs to make up for lost time. She glances around the plaza, searching for her SUV, when suddenly Ashlyn stops, gripping her waist tightly. Ali stops too, following Ashlyn’s gaze across the street until she notices an old woman staring at them. She feels the air leave her chest. The mother. Hardy Jones’ mother. After the trial, she thought she’d never see the woman again. She was leaving Dumfries, the newspaper had said, moving in with her daughter back west. Well, good riddance, Ali had thought. She’d wanted to slap Mrs. Jones during the trial. The woman asked the judge for the maximum sentence. Death. She wanted Ashlyn sentenced to death for killing her miserable son. The woman was grieving, but Ali hated how her grief weighed on Ashlyn. So what if Hardy Jones’ mother loved him? It didn’t make him a good person. It didn’t erase what he’d done to them. She didn’t know how she could disagree with the death penalty, yet still believe that Hardy Jones had deserved to die. She didn’t make much sense to herself in those days. But she hated Mrs. Jones for trying to manipulate the judge and jury, for making Ashlyn second-guess what she’d done. She shouldn’t have killed Hardy but only because his life wasn’t worth sixteen years of hers. Not because he was a good man who deserved to die happy and old. Later, when Ali became a mother herself, she developed more empathy for Mrs. Jones. She’d never understood how the woman could stand in a courtroom on behalf of her evil son. But now that she had a daughter of her own, she learned what it was like to be blinded by that type of love. Defending your child made sense; what didn’t was abandoning him, the way Ashlyn’s mother had abandoned her during the trial. Now that’s the part that Ali finds unthinkable. Still, she’d banished Mrs. Jones to the recesses of her memory along with every hurtful part of that trial until she finds herself staring straight at her, the woman staring back. Ashlyn makes a little strangled sound in her throat, like an animal caught in a trap. Ali grips her waist, ushering her down the sidewalk. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay.” She doesn’t even know if she’s walking in the direction of her car, but she doesn’t care. She just needs to move Ashlyn along the sidewalk, out of the gaze of a woman who had, years ago, asked for her death. *** All weekend, Ashlyn can’t stop thinking about Hardy Jones’ mother. She tries to because she know that Ali wants her to forget. In the movie theater parking lot, she’d stared at her hands, shell-shocked, while Ali leaned over and rubbed the back of her neck. “Don’t even think about it,” Ali said, as if she could will her not to. Ashlyn never forgot Mrs. Jones’ face. Mrs. Jones never forgot hers either. How could she? How could you forget the woman who had killed your son? Who removed him, forever, from the planet. Ali brought her home and fixed her tea. She fluttered around the kitchen, offering food, offering whatever she hoped might distract Ashlyn. She tried to allow herself to be distracted. She was back with Ali again—shouldn’t she be happy? Shouldn’t she be thrilled, even? She tried not to think about Mrs. Jones. She tried to focus only on Ali. But later that night, when they made love again, her heart wasn’t in it. She knew that she’d only been invited over because Missy was at her dad’s. She still hadn’t been granted full access back to Ali’s life; she was on a probationary period. Who could blame Ali for not trusting her yet? Who could blame Mrs. Jones for still hating her? Hardy Jones was a bad man, but maybe he could have changed. Maybe, if Ashlyn had done the right thing and called the police, he would have gone Inside and emerged better. Maybe Hardy Jones would have become a good man someday but Ashlyn had taken that chance away from him. On Monday, she’s so distracted that she misses her bus and arrives at work ten minutes late. When she walks through the store, she notices her co-workers staring at her. It unsettles her. Nobody ever stares at her. She works so quietly that half the time, nobody even knows she’s there. She glances at her watch. Is she really that late? Is that why everyone is watching her? She doesn’t receive her answer until she steps inside the locker room and spies a newspaper on the table. There, on the front page, she reads the headline: Dumfries Killer Returns. Her mugshot, alongside a smiling photo of Hardy Jones. He’s wearing a collared shirt, his hair parted and slicked to the side. He looks youthful. Innocent. She stumbles backwards into the locker. Mrs. Jones. She must’ve alerted the newspapers. Ashlyn feels stupid for never considering the possibility that this might happen. No one would care about a fifteen-year-old case, she’d thought, but the story had been so sensational at the time and Dumfries didn’t see many murders. All it took was a slow news day and a vindictive mother to blow the careful life she’d been building to pieces. “I knew something wasn’t right about you.” Will Parker appears in the doorway, holding a paper. He doesn’t look angry, oddly enough. He looks almost pleased, as if a long-considered hunch has finally been proven correct. “Pack your stuff,” he says. “You’re done here.” The moment she’s feared for months arrives suddenly and quietly. She waits for the devastation to wash over her, but finds instead, that she feels nothing. She unclips her work badge, setting it on top of the table. Then she walks out the hardware store. She keeps walking downtown, past donut shops and restaurants, past grocery stores bearing racks of newspapers that feature a picture of her crying face. *** In the morning, Ali decides to sleep in. She never does this—forget her job, motherhood hardly allows for such indulgences—but she figures that she deserves a leisurely morning for once. Will’s dropped Missy off at school. Ashlyn left for work already. She rolls over in bed, hugging the pillow where Ashlyn slept. It still smells like her shampoo. She doesn’t know the next time Ashlyn will sleep over again, and the thought disturbs her. She should talk to Will. She can tell him that Ashlyn is getting help, visiting a doctor regularly. She can tell him that she agrees that Ashlyn shouldn’t move in yet, but keeping her away from Missy forever is unreasonable. He’ll have to understand that, won’t he? Maybe he hadn’t even meant what he said. He’d been angry that day, they’d all been emotional. Maybe now, with the distance of time, he’ll be able to see their situation more clearly. She rolls over and reaches for her phone to text Will that she needs to speak to him later. But before she can even unlock her phone, she sees that her screen is filled with missed calls and voicemails. Two are from Kelley. She frowns, listening to the first one: “Jesus, Ali, call me.” The next message is from Tracy, one of the other moms from Missy’s soccer team, who also asks Ali to call her back. “Look, Ali, I don’t judge whatever you do in your personal life,” Tracy says, “but I’d think someone like you would exercise better judgment when it comes to the kids.” Ali frowns, swinging her legs over the edge of her bed. What the hell is Tracy talking about? What crisis has befallen a junior-level club soccer team that requires everyone to call her this early in the morning? But then she listens to Kelley’s second message. “Ali? Did you read the news yet? Call me, everyone’s going crazy.” She scrambles for her laptop, opening to The New York Times. But she sees nothing beyond the normal tragedies—foreign wars and political scandals, nothing that would warrant all of these phone calls. Then, on a hunch, she searches for the Dumfries Daily News. There, on the front page, is a copy of Ashlyn’s mugshot. In Ali’s inbox, an onslaught of emails awaits her, ranging in levels of rage. The angriest is from the mother of the backup keeper. Her email simply says, “I can’t believe you brought a killer around our children.” Ali slams her laptop shut and dials Ashlyn. There’s no answer, but she keeps trying, as she rifles through her drawer for clothes. If the parents on the soccer team have seen the newspaper, then who else has? Has Ashlyn seen it yet? She tears up at the thought of Ashlyn looking back at her old mugshot, her deepest shame printed on a newspaper spread out all over town. Ali can deal with the angry parents later, once she knows that Ashlyn is okay. But while she dials, Kelley calls her and she finally answers. “Jesus, Ali,” Kelley says. “Why didn’t you tell me?” “I really can’t talk right now, Kelley,” she says, shimmying into a pair of jeans. “You lied to me.” She pauses, buttoning her jeans. Kelley’s upset. Of course Kelley’s upset. Wouldn’t Ali be angry too if she suddenly discovered that a friend had brought a felon repeatedly around her child? A murderer, nonetheless. Wouldn’t she be angry if this felon were anybody except Ashlyn? “It’s complicated,” she says. “I told you what she said about hurting people. I asked you point-blank and you lied to me—” “I’m sorry!” she says. “But what the fuck was I supposed to do?” “I don’t know,” Kelley says. “Maybe trust me?” Ali can hardly think on the drive to Parker’s Hardware. She knows that Kelley’s right, she shouldn’t have lied. Out of everyone, Kelley at least deserved to know the truth. But look at how everyone’s reacted. Can you blame her for not wanting to reveal where Ashlyn had spent the last sixteen years of her life? She dials Ashlyn as she drives, but there’s still no answer. When she hops down at the store, she foolishly hopes to spot Ashlyn carrying flower pots across the floor. Maybe she’s so hard at work, she hasn’t had a chance to check her phone. Maybe she doesn’t yet feel the ground trembling underneath her. But instead of Ashlyn, Ali immediately sees Will. Her heart sinks. She can tell just by looking at him that he’s already seen the paper. “Where is she?” she says. “Gone,” he says. She grabs his arm. “You promised,” she says. “You promised me, Will. That you wouldn’t do anything without talking to me first—” “That’s before you tricked me into hiring your ex-con girlfriend.” Will squints at her, incredulously. “A murderer? You had our kid sleeping in the same house as a murderer? Jesus Christ, Ali, what were you thinking?” She’s only thinking about one thing now: how to find Ashlyn. She can feel it already, Ashlyn’s desire to run. Her instincts will tell her to flee, to get the hell out of Dumfries, but running is the worst possible thing she can do. If she runs, the judge will be within his rights to send her to jail. Ashlyn can’t get locked up again. Even a brief jail sentence might destroy her. Ali releases her grip on Will’s arm. Part of her hates him for acting without her, for not trusting her enough to include her in his decision. But why would he trust her? Why would anyone? What has she done since Ashlyn’s return except lie to everyone she knows? *** That night, Ali drives around town slowly, searching for Ashlyn. The slow, steady rain makes it difficult to see but she drives carefully past any place Ashlyn might be. The bus depot. The coffee shop downtown. The dive bar where Kelley had found her. This is after an unsuccessful afternoon she spent calling and calling, once she realized that Ashlyn was not answering because she didn’t want to talk. She’d gone by her apartment and waited an hour, two hours, but there was no sign of her. There aren’t many places to hide in Dumfries—this scares Ali the most. But she tries to steady her nerves as she glides down the darkened streets. She can’t stay out much longer. She already hates the fact that she left Missy at home alone. But she couldn’t drag her daughter along on this endless search and truthfully, she’s scared to discover what state she might find Ashlyn in. If she finds her at all. She grips her steering wheel tighter. No, she will find her. She has to. Where else does Ashlyn have to go? In the end, she finds Ashlyn in a place that she would never think to look but the place that perhaps makes the most sense. She’s driving past Graham Park, the soccer fields where she used to play as a girl, when she spots a huddled figure on a bench. A transient, she thinks, until she notices a flash of blonde hair and decides to pull over. She leaves her car running and sprints across the grass, holding a rain coat over her head. There she finds Ashlyn sitting alone, hugging her knees, her hair and clothes drenched. “What’re you doing out here?” Ali says, holding the coat over Ashlyn’s head. Ashlyn doesn’t answer. She won’t look Ali in the eye and when Ali tries to touch her, she flinches. Ali swallows. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s just me. It’s Ali. Let’s get you inside, okay? Can you come inside with me?” She’s speaking gently, the way you talk to a hurt child. She has never seen Ashlyn like this, silent, nearly catatonic. Feral, almost, as if any sudden movement could send her running. Ali slowly drapes the coat across Ashlyn’s shoulders. She feel the rain pelting her skin. “Let’s get in the car,” she says. “Let’s get you warm, okay? Let’s take you home and get you warm.” She eases an arm around Ashlyn and tries to lift her. Ashlyn doesn’t resist. Her skin feels cold as ice, and in the car, Ali blasts the heat. Maybe the warmth awakens her, but Ashlyn turns her head toward the window. She’s crying. “I’m sorry,” she says. “No, don’t say that.” Ali rubs her thigh. “You don’t have to be sorry. It’s okay. Everything’s okay.” But they both know that this isn’t true. Everything is far from okay. Ashlyn’s lost her job, and who else in Dumfries will hire her now that the whole town knows about her past? How is Ali supposed to explain this to her friends and co-workers? How is she supposed to explain this to her daughter? But she can’t think about that now, not yet. When they get home, she ushers Ashlyn into the guest room. She sits her on the bed and kneels in front of her, unlacing her shoes and unrolling her soaked socks. She helps Ashlyn out of all of her wet clothes until she’s sitting in her underwear, then she wraps her in a fluffy black towel. She runs another towel over her hair. “It’s over,” Ashlyn says. Ali pauses. “No, it’s not,” she says. “It’s fine, everything will be fine.” “Everyone knows—” “I’ll take care of it,” Ali says. “You have to trust me to take care of you.” But she doesn’t know how she can do this. She doesn’t have a plan. She doesn’t know how to repair the damage of the newspaper article, how to stop everyone around Dumfries from cowering in fear every time Ashlyn walks by. She doesn’t know how to find her another job, how to ensure she complies with her parole requirements. How to make sure she doesn’t run. Ali’s in over her head, and after she brings Ashlyn a change of clothes, she steps into her bedroom, trying to collect herself. But she hears footsteps behind her and she turns to see Missy. She looks defensive, her face frozen in anger. “Is it true?” she demands. Ali lets out a deep breath. “Yes,” she finally says. “Then why is she here? Why are you helping her?” It’s complicated, Ali wants to say. The law is complicated, ethics are complicated, the whole world is a complex place. And the lessons you learn as a child—the simple rules you live by— prove insufficient the more you grow and the larger the world appears to be. But she knows that this doesn’t answer Missy’s question. The answer to why she’s helping Ashlyn is quite simple, actually. She loves her. Love is perhaps the simplest, most complex thing there is. She doesn’t tell this to Missy, though. For once, she wants to give her daughter a real answer. For once, she wants to tell the truth. She sits on the edge of the bed and takes a deep breath. “When I was young, a man hurt me,” she says. She doesn’t realize she’s crying until she finishes the story, a story about two girls driving home from a movie theater one night. She doesn’t realize she’s crying until she feels her daughter’s hands on her cheeks, brushing away the tears. Inside Chapter Notes Thanks for still reading, everyone! I know this one hurts a little. Ashlyn wakes up Inside. Not Inside where she lived for sixteen years but a different Inside, a new one. This Inside has no bars, no hard concrete floors. No splotchy ceiling, no scribblings on the walls, no small metal sink in the corner. This Inside is nice, lovely even. She’s lying on a big, soft bed covered in a light blue comforter. The cell is larger than twelve by nine—when she measures it, she counts seventeen steps from wall to wall, thirty steps to the bathroom attached. The bathroom encourages her. Now she’ll never have to step Outside, not if she doesn’t want to. And she doesn’t. She locks the door handle, comforted by that resounding click. There. Now she’s locked Inside, where she belongs. She can’t hurt anyone in here and Outside—with its tricks and games and shifting rules—can’t hurt her. She sinks back onto the bed. At least this Inside is quiet. Maybe here she can finally rest. She starts to close her eyes when she hears footsteps draw near, then a soft knock on the door. “Ash?” a woman’s voice says. “Are you up?” In the old Inside, no one ever knocked before entering. The guards unlocked your cell and trounced right in. She feels emboldened by that knock. This Inside feels more private. More secure. “Ash?” the voice says again. The doorknob jiggles. “Can you let me in? I made breakfast and I thought we could talk.” The voice sounds like Ali Krieger. But Ashlyn just rolls over onto the other side of the bed. She’s been through this before. In solitary, she used to hear Ali’s voice in her head. Ali crying, Ali pleading for help, Ali screaming her name. Ali laughing, Ali calling her baby, Ali saying I love you. It felt like a slow, steady torture, whether Ali’s voice was happy or sad. At least Ashlyn knew that the sad things happened. But as time went by, she began to question the happy parts of her life. Did any of them happen? What if it was all a dream? What if she had never existed Outside at all, if her memories of Outside are all made up? The more she thought about her old life, the less it made sense. A college scholarship playing soccer? No one in her family had gone to college. A steady girlfriend of four years? This part made the least amount of sense. Ali Krieger, who could want anybody, loving her? No, that couldn’t possibly be real. Her memories disintegrated into mist, scattering right inside of her head. Even now, she thinks about the voice outside the door. A woman’s voice offering her breakfast. She tries to envision the kitchen—a skillet on the stove, a bowl of colorful fruit on the table, a girl sitting at the counter, her legs swinging from the stools. She rolls onto the other side of the bed. No, that voice isn’t Ali. The voice isn’t real at all. The only things that are real exist right here inside this room. In a strange way, she’s missed Inside. Inside is good. Inside is home. *** In the evening, Dr. Holiday pays a visit. She’s a pretty, slender woman with curly brown hair and a calm demeanor required of her profession. She’s younger than Ali would have guessed from their earlier phone call, but then again, she knows next to nothing about the doctor. She hadn’t known who else to call when Ashlyn refused to leave the guest room. She felt stupid that she didn’t have a spare key to the room—she’d lost the key years ago, but once Missy passed the age where she might accidentally lock herself inside, she forgot to replace it. Why would she? She had guests sleep over so rarely, and she never imagined that she might have a guest who would simply refuse to exit. But Ashlyn has refused all day, and even worse, she won’t even answer Ali when she tries to speak to her through the door. At first Ali thought she might be sleeping. But then she realized that if she knelt on the ground, she could catch a glimpse of Ashlyn through the keyhole. Ashlyn sleeps, but she also lies on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. Sometimes she paces from wall to wall, back and forth. Other times, she sits in a corner of the room, hugging her knees. Ali knows what she should do. She should call Will and ask him to help her remove the door from its hinges. But the intrusion seems so violent, she can’t bring herself to do it. Besides, the last thing she wants to do is involve Will. He told her he didn’t want Ashlyn around Missy. How is she supposed to explain why Ashlyn is now sleeping under the same roof? Dr. Holiday knocks on the door. “Ashlyn?” she says. “It’s Dr. Holiday. May I come in?” Ali sighs, folding her arms across her chest. She’s irritated, although she knows she’s being unreasonable. But doesn’t the doctor realize that Ali has tried all of this already? She’s knocked and cajoled and begged. She’s made ludicrous promises she has no way of keeping—the extravagant trips they’ll take, the elegant meals they’ll eat, if only Ashlyn will open the door. So far, no luck. Yet the doctor thinks she can just knock and Ashlyn will somehow let her in. If it didn’t work for Ali, then how would it possibly work for Dr. Holiday? The doctor pauses, then she beckons Ali into the hallway. “Is there anything in there that she could use to hurt herself?” Dr. Holiday asks. Ali swallows. “No,” she says. “It’s just an empty room.” “No scissors, knives, nail files? What about sleeping pills?” “No, nothing like that—we don’t keep anything in there.” “Then I’m not sure if there’s anything I can do.” “What do you mean?” Ali says. “You’re her doctor.” “We don’t have many options,” Dr. Holiday says. “We could have her involuntarily committed, but that’s only if she appears to be a danger to herself or to you.” Ali doesn’t even want to think about sending Ashlyn to a mental hospital. She doesn’t think Ashlyn could handle another institution where she is not permitted to leave. “No, no, not that,” she says. “Then this might be a matter for the police,” Dr. Holiday says. “If you want her removed from your house.” “I don’t want her removed!” Ali says. “I’m worried. I don’t like the idea of her staying in that room by herself.” Dr. Holiday gives her a reassuring smile. “I understand,” she says. “But I can’t force her to come out. Maybe she just needs a break. You said she’s had a stressful few days. I’m sure she’ll get hungry at some point and decide to leave her room.” Dr. Holiday sounds so sensible that Ali almost feels silly for overreacting. Ashlyn needs a break. That sounds reasonable. Hasn’t Ali ever wanted to lock herself in a room for a while and not emerge until she’d cleared her head? So that night, she tells Missy to be extra quiet because Ashlyn is resting. She makes dinner and before going to bed, she knocks softly on Ashlyn’s door and tells her that leftovers are in the refrigerator. But when she wakes up the next morning and finds Ashlyn still in the guest room, the food untouched, she picks up her phone and dials. This time, she doesn’t call Dr. Holiday. This time, she calls Alex Morgan. *** Around Wilson, Paul & Associates, Alex Morgan has earned the nickname of The Covergirl. Ali rolls her eyes every time she hears one of the male attorneys refer to Alex as such. Ali isn’t in the business of expending energy defending beautiful women—beautiful women rarely need defending—but she understands how difficult it can be for female parole officers to be taken seriously, let alone female parole officers who look like swimsuit models. So even though she doesn’t know Alex well, she’s always felt a strange loyalty toward her. She always expects Alex to be fair to her clients, to offer warnings to first-time offenders who violate parole conditions instead of urging the judge to lock them up. She doesn’t expect, however, for Alex to drive over as soon as Ali calls. “I’m sorry,” Ali says. “I know this is unorthodox—” Alex waves her off. “It’s my job,” she says. “I need to know how my parolees are doing. I’m glad you called me.” It’s her job in the strictest sense. A parole officer normally visits to inspect a parolee’s home, to ensure she isn’t storing weapons or drugs or any other forbidden materials. But now, as Alex sits sipping coffee in the kitchen, Ali realizes that this feels less like a parole visit and more like a friendly house call. She’s grateful suddenly for Alex’s presence. “I didn’t know who else to call,” she says. It dawns on her suddenly, how alone she is. She takes a steadying breath, gripping her coffee mug. Alex touches her arm. “Is she eating?” she says. Ali nods. At breakfast, she’d gotten the sudden idea to leave toast and a glass of juice on a tray outside the door. After she showered, she returned to the guest room door but the food was gone, and later that afternoon, she found the empty plate and cup waiting for her. She doesn’t understand it. It’s almost as if Ashlyn is playing a strange game and Ali is trying to play along, trying to learn the rules. Why does Ashlyn refuse to exit the room? Why won’t she eat until Ali leaves the food for her by the door? “It’s like she’s back in prison again,” she says. “It’s like she wants to be.” Alex pauses, glancing toward the guest room door. “Did she ever tell you that she was in solitary confinement?” she asks. “What?” Ali says. She doesn’t admit the shameful truth: that Ashlyn never talks to her about prison, that she never even asks. Her mind fills in the blanks on her own, and she imagines Fluvanna as a series of painful humiliations: the awful food, the fights, the endless stretches of boredom. But when she imagines Ashlyn’s life inside prison, she has never even considered solitary confinement. Solitary is for the worst offenders. Ashlyn had been convicted of murder, yes, but second-degree—she was a young, first-timer, not a repeat offender who’d proven time and time again that she couldn’t live peaceably around the general population. What had Ashlyn possibly done that landed her there? “It was a minor infraction,” Alex says. “But she spent two months in there.” Ali’s eyes well up with tears. Two months? Two whole months in a small white cell, a fluorescent lightbulb burning overhead the entire time. She’s read the literature on solitary confinement. Torture, some activists call it, and she finds it hard to disagree. She read once that a few days of complete social isolation can alter the brain permanently. Anxiety, depression, anger. Hallucinations. If days can cause lasting mental damage, then what could two months do? She hunches over the table, her face buried in her hands. She feels Alex’s hand on her back. “I’m sorry,” Alex says. “I probably shouldn’t have told you but I thought you needed to know.” “I was afraid to know,” Ali says. “I should’ve asked.” “That doesn’t mean she would’ve told you,” Alex says. “She has to be ready to tell you.” When Alex leaves, she promises leniency about Ashlyn losing her job. “We’ll count this as her check-in,” she says, giving Ali a hug. Ali feels grateful for Alex’s compassion, but she realizes that she has no idea what to do next. Like Dr. Holiday told her yesterday, unless she wants to involve the police, she can’t force Ashlyn to come out of the guest room. She has to wait for Ashlyn to want this herself. But that’s the problem: staying in the guest room is what Ashlyn wants. She has sentenced herself to solitary confinement. She is the prisoner and the warden. Alex pauses in the driveway before climbing into her car. “You’re the girl, aren’t you?” she asks. “The girl Ashlyn was protecting?” Ali has never been asked this directly. Everyone living in Dumfries at the time knew, but somehow, she emerged from the scandal unscathed. She was seen as a double victim, a victim of a vicious attack and a victim of an unhinged girlfriend. Her parents had asked the courts to redact her name from the official records; she was a young assault victim, so the judge agreed. At the time, their request felt like a betrayal to Ashlyn, like Ali was trying to wash her hands clean of her. But later, she understood that they only wanted to protect her. And with the advent of search engines, she felt grateful that when she searched her name, nothing about a murder came up. Even the Dumfries Daily News article hadn’t seen fit to mention her, instead focusing on the sensationalism of the murder itself. Nobody who met her later in life—not Kelley, not Will— would ever know that she was involved in any way, which is what her parents wanted. But they hadn’t imagined how difficult it would be to hide a secret for so long. And she hadn’t imagined the strange sense of relief that would flow through her when she finally nods. “Yes,” she says. “I’m the girl.” *** Ali Krieger has never believed in magic. She had always been a rather rational child, which disappointed her parents terribly. She was skeptical of Santa Claus from the beginning—if he lived in the North Pole, then why did she see him at the Dumfries Mall each December?—and she lost faith in the tooth fairy early, when she heard her parents arguing one morning about who had forgotten to leave a dollar under her pillow. When she became a mother herself, she understood why her lack of belief was such a bummer. The fun in parenting is in turning ordinary life into the magical for your child. Adulthood is hard, so childhood, at least, should be a whimsical time where you believe in unicorns and dragons and anything you like. So when her daughter became obsessed with Harry Potter along with the rest of the world, she’d nurtured that love. Even though the pragmatist in her wanted to urge her daughter to just wait until the book arrived at the Dumfries Public Library, she drove Missy down to Barnes and Noble whenever a new book came out, waiting in that endless line for Missy to get her copy. There were worse things her daughter could be excited about than reading a book, and besides, she lived for the glee on Missy’s face when she cradled the new book in her arms. She brought Missy to each movie, even though a few were so long, she could barely keep her eyes open. She threw more than one themed party, complete with wands and robes and punch she named after Latin potions. Soon, Ali was sure, Missy would grow older and find the world of Harry Potter silly. She would outgrow her love for this magical universe eventually, but until then, as nonsensical as she currently found it, Ali wanted to protect that innocent part of her daughter that still wanted to believe that magic was real. That anything at all is possible. Ali has never been interested in considering the impossible. She’s a realist; she sees things for how they are and then she adapts. So when Ashlyn locks herself in the guest room, Ali calls into work and asks for personal time off. She devises a new schedule: at seven, she leaves breakfast outside the guest room door, then lunch at noon, and dinner at six. She collects the empty plates, grateful that Ashlyn is eating. But she doesn’t try to convince her to come outside. She’s learned by now that begging Ashlyn is futile. She’ll have to be patient and wait for Ashlyn to emerge on her own. But by the end of the first week, Missy still tries to coax Ashlyn outside, even though Ali has asked her to leave Ashlyn alone. “Why won’t she come out?” Missy asked days ago. “Because. She just needs a little time to herself.” “But why?” “She’s sad, honey. She needs to be sad by herself for a little.” “But isn’t she bored? I would be bored.” “She’s fine,” Ali said. “She’ll come out soon, we just have to wait.” She didn’t know this for sure, but she needed to reassure Missy—and perhaps even more, herself —that Ashlyn’s self-imposed sentence would end soon. Still, Missy is undeterred. Each day, she taps on the door quietly, holding her face close to the wood. “Coach, do you want to play outside?” she asks. Or, “Coach, wanna watch a movie with me?” Ashlyn doesn’t answer. She never answers. Missy’s hopeful insistence only breaks Ali’s heart. One afternoon, Ali is washing dishes in the kitchen when she hears Missy around the corner. She draws near and finds her daughter sitting outside the guest room door, the first Harry Potter book spread open in her lap. “Coach, I’m gonna read Harry Potter to you now so you don’t get bored,” Missy says. She begins to read the first page aloud. Ali swallows. The gesture is so sweet, but she has to tell Missy to stop. Missy should be outside playing with her friends, not stuck in the house trying to coax an adult out of her room. Besides, Ashlyn wants to be alone. She certainly doesn’t want to listen to a child read a six hundred page book aloud. But before Ali can say anything, she hears the floor boards in the guest room creak. She bends near the door knob and glances through the keyhole to discover that Ashlyn has moved from the bed to sit near the door. She can’t see her face from this angle, only the top of her head, but Ashlyn has drawn closer. It’s the first hopeful sign, and Ali gestures for Missy to keep reading. So Missy does, and when she grows tired, Ali takes over. She wraps an arm around her daughter, brushing back her hair, and she reads aloud until her voice grows hoarse. She doesn’t know if Ashlyn’s still listening. But she reads because she doesn’t know what else to do. She has to believe that this is helping. She has to believe in something. *** It works like a charm. Each afternoon, after Missy finishes her homework, she collapses in front of the guest room with her Harry Potter book and knocks on the door. “It’s me, Coach,” Missy says, “with some more Harry Potter.” She’s endlessly cheerful, which Ali envies. Missy acts as if this is a perfectly normal thing to do, reading aloud to her mother’s old girlfriend who has locked herself inside a room. Missy is a special kid—if Ali didn’t know this before, Missy has proven it this week. Each afternoon, Missy sits down to read. Each afternoon, Ali watches through the keyhole as Ashlyn drags herself out of bed and sits against the door to listen. Maybe it calms her, having a story to focus on. Maybe she likes hearing the sound of Missy’s voice. Ali doesn’t understand it, but she doesn’t stop it. It’s the only thing that seems to be working these days, the only thing that gives her hope. On Saturday, Missy has just started to read when the doorbell rings. Ali is startled to find Kelley and Tristan on her front step. Kelley’s eyes float past Ali to the hallway, where Missy sits, reading aloud to a closed door. Ali’s neck grows hot. “What’re you doing here?” she asks. “Well, Tristan wanted to see Missy,” Kelley says. “So I figured we’d just swing by.” Ali knows that this isn’t the whole reason Kelley is there. Kelley has come to investigate, to snoop through the debris of her life. But Ali lets the two in. What else can she do? She wants Missy to play outside with her friend, not spend her entire weekend talking at a door. Missy’s eyes light up when she sees Tristan, but then she glances back at her book. “Go outside and play,” Ali says. “Go on.” “But Coach—” “It’s fine,” Ali says. “We’ll read later, okay? Go on.” Missy slides her bookmark in place and she and Tristan head out to the backyard. Ali sighs, leading Kelley into the kitchen. She starts to make coffee, but instead reaches for a bottle of wine. It’s not even three yet, but she needs a drink, considering the conversation she can already tell she and Kelley are about to have. “You should’ve told me,” Kelley says. Ali pours the wine slowly. She knows that she should’ve told Kelley the truth. Maybe Kelley might have decided that she didn’t want Ashlyn around her daughter. Maybe she would’ve decided that she no longer wanted to be friends with a woman who was dating an ex-con. But either way, Kelley should have had a chance to decide. By not telling her, Ali took that choice away from her. And she hates herself for this. But telling her felt like betraying Ashlyn. Kelley is the closest thing Ashlyn has to a friend in Dumfries. Kelley, who flirted with Ashlyn and teased her, who had taken care of her when she’d gotten drunk. Kelley, who treated Ashlyn like she was a normal person. Ali couldn’t bring herself to take that away. She sets the wine in front of Kelley and sits across from her at the kitchen table. “I know,” she finally says. “But it’s complicated—” Kelley laughs bitterly. “I’m so tired of hearing you say that.” “Can I just explain?” Ali says. “Can you listen to me for a second? This is really hard for me to say.” Kelley nods, and Ali finally tells her about the attack. She fiddles with her wine glass the entire time, not looking at Kelley’s face. She has spent the rest of her life becoming a strong woman. A fierce competitor on the pitch, a tough advocate in the courtroom. But she still feels ashamed when she speaks about a night when she wasn’t strong, when she was completely vulnerable, at the mercy of a violent man. As if she had let herself down, somehow, by becoming a victim. She tells Kelley the entire story, all the way up to the rainy night when she’d brought Ashlyn home from the park. Kelley touches her hand. “Why didn’t you just tell me this?” she says. “It’s not you,” Ali says. “It’s me. I never talk about it. I thought I’d moved past it, then Ashlyn returned—” “And now she’s locked in your guest room.” Kelley glances toward the hallway. “Jesus, Kriegs, what’re you gonna do?” “I don’t know. I don’t know what I can do.” “You have to do something. You can’t keep her here forever.” Ali reaches for her wine, staring out the backyard at the girls playing keep-away on the grass. She wants to pretend that this is a typical weekend afternoon. She is supervising her daughter’s playdate and enjoying wine with a friend. She is waiting for Ashlyn to finish her shift at the hardware store and come over to watch a movie. She feels almost angry at herself for the lazy weekends she has enjoyed in the past, before she realized how much of a luxury they truly were. “I think she’s getting better,” she says. “I think if I keep reading to her—” “Maybe the hospital can—” “No,” she says. “Absolutely not. I’m not having her committed.” “Kriegs, it’s not the same as prison—” “I know,” she says, “but it’ll feel that way to her. I just need to keep reading to her. She’ll get better. She will.” She realizes how ridiculous she sounds even before she sees the look on Kelley’s face. A children’s book can’t turn back years of trauma. Ashlyn needs real help. But what if forcing her to get that help only makes things worse? She knows how involuntary commitment works in the state of Virginia. The police will arrive at her house and they’ll place Ashlyn in handcuffs. They’ll transport her to the hospital and she’ll have to wait at least 48 hours until special justices conduct a hearing on whether the hospital can detain her. It isn’t an arrest, but the whole process is so invasive and humiliating, she can’t imagine being the one who forces Ashlyn to endure it. But what are her other options? She doesn’t have a plan, only a feeble sense of hope. That night, her doorbell rings again. This time, Will stands on her welcome mat, and when he glances past her to the closed guest room, his face clouds into a frown. “I didn’t know you had company,” he says. Ali feels too exhausted to lie. She feels too exhausted to say anything at all. But Will reads into her silence. He brushes past her, stepping into the entryway. “Missy!” he yells. “Go get your stuff!” Missy enters from the kitchen, frowning. “It’s not your weekend,” she says. “You’re staying with me tonight,” he says. Then he leans close to Ali. “You’re out of your mind if you think I’m letting my kid sleep under the same roof as a killer.” She grabs Will’s arm and drags him outside. She’s never let Missy see the two of them fight and she doesn’t intend to start tonight. “Will, Ashlyn’s sick,” she says. “And you are too!” he says. “You’re sick in the head, Ali. Jesus, what’re you thinking? You’ve never been this way. You’ve never put someone else before Missy—” “I’m not!” she says. “Then get rid of her!” he says. “Get rid of her or I’m taking Missy with me. And don’t try to fight me on that either. I’m sure any judge in this whole goddamn state would agree with me.” The hardest part of being a lawyer, Ali has learned, is realizing that you are building an argument that you cannot win. It doesn’t matter how right you are, how convicted, how passionate. Sometimes you have to look at the evidence on the table and you have to admit to yourself that no matter how you re-arrange the details, you cannot create the story that you need to tell. Ali has experienced this plenty of times in the courtroom when she’s returned to her seat and realized that she is fighting an unwinnable battle. The realization is demoralizing, especially when you’ve put your heart and soul into a case. She always dreads the moment she tells a client that there’s nothing more than she can do for him. But nothing is more demoralizing than this moment when she realizes that Will is right. She can’t fight him. What if Will asks a judge to re-evaluate their custody agreement? What judge would allow Ali to have primary custody if he knew that she was harboring a killer in her guest room? What judge wouldn’t side with the concerned father? And what if a judge decides to give Will primary custody? What if she can only visit her daughter on weekends and holidays? Ali blinks back tears. “Okay,” she whispers. “I’ll get her.” As she silently packs Missy’s bag, she can’t believe that she’s sending her child away and she doesn’t know when she’ll return. But the alternative is just as unthinkable. She can’t kick Ashlyn out, not right now. Where would she go? How would she survive? At least Ali knows that Missy will be safe at her father’s. But Ashlyn has nobody except for her. That’s why she has to make this choice. It’s the only rational option. This is what she tells herself, but it still doesn’t stop her from wiping away tears as she quietly folds Missy’s clothes into her duffel bag. Missy watches her wide-eyed from the doorway. “I don’t want to go,” she says. “It’s just a little while, baby,” Ali says. “Just until Ashlyn is better—” “But why do I have to go?” Missy says. “What did I do?” “Nothing, honey, nothing.” Ali pulls her close, kissing her hair. “We just think—there’s a lot going on here and maybe it’d be better if you stayed with Daddy for a bit, okay? Just for a little while. It’ll be okay, I promise. Then you can come back and tell me about all the fun things you did, okay?” She tries to smile, but she feels like her face is breaking, right along with her heart. She watches from the window as Missy climbs into her father’s truck. She can’t bring herself to wave from the front porch, afraid that she might end up saying something she regrets. That night, the house settles into an eerie silence. She tries to read aloud from Missy’s book but she stops halfway through the page and starts to cry. “I’m sorry,” she says, but she isn’t sure who she’s apologizing to. Ashlyn, or Missy, or herself. It doesn’t matter, though. Nobody responds. Storm Chapter Notes Thanks again for all the love, everyone! I really appreciate the comments and kudos. Inside, Ashlyn loses the voice. Not Ali’s voice, although it reminds her of it sometimes. This voice is young, a girl’s voice. A cheerful voice. Innocent, even. She’d never heard this voice before in old Inside, which makes her latch onto it. The voice feels like a rope tethering her to Outside, if she can just wrap her hands around it and pull. She gathers near every time the voice visits, and over time, she begins to notice things she recognizes. The story about the boy wizard—hasn’t she read that before? And the voice itself, she knows it, doesn’t she? She’s heard it before, a girl calling her Coach. She closes her eyes and sees a wide grass field, orange cones, a soccer goal. A girl standing in front, fiddling with her gloves. A girl who looks just like Ali. She clenches her fists. Is this girl real? Has she just imagined her? Maybe in new Inside, her mind works harder to deceive her, her visions even clearer. But as she leans her ear against the door, she hears more than the voice. Footsteps back and forth, doors slamming, Ali (stop thinking it’s Ali, it’s not Ali) calling the girl to dinner. Then the girl is back with the story of the boy wizard and each time, Ashlyn gathers near, her memories (visions?) grow more vivid. The girl hugging her after a soccer game. The girl sprawling across her lap on the couch. The girl dropping a single screw into her palm. The girl has a name. “Missy,” she says out loud, but her voice is so hoarse from lack of use, it comes out as a whisper. She will speak back to this voice the next time she hears it, she decides. But she loses the voice as suddenly as she found it. She sits by the door, her ear pressed against the wood but she does not hear a girl’s voice. She only hears Ali—Ali speaking to her, Ali reading about the boy wizard, Ali crying. Ali crying. Ali crying. *** Ali’s friends had always been impressed by how clean her divorce was. Her lawyer friends, especially, who knew first-hand how messy divorces can get. For some people, sure, divorces can be expensive and dramatic drawn-out affairs. But Ali never expected this for her and Will. They weren’t messy people. And their marriage hadn’t dissolved because of a dramatic reason. So she had been pleased, but not surprised, when Will quickly agreed to all of her terms. The money split evenly, leaving her with the house and, most importantly, Missy. She worried most about their custody agreement; children, her family lawyer friends warned, is where the divorce tends to get the dirtiest, the most emotional. But she and Will both wanted what was best for Missy, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that the best thing would be for Missy to live at home with her mother. Will never fought her on this, and Ali agreed that he could have Missy for weekends and vacations as long as he gave her notice. She’d been proud of them for settling this easily, without requiring a judge to referee. She never imagined how Will might feel cheated by this arrangement, how he might grow to resent her over time because of it. She never imagined this until she experiences the humiliation of asking him for permission to visit her own daughter. On Saturday, she sits across from Missy at the Dairy Queen, watching her daughter stir her ice cream until it’s melted into a milky puddle. “I still don’t get why I can’t come home,” Missy says. Ali sighs, staring down into her own melted ice cream. She’s often envied Will for his convenient parenting role. He gets weekends and vacations, which means that he gets to be the fun parent. Not the one who makes Missy do homework and eat vegetables, but the one who takes her to the beach or theme parks, the one who plies her with candy before dropping her off and leaving Ali to deal with her sugar rush. But now Ali sees that she is not fit to be the fun parent, not when the fun parent is the away parent. She’s been miserable this whole week without her daughter. “I told you,” she says. “We have to wait a little bit. Until things settle down with Ashlyn.” “But why do I have to be the one to go?” Missy says. “Why are you picking her over me?” Ali bites her lip, reaching for her daughter’s hand. “I’m not, baby,” she says. “I’d never choose anyone over you. It’s just—she doesn’t have anyone, honey. You have Daddy but she doesn’t have anyone to take care of her. So I…I promise it’s just for a little longer. Just a little while longer.” She can’t actually promise this, of course. She doesn’t know when Ashlyn will be better. But she has to promise this because she has to promise her daughter something. But Missy just pulls her hand back and stares out the window. “I want to go home now.” It takes Ali a moment to realize that when Missy says home, she means her father’s house. Her daughter trounces out the door, and Ali sighs, throwing their ice cream in the trash. *** When Ali arrives home, she pauses on her front porch after sliding her key into the lock. She takes a deep breath. She’s started doing this lately, taking a moment to collect herself before she steps through her front door. Not that she steps through her front door often. She hardly ever leaves, only to buy groceries or visit her daughter. She’s haunted by the possibility that Ashlyn might try to speak to her and she won’t be there. She hates the thought of this, as if Ashlyn is a coma victim waking up in an empty room. What if Ashlyn panics after discovering that she’s alone? What if she takes off somewhere and Ali can’t find her this time? When she steps inside, her breath catches. The door to the guest room is open. “Ash?” she says. But she hears nothing except her own voice echoing in the house. She runs down the hallway to the guest room, but finds nothing except the mussed sheets. She yells Ashlyn’s name again, into the kitchen, up the stairs. She starts into her bedroom, her heart racing, when she stops suddenly in front of her daughter’s room. There, sitting on the floor beside the bookshelf, is Ashlyn. She starts to speak, then stops herself, clearing her throat. Ali kneels beside her. “What is it?” she says. “What is it, honey?” “Where’s Missy?” Ashlyn says. *** Outside changed. It always does. In the afternoon, Ashlyn sits in the backyard, her wet hair dripping down her back. She’d taken one shower, then another, partly out of disgust with herself, partly because the steam helped clear her mind. Now she’s sitting on the grass, the sun baking her skin. It feels good, to be touched like this, by light, by no one. She’s wearing borrowed clothes—a Georgetown Law t-shirt and a pair of Ali’s sweatpants that bunch up around her ankles. The t-shirts hangs off her shoulders, the pants loose around her waist. She’s lost weight. Ali has too. She sits beside her on the grass, her legs folded in front of her. She looks paler, her eyes a little sunken in, like she hasn’t been sleeping. Together they pick at a plate of sandwiches Ali just made. Ashlyn isn’t hungry but she eats anyway because she knows Ali will worry if she doesn’t. “How long was I in there?” she asks. Ali fiddles with her cup of tea. “About two weeks,” she says. She hadn’t meant to retreat for that long. She hadn’t meant to retreat at all. When Ali had brought her home, she thought she’d just go to sleep. But overnight, something changed her. Something inside her shifted and she doesn’t understand it, but now she’s terrified that it might happen again. That she could lose even more time from her life. She needs to talk to Dr. Holiday about it. Had Dr. Holiday visited her? She vaguely remembers hearing her voice, but maybe that wasn’t real either. Maybe it was all in her head. Ali sets her tea cup down. “Alex Morgan told me what happened,” she says. “That you were in solitary confinement.” “Oh,” Ashlyn finally says. “Alex said—” Ali takes a breath. “She said that you were in there for two months.” Two whole months? Ashlyn feels surprised, but she doesn’t know if it’s because she thought her time there was longer or shorter. Inside, time doesn’t exist, not in any traditional sense. And in solitary, she’d floated through this timelessness for sixty days. She glances up to find Ali blinking back tears. “It’s inhumane,” she says. “No one should be isolated that long. It does things to your head.” “I thought I imagined you,” Ashlyn says. She feels ashamed to admit this. It makes her sound crazy, crazier than she already feels. But Ali reaches for her hand, giving it a squeeze. “Well, I’m here now,” she says. They sit outside for the rest of the afternoon. After two weeks in the guest room, Ashlyn finds herself hungry for outdoors, craving the sunlight on her skin, the grass underneath her. Craving Ali, even though they barely touch. It’s enough, just to know that Ali is near her. Outside has changed over the past two weeks. Ashlyn can tell, even if she doesn’t know exactly how. Ali is glad to see her, but there’s a deep sadness in her right under the surface. Of course there is. Ashlyn winces, picturing the Dumfries Daily News, her face on the front page. For two weeks, Ali has been dealing with the fallout of Ashlyn’s mistakes. And Ashlyn left Ali to handle it all on her own. How could she have done this? She doesn’t understand it, but then again, she doesn’t understand much right now. She’s still trying to understand what is real and what is not, what happened while she was in the guest room, what she only imagined. “My mom was here,” she says. “She was mad at me.” “No,” Ali says. “That never happened.” Ashlyn lets out a breath. She’s partly relieved. Her mother’s voice had been angry, screaming at her for being such a disappointment. She’s glad that her mother hadn’t driven all the way to Dumfries just to berate her. But part of her is also disappointed. She’d wanted to believe that her mother had visited. She wanted to believe that her mother had come back for her. “Kelley was here?” she says. Now Ali smiles. “Yes!” she says. “She came by to check on us.” “You were crying.” Ali pauses. “I was worried about you,” she says. But Ashlyn knows that isn’t the only reason. If Ali were only worried about her, then wouldn’t she look more relieved right now? There’s something else bothering her, something else causing that sadness behind her eyes. “Al, where’s Missy?” she says. “I told you. She’s at her dad’s.” “But when’s she coming back?” Ali sighs, hugging her knees. “We thought it was for the best if she just stayed with him for a little while.” She looks so small when she says this that Ashlyn wants to wrap an arm around her. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t deserve the right to touch Ali right now. Missy is gone. Missy is gone and Ali doesn’t even know when she’s coming back. Missy is gone, Ashlyn thinks, and it’s all because of me. *** When she first lost Ashlyn to Fluvanna, Ali had never experience radio silence before. She was fortunate enough that nobody close to her had died yet, and all of her breakups had ended amicably enough that she was still friendly with her exes. She’d fallen out of touch with friends but nothing that couldn’t be repaired with a phone call or visit. No one had ever completely disappeared from her life before, not until Ashlyn stopped calling or writing. Ali learned the cruelty of prison, which not only traps those inside but those left outside as well. She imagined Ashlyn caught in a steel metal box where no light could slip through. Ashlyn had sealed all the holes and gaps that led to the outside world. She had cut Ali off from her life, and Ali had never felt so completely alone. She soon learned that when you lose someone, you miss the small things the most. She never mourned on Ashlyn’s birthday, although for the first couple of years, her family tiptoed around her on October 19th, expecting the very day to send her into hysterics. It never did. A calendar couldn’t make her miss Ashlyn more; the earth’s rotation wouldn’t deepen her loss. Still, she thought about Ashlyn growing one year older in a state prison, the day falling into an endless well of other days she would spend inside. She thought about her on Christmas as well, imagining Ashlyn beside her in pajamas, reaching for a silver-wrapped gift. On her own birthday, where Ashlyn might tease her for being three months older. Or, or, or. She thought about Ashlyn always, the occasion didn’t matter. But what startled her was how easily she thought about Ashlyn on the unremarkable days, the boring, normal moments of life. Not when Missy was born, although in her pain-fueled delirium, she imagined Ashlyn smiling, bending beside her to cut the cord. Not when her grandfather died, although she pictured Ashlyn at the funeral, resolute and warm, wrapping an arm around her shoulders while she cried. Not during any of these large moments, but in the quiet, private times. She would hear a joke and think about sharing it with Ashlyn, how her dimple always deepened when she laughed. Or she saw a commercial for a new television show and thought, Ashlyn would love this. It was these little moments when Ashlyn returned to her and Ali learned how deeply Ashlyn was imbedded inside of her. In those moments, her silence only felt louder. Ali hadn’t experienced a silence quite that loud since, not until Ashlyn disappeared inside her guest room for two weeks. In the days after she’s emerged, Ali can think of nothing except for ways to prevent Ashlyn from locking herself away again. She tries to give her space. She doesn’t want Ashlyn to feel as if Ali is crowding around her, watching her every move. But she is. She wants Ashlyn to feel safe and happy. She wants Ashlyn to feel safe and happy with her, not like she has to lock herself away to feel a bit of peace. Here is the reality: everyone around Dumfries knows about Ashlyn’s return. Even those who never knew about the original crime know about it now. Ali has tortured herself enough by reading the Dumfries Daily News comments. Great, now there’s a killer on the loose. Who let her back in our town? She should be rotting behind bars. Ali slammed her laptop shut in frustration. What does anyone know about Ashlyn, anyway? What does anyone know about anything? She wants to shield Ashlyn from all of this, even though she knows she can’t protect her forever. Ashlyn will have to learn to live in Dumfries. She’ll have to find a new job. She’ll have to learn to live in the world, a world where she can no longer hide. But Ali still wants to protect her. So when Ashlyn gets ready to go to Alex Morgan’s office to check in, Ali insists on driving her. Ashlyn stares at the door, rubbing her neck for a second, before she finally agrees that it might be for the best. Outside the office, Ali waits in her car, halfheartedly reading a file for work until Ashlyn climbs back inside. “That was really hard,” she says. Ali doesn’t know what she means but she squeezes Ashlyn’s hand. Ashlyn gives her a sad smile and brings her hand to her lips. *** Over the next three days, Ashlyn seems better. Ali feels silly even thinking this because she doesn’t know what better should look like. But she knows what it doesn’t look like: those torturous weeks of endless silence. Now Ashlyn lingers around Ali, entering a room noiselessly, and sitting beside her on the couch, their legs touching. She enters the living room during Ali’s nightly calls to Missy. She sits on the floor in front of her, watching Ali pretend to be relentlessly cheerful to her daughter. Running her fingers through Ashlyn’s hair is the only thing that stops her from crying. She’s stunned by how much she’s missed Ashlyn, these little moments of contact that make her feel less alone. Ashlyn’s hand squeezing her shoulder when she enters a room. Ashlyn resting her head in Ali’s lap while they watch television. Ashlyn planting a small kiss on the back of her neck before she heads back to the guest room at night. Ali shivers at her touch, then immediately hates herself for it. What is she doing? How could she even think about the pleasure of Ashlyn’s touch right now? When she’s lost her daughter and nearly lost Ashlyn again, how can she think about anything as superficial as desire? But she does; she can’t help it. Ever since they’d first kissed on her living room couch, she has never been able to look at Ashlyn and not feel a twinge of desire. She cannot imagine not wanting her, and every night she watches Ashlyn disappear behind the guest room door, she wants to tug her up the stairs to her bedroom. But she doesn’t. Of course she doesn’t. Life is complicated enough, right now. The last thing Ali needs—the last thing they both need—is to complicate it further. In the afternoon, they work in the garden. Ali has never known Ashlyn to be interested in gardening before, but once, when she’d stepped outside, she’d found Ashlyn sitting, staring at the flowerbed. On a whim, Ali asked if she wanted to plant something; to her surprise, Ashlyn nodded. Ali is no expert gardener herself, but she’s managed to keep up the garden her mother started. So she dug through the drawer and found packets of seeds. Marsh marigolds and wild geraniums, and Missy’s favorite, the monkey flower. When she was little, she’d thought that you could grow your own monkey that way; she’d been so excited by the possibility, Ali could hardly find the heart to tell her the truth. In the garden, Ali swallows, ripping up a packet colored in bright yellow flowers. Beside her, Ashlyn continues to turn over the dirt. “I want to tell you,” she says suddenly. “What happened to me. Inside.” Ali pauses. “Okay,” she says. “I should have told you. Maybe if I told you, I wouldn’t have…” She trails off. Ali can imagine a million ways that sentence could end, a million things Ashlyn wishes she could take back. She touches Ashlyn’s ankle. “I should have asked,” Ali says. “I think I was afraid to know. I think…” She takes a deep breath. “I think I always felt like it was my fault that you were in there—” Ashlyn scoots closer. “Al—” “It’s true. If I hadn’t…if I had just been a little stronger—” “No, Al, don’t,” Ashlyn says. “Don’t apologize for needing me.” She pulls Ali close, pressing her face into her neck. Ali holds her tight. “I know you feel like you let me down,” Ali says. “But you didn’t. You saved me.” This is the true violence of Hardy Jones, Ali realizes. Not her broken ribs and concussion, not the way he brought her close to death. Not the nightmares, not even his ability to transform Ashlyn into a person willing to risk half of her life to rid the earth of him. But here is the true cruelty: his ability to convince both of them that their suffering was their own fault. That on top of everything they’ve lost, they also deserve the blame. It’s not your fault, Ali says. She tells this to Ashlyn and she tells this to herself. And when she feels Ashlyn relax in her arms, she feels peace wash over her. *** That evening, a rainstorm passes through Dumfries. Ali tries to ignore it at first, the clouds darkening overhead. She doesn’t want to notice anything that might force them back inside, anything that might ruin their afternoon. But the sky opens anyway, pelting them with rain, and Ali sits dumbfounded for a moment, the sudden downpour soaking through her clothes, before Ashlyn laughs, grabbing her hand and tugging her inside. In the kitchen, Ali shuts the screen door behind them and Ashlyn pulls her closer as they watch a streak of lightning across the sky. Ali’s heart beats angrily against her chest. She’s pressed against Ashlyn, wet clothes clinging to both of them like a second skin, and she can only think about one day, years ago, when they’d been caught in a similar storm outside her dorm room. They were in the middle of an argument about something silly and inconsequential, and in spite of her frustration, she’d stared at Ashlyn under the dripping eaves and thought, I want to marry you. The thought arrived suddenly, like the thunder that rolled beneath them, like the thunder that rumbles now as she stares up at Ashlyn, the same thought flickering in her mind. In the laundry room, they peel off their wet clothes and dump them into the dryer. Neither hides her staring as they face each other in damp bras and underwear. Ali steps forward, tracing a finger along the scar on Ashlyn’s back. “Who hurt you?” she says. She doesn’t know what she expects to hear. The name of a specific inmate, a woman whose face Ali will never know. Or an angry guard, maybe, abusing his power. But Ashlyn gives a little smile. “A table,” she says. Ali laughs. “What?” “It was an accident,” she says. “It just happened.” Ali has spent a lifetime searching for causes and effects. If she found a cause, she reasoned, then she could understand why certain things happen. If you understand why something happens, then maybe you can prevent it from happening again. She has tried to apply this logic to everything in her life that she regrets. But what she’s learned is that sometimes, you never learn the cause. Or even if you do learn the cause, you never completely understand it. She can never know what leads a man to attack two girls. She can spend her whole life wondering or she can expect that the reason behind her suffering is forever unknowable to her. The reason, if it ever existed, has been buried with Hardy Jones, along with all of the other secrets of his life. Sometimes, tragedies just happen. It seems obvious, the type of thing you explain to a child, but sometimes, these are the hardest lessons to accept. That life is filled with accidents, both happy and sad, that her life had been structured by a series of accidents, from a truck following her in the darkness to a deflected soccer ball that she chased down a field only to find it right at Ashlyn Harris’ feet. In the laundry room, she pulls Ashlyn in for one kiss and then another, softly stroking the back of her neck. This time, they are not rough with each other. This time, they make love gently, too aware of how close they are to breaking. *** In the morning, Ali wakes up alone. She opens her eyes slowly, still not quite used to waking up without the blaring alarm. But she prefers this, a gentle waking, the rain falling softly on her rooftop. She rolls over to ask Ashlyn if she wants coffee, but the bed beside her is empty. She wraps a robe around her, padding downstairs where she expects to find Ashlyn eating in the kitchen or sitting at the table, watching the rain fall. But the kitchen too is empty, and she finally notices, beside the coffee maker, a note written in Ashlyn’s scrawl. I need you to trust me, the note says. I need you to trust that I’ll always come back to you. *** In Florida, the sun burns so brightly overhead, Ashlyn almost gets dizzy. On the bus, she stares out the window as she passes downtown Orlando, the whole city appearing as fake to her as its world-famous attractions. Like it’s been plucked right off a tourism brochure— the sunshine and palm trees and Disney characters that pop up, suddenly, on storefronts. It’s not a city she’s ever imagined herself living in, but then again, she doesn’t exactly have a choice. Alex Morgan asked if she was sure before she filed the request to move. If the state of Florida accepted her under courtesy supervision, she would have to stay there until her parole ended. Did she understand this? Yes, yes, Ashlyn said, nodding. She had to leave Dumfries, even if it meant spending the next year in Florida. She had to leave Dumfries, even if it meant living with her brother Chris, who had been the only reason Florida accepted her request in the first place. When she first made up in her mind that she would leave, she hoped that she might be able to request a move anywhere. California, she’d settled on. Warm and sunny and, most importantly, as far away from Virginia as could be. But Alex told her that parolees are rarely granted move requests. It depended on your parolee performance (Ashlyn’s wasn’t exactly stellar) and what you had waiting for you in that new state. No one wanted a parolee who had no friends or family or job prospects; she would quickly become a greater burden on the state, a high risk for recidivism. But it helped, Alex told her, if you had family somewhere. So Ashlyn took a deep breath and told Alex about her brother. Alex promised that she would try to contact him. “Are you sure this is what you want to do?” Alex asked. “You’ve gotten settled here and it can be difficult to start over—” “It’s what I need,” Ashlyn said. “To start over.” “Have you talked to Ali about all of this?” Ashlyn paused. She had to leave Dumfries, even if it meant leaving Ali. No, she had to because it meant leaving Ali. Ali had already given up so much for her. She couldn’t allow Ali to give up her daughter too. As long as Ashlyn stuck around, Missy would never come home. Ashlyn would never forgive herself for wedging between a mother and a daughter. The best thing to do—the only thing, really—was to leave. But she couldn’t tell Ali this. Ali would try to talk her out of it. Her brain would start to whir, devising calculations and strategies, confident that if she just thought hard enough, she could find a way to make everyone happy. But she would end up forcing herself to make impossible decisions, like the one she’d made when she allowed Will to take Missy in the first place. Ashlyn couldn’t allow her to do this again. She would make the choice simple, easy for everyone. She would remove herself from the equation. “No,” she finally said. “And you can’t tell her either. Not where I’m going. She’ll try to find me or something. But I need to be away from her. It’s no good for me. She just brings up bad memories.” It wasn’t true, any of it, and she doubted Alex believed her. But Alex told her that of course, she would respect her privacy, and Ashlyn was left waiting. She didn’t know if Alex would be able to locate Chris, and more than that, she didn’t know if Chris would even agree to take her in. She figured the entire process would take weeks, but to her surprise, Alex called her two days later. Her brother had agreed to house her. The state approved her request. She was free to go. Free, although every time she looked at Ali, she felt like a cord was tightening around her chest. She hated what she was about to do—disappear without a trace. Even though she knew it was the right thing to do, the only thing to do, she hated it for the sheer fact that it would devastate Ali. But what else can she do? Inside, Ashlyn had gone dark to preserve her own sanity. Outside, she is leaving to preserve Ali’s. Ali is holding on right now, but she can’t survive much longer without her daughter. When Missy returns, Ali will understand. She’ll understand why Ashlyn left, why she is returning to her family, in spite of all her dread. She’ll understand this time, won’t she? But part of Ashlyn feels that Ali won’t. Maybe Ali will never forgive her. Maybe disappearing twice will push Ali too far, shattering her heart into unrecognizable pieces. Ashlyn sighs, staring out the window again. She hadn’t meant to make love to Ali the night before she left. But when Ali kissed her, she found herself unable to stop. Maybe it was cruel, this onesided goodbye. But she couldn’t leave like last time. The thought haunted her Inside, how unremarkable her final night with Ali had been. For years, she obsessed over all of the things she wished she could have whispered in Ali’s ear as she held her. She hated herself for not even kissing Ali goodbye before she slipped out of her bed in the morning. This time, she swore she wouldn’t make the same mistake. She would make love to Ali all night long. She would ingrain the contours of Ali’s body into her brain. She would give both of them something to remember, even if she was the only one who knew that their relationship would soon be only a memory. *** Her brother lives in a town called Satellite Beach, an hour south of Orlando. She doesn’t expect him to live so close to the ocean, but from his living room, she can stare out the window at the waves lapping against the shore. The air hangs with salt. She fiddles with the tab on her beer, watching a sea gull pick at a empty bag of chips while her brother bustles around, straightening up the guest room. Bustles is an exaggeration. Chris is heftier now, more muscular; he doesn’t do anything quickly. And guest room is an exaggeration as well. The room is barely larger than a closet, one twin bed pushed against the wall, one window outlooking the shore. Chris offered her the living room couch, but she preferred privacy over space. Small rooms don’t bother her anymore. His whole house is smaller than she’s imagined. Where does his wife sleep? Or his son? How is there enough room here for a growing boy? But she quickly learns that the boy lives with his mother, who lives in Miami. “We split,” Chris said brusquely, and Ashlyn just nodded. It was another detail about his life that she didn’t know, and in her head, she added it to that immeasurable pile. “The bathroom’s a little messy,” Chris says, returning to the living room. “Would’ve cleaned it if I had more time.” She sighs, turning to face him. She knew this conversation was coming. She didn’t quite expect it to be so soon. “Yeah,” she says, “sorry about that. It was kind of a quick decision.” “I thought it was a prank call at first. Some asshole from high school or something.” He sinks into his armchair, which looks as worn as he does. She slowly lowers herself across from him. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I should’ve called—” “Some lady, out of nowhere, says, ‘your sister wants to stay with you. She wants a transfer from Dumfries.’” He laughs a little. “That’s when I knew she was fucking with me. I said, no way would my sister go back there. But she said you did. Six months ago.” “I wanted to call, okay?” she says. “I didn’t think you wanted to hear from me—” “Oh, bullshit—” “You didn’t when I was Inside.” She hates the hurt that creeps inside her voice. She’s told herself that she wouldn’t do this, that she couldn’t do this. That she should be grateful enough that Chris has allowed her to stay with him, that she cannot start digging through the past to present all the ways he’s hurt her. She would banish these thoughts from her mind, all of her unanswered letters and phone calls. The weekend visitation hours that passed her by, until she failed to even notice them, until the other inmates whispered about her, wondering what was so awful about her that nobody ever wanted to visit. She would ignore how foolish she’d felt for pushing Ali away when her own family forgot about her. It felt karmic, almost, a dose of cruelty for her own. But at least, she’d been cruel in order to be kind. Her distance was an act of love. What would explain her family’s? “It was hard on all of us,” he finally says. She huffs, sitting back in her chair. It was hard on them, sure. But how could that compare to what she’d gone through? How could that justify their abandonment? Still, when she glances around Chris’ house, she can tell that his life hasn’t exactly panned out as he’d hoped. He lives alone in this tiny house, his son and wife hours away. His construction business, he’d explained earlier, has faltered with the economy. Maybe he would have been happier in Dumfries. Maybe he would have stayed in Dumfries, if it wasn’t for her. She was the one who’d decided to kill a man and made home inhabitable for her entire family. Her family has spent the rest of their lives, coping with the consequences of a choice that she made. “Where the fuck were you anyway?” he says. “What could you have possibly been doing back in Dumfries?” She lets out a breath. “I found Ali,” she says. He scoffs. “Ali Krieger? I thought she was married.” “Not anymore.” She pauses. “I found Ali again, Chris. Can you believe it?” “So what the fuck are you doing here then?” What is she doing here? She glances around at the tiny living room, the bright blue sky. Her brother across from her, nursing his beer. She barely knows him as an adult. She barely knows him at all. How could she have interrupted the life she’s built over the past six months to move here and start over? She had done the impossible—she’d found Ali again, still in love with her. How could she leave? “It’s a long story,” she finally says. “Tell me in the car,” Chris says. He pushes himself up, grabbing his keys. “Where are we going?” “To visit Mom,” he says. *** Her mother lives in Shady Oaks Assisted Living Facility, where she spends her days forgetting. Early onset dementia, Chris explains on the drive over. The revelation leaves Ashlyn numb. Her mother has always had a mind like a steel trap that latched onto figures and dates. The family started to realize something was wrong about seven years ago, when she began forgetting little things, like dentist appointments or lunch meetings. Then larger things, like when she was supposed to pick up Chase, Chris’ boy, from school. Chris finally accepted that his mother was truly sick when she began asking where Ashlyn was. “She might not recognize you,” he says, as they climb onto the elevator. “Most days, she has no clue who I am.” Ashlyn leans against the steel wall as the elevator glides up to the third floor. The facility looks nice, from what she’s seen of it. The lobby resembles a hotel, not a hospital, and the aides seem friendly and attentive. Still, Chris hadn’t wanted to leave their mother here; he’d had no choice. She’d begun wandering down the street if he glanced away for even a second, and he knew that only non-stop supervision could prevent her from harming herself. He seemed like he was almost trying to justify his decision, but he didn’t have to. Ashlyn can’t imagine the weight of a decision like that, the responsibility he’d felt leading up to it. She hates herself for leaving him to make this decision on his own. He pauses outside their mother’s room. “If she thinks you’re somebody else, don’t correct her,” he says. “Just go with it. It’s less confusing that way.” She swallows, nodding. When they step inside the room, her mother is sitting in a chair in the corner, watching a game show on the television. Her eyes glide over Chris, as if he’s a piece of furniture, but she lights up when she sees Ashlyn. “Where have you been?” she says, reaching out her arms. “I’ve been waiting for you.” Ashlyn tries to swallow the lump in her throat. She knows that none of this is real—her mother’s excitement to see her. Her mother is imagining her as somebody else, somebody better. But Ashlyn smiles, blinking back the tears, as she picks her way across the room. She hugs her mother, closing her eyes when she feels her mother’s fingers in her hair. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I got here as fast as I could.” “Sure you did,” her mother says. “I know you were with Ali.” Ashlyn pulls away. How could her mother possibly know that? She glances behind her at Chris, who shrugs. “What do you mean?” she asks. Her mother laughs. “Oh, you think I don’t know how you girls sneak out past curfew,” she says. “I just pretend not to hear.” Ashlyn slowly sinks into the chair beside her. Chris was wrong and right; her mother does recognize her, just not the woman she is now. In her mother’s mind, she is perpetually a teenager, running into the front door with a skateboard tucked underneath her arm. Dementia is a strange disease, a nurse explains to them later. It uproots the recent memories, but the older ones stick. “She must not have seen you in a while,” the nurse tells Ashlyn. “She was gone for a little,” Chris says. Ashlyn’s grateful for his cover, even though she recognizes how unfair it all is. Their mother forgets Chris, who visits her constantly, but she remembers the daughter she hasn’t seen in sixteen years. The daughter who’s never visited her in Shady Oaks, who did not even know her health was failing, who has avoided calling her for months. The nurse just smiles. “Well, I hope you visit again,” she tells Ashlyn. “I can tell it brings her great joy to see you.” Ashlyn promises she will, even though she knows it will hurt. The only thing her mother remembers is the girl she once was. A life she used to dream of returning to, but now realizes that it’s gone from her forever. She can try to recreate it. She can return to Dumfries—she can return to Ali, even—but the girl that she was is lost forever, living on only in her mother’s confused mind. Before they leave, Ashlyn pulls her mother into a long hug. She kisses her graying hair. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry I was away for so long.” She will not remind her mother of where she’s been. She remembers Chris’ warning—telling her mother that she is nearly thirty-seven, not seventeen, would only confuse her further. Still, a small part of her is grateful that her mother does not remember the terrible things she’s done. Maybe it’s better for her this way, more peaceful. She’s grateful that, if her mother must remember her at all, she remembers her like this, young and hopeful and innocent. Her mother squeezes her back, smiling. “It’s okay,” her mother says. “You always come back.” Florida Chapter Notes Thanks for sticking with me, guys! I really appreciate your comments and kudos. In Florida, Ashlyn learns how to build. She doesn’t have a choice, exactly. She needs a job to meet her work requirement and her brother needs another body on his crew. So at dawn, she climbs into his truck and they drive to the morning’s work site. Her first morning, she’d stared at the empty dirt lot and couldn’t possibly imagine how a house might end up there. Let alone how she might have some part in building it. She used to tinker around with little projects around the house, never anything as massive as this. She’d built Ali a birdhouse once. She was in ninth grade and she needed a final project for woodshop, so she’d spent weeks in her garage after school, cutting panels and adding perch holes and sanding the edges. She never told Ali about it and she realized, halfway through, that she had always envisioned it as a surprise gift. When she pictured the finished birdhouse, she saw it hanging in the Krieger’s yard, Ali lying beneath in on a blanket, watching the birds flit back and forth. So Ashlyn painted it blue and red and gold, the colors of all the flowers growing around the house. Her recalcitrant woodshop teacher called it the most beautiful final project he’d ever seen. His praise felt nice, but Ali’s delight felt even nicer. Even now, Ashlyn’s stomach clenches when she remembers how Ali had beamed, throwing her arms around her neck. All summer, they’d laid out in the backyard, as birds fluttered over their heads. Ashlyn had been amazed by what she was capable of doing with her bare hands. She could build something beautiful. She could build something beautiful that made Ali happy. What could be more wondrous than that? Since then, she hasn’t built anything. She’s done the type of thankless maintenance work that keeps the world spinning—sweeping floors and cleaning toilets and hauling loads. She thought she might do that sort of thing on the construction site as well, but on her first morning, her brother handed her a hard hat and work gloves. “I’ll show you,” he said, when she started to protest. “You gotta learn how to do something.” A skill. Didn’t the job counselor tell her this once, long ago? That what she needed was an employable skill? Here’s the truth: she’s a few years shy of forty and she does not know how to do anything. Florida confuses her with its new rules. Its rapidly-changing weather, the mugginess, the humidity that sucks her clothes to her skin. She has a new state to learn, a new town. New streets and stores, new everything. But her brother wants to teach her, so she tries to pay attention. At the end of her first day, they have a beer together on his back porch. She hugs herself, staring out into the ocean. “I never could understand how you could do it,” he says suddenly. “Some guys, they fight their whole lives. Just always looking for trouble. But you—it’s like something snapped inside you. I always wondered if that would happen to me someday too.” She doesn’t know what to say. Earlier, he’d paraded her past a stack of wooden beams and she forced her eyes away. How could it be? She’d once carved wood into a beautiful birdhouse for the girl she loved, and years later, she had grabbed that same material and used it to take a man’s life. Something inside her had changed and she’s still fighting to change back. She doesn’t want to look at a wooden beam and see Hardy Jones’ blood. She wants to be a person who can turn wood into something beautiful and lasting. So she tries to listen to all of Chris’ instructions. She imagines the house when it’s finished, the family that will move inside. Parents and children sitting around a kitchen table, loving each other. Her hands, her work, all a small part of their lives. *** Her brother’s crew is nice, but distant. They eye her warily during her first weeks, judging her for her inexperience. “I didn’t even know you had a sister,” one man tells Chris, and Ashlyn pretends not to hear. She tries to focus on learning, and over time, she does. Over time, the crew begins to respect her as a member, not just the beneficiary of a favor from her brother. Still, she feels on the outside. In Florida, she doesn’t make friends. She doesn’t even know how to. It had been so easy before, not just because she used to be a friendly person, but also because the structure of school and sports made socializing inevitable. But adulthood is lonely. She returns from work with Chris to her tiny room, and she sits on her bed, hugging her knees, staring out at the ocean. She thinks about Ali. She always thinks about Ali. Once or twice, she thinks about calling. She even reaches for the house phone. But she sets it back on the receiver before she even dials. What good would calling do? Ashlyn left so that Ali could have a life. Why should she disturb that life now, when she has no chance of rejoining it? Wait, she tells herself. Just wait. But she hates this slow dripping of time, these long days that run into one another. She has at least another six months of parole, which feels like an eternity. And how does she know what will happen in six months? Maybe Ali will have finally moved on by then. Maybe she’ll find Ashlyn’s second disappearance unforgivable. Maybe she’ll have met someone else. She considers Facebook-stalking Ali, the way that kid had taught her long ago. But she doesn’t want to see how happy Ali is without her. It hurts too much to know. On a whim, however, she decides to Google Missy Parker. She’s surprised when a series of Dumfries Daily News articles pop up, brief sports write-ups of the junior level soccer games from that weekend. She reads all of them, her heart leaping when Missy’s name appears. *** Six months after Ashlyn’s disappearance, a man asks Ali on a date. She hardly even registers his invitation at first. She does this a lot now, zone off in the middle of conversations. She’ll find herself staring out the window in the middle of a meeting, her thoughts drifting everywhere and nowhere at all. She’ll forget questions right before she asks them. She’ll eat lunch in her car because she can’t stand to be around anyone else. Her therapist tells her that there is nothing wrong with her, not in a psychiatric sense. “You’re heartbroken,” Julia had said kindly, and Ali laughed. Heartbreak? That’s the best diagnosis a woman with multiple degrees can come up with? Heartbreak isn’t even a real diagnosis. She has been heartbroken before but she’s never felt quite this numb or this empty, like she’s floating alongside her body, not living in it. “Ali?” the man says again. “Did you hear me?” She glances up from her computer to find Blaine Richards standing across from her, an easy smile across his face. “I’m sorry,” she says. “What’d you say?” “I was asking if you wanted to check out that new Thai place,” he says. “Maybe this weekend? I know you like Thai food.” She doesn’t remember telling him this, although maybe she did. She barely knows Blaine—he transferred to her office a few months ago, and since then, she’s only spoken to him a handful of times. She hardly speaks to anyone from her office now. She’s noticed the way her colleagues regard her differently. Their professional respect has quickly dissolved into lurid speculation about her love life. Once or twice, she’s thought about leaving. Packing her desk into a cardboard box and starting over at a different firm. But what’s the point? She has no energy to start over somewhere else right now. She has no energy to do anything, really. In front of her, Blaine fidgets with his tie while he waits for her answer. A date, she realizes. He’s asking her out. She’s startled by his attention. He’s a handsome man, tanned with wavy brown hair. Any woman would be flattered to date him. So why is he asking her? Maybe he’s too new to be caught up in the office gossip. Maybe he just doesn’t care. Maybe he’s the type of person who wouldn’t judge a woman by her past, if such a person existed. Ali glances back at her computer screen. “I’m sorry,” she says. “This weekend is crazy. Maybe another time?” Her weekend is wide open, but she lies to spare his feelings. The truth seems too harsh to even admit out loud: she cannot even think about going on a date. The idea exhausts her. Meeting someone new, starting all over. Later that night, she lingers in her daughter’s room while Missy gets ready for bed. She’s begun doing this ever since Missy moved back home. She knows it’s odd, her constant desire to be in her daughter’s presence as she brushes her teeth and turns back her bed. But Missy doesn’t complain about it, even on nights when Ali falls silent and morose, when she doesn’t speak at all besides saying good night before she shuts off the light. Most nights, she tries to think of something to say. This is another thing that is different about her now. She never had to struggle to think of what to say to her own daughter, but now she scours her brain, hoping to find something interesting to share. So tonight, as she leans against the door with her arms folded across her chest, she tells Missy about Blaine’s dinner offer. She doesn’t know why she decides to reveal this, besides her desire to fill the silence, but when Missy smiles after, she’s glad she has. “Is he cute?” Missy asks. Ali laughs. “Cute enough,” she says. “Well, what’s he like?” “I don’t know,” Ali says. “He seems nice.” “Nice is good,” Missy says. She seems so hopeful that this man might make Ali happy that Ali almost wishes she had told him yes. Instead, she lifts the covers as her daughter climbs into bed. “Yes,” she says. “Nice is good.” *** On the weekends, Ali cleans. She doesn’t intend to, but once she starts, she can’t stop. One moment, she’s washing her dishes, and the next thing she knows, she’s kneeling on the kitchen floor, bleaching the grout with a toothbrush. She scrubs the stovetop until it gleams. She washes the window panes, beats the dust out of the curtains, vacuums every seam of the living room couch. She falls into these cleaning fits, and her daughter learns not to disturb her. At first, Missy tried to help. She picked up a rag, her face crumpled in confusion, as Ali bustled around, touching up the nicked wooden furniture with a refinisher. Ali waved her along. She didn’t want help. If she had help, cleaning would be finished faster. And she needs to clean right now. If she doesn’t clean, she’ll cry and she’s done enough of that already. No more crying. She’s promised herself that. If not for herself, then for her daughter’s sake. The first night Missy moved back home, Ali couldn’t stop crying. She was mired in love and grief. She knew why Ashlyn left. She knew before she’d raced to Ashlyn’s apartment and found it empty, her cell phone buzzing on the nightstand. She knew before she paced outside of Alex Morgan’s office, before the parole officer admitted that Ashlyn had requested a transfer. “It was too hard for her here,” Alex said. “She said this place was nothing but bad memories.” “But where is she?” Ali asked. “I need to be able to reach her.” “I think,” Alex said gently, “that she doesn’t want to be found.” That morning, Ali returned home and ripped all of the sheets off the bed. She later regretted this when she realized that she didn’t have anything to remember Ashlyn. Not a piece of her clothing, not a gift, only that photograph on her phone that Kyle had taken. She couldn’t bring herself to look at it without wanting to cry, so she’d deleted it. She wanted to remove all thoughts of Ashlyn from her brain. So she’d cleaned her house from top to bottom. She’d started with the sheets that smelled like her, that reminded her of the last night they’d spent together. She felt stupid when she thought about how happy she’d been. How sure she’d felt that they were reuniting, when Ashlyn had planned to leave all along. When she pulled the sheets out of the dryer, she held them to her nose and smelled nothing but washing powder. She’d bent over the washing machine and cried. She spent the rest of the day trying to rid her house of Ashlyn, the way you cleanse a haunted house of a ghost. She washed the dishes Ashlyn used, she scrubbed the guest room until it smelled like lemon pine and ammonia. She knew it was futile. You can’t rid yourself of a person the way you scrub a stain out of your clothes. But she had to try. This was what Ashlyn had done to her, wasn’t it? Flung Ali out of her life. Slipped out of her love as quickly and easily as pulling off a blanket. For the second time, Ashlyn has disappeared from her life without a trace. This time, Ali has resolved to remove all traces of Ashlyn as quickly as she can. So she cleans, even though it has been months since Ashlyn has touched a plate or a pillow. She cleans to clear her mind, to cloud it. Her friends have learned to stop trying to convince her to go out on weekends. If she doesn’t have to take Missy somewhere, she barely leaves the house at all. That Saturday, Kelley calls. “I heard about your suitor,” she says. Ali rolls her eyes, reaching for the toilet bowl cleaner. She can imagine how Kelley heard about Blaine. Missy and Tristan whispering, or perhaps, what worries her most of all, Kelley asking Missy for updates about her. She suspects this sometimes and the thought angers her. Her friend plying her daughter for information about her, her daughter supplying it. She feels doublybetrayed, but how can she complain? She knows that she is not okay. She is barely holding on and how could she be mad at Kelley for worrying about her? Wouldn’t she worry if Kelley became a sullen, recalcitrant woman who spent all weekend scouring her house until it smelled as sterile as a hospital? “He’s not a suitor,” Ali says. “He’s just a guy from work.” “Well, whatever he is, I think you should go out with him,” Kelley says. “It’s just dinner. It’ll be fun.” She tries to envision herself doing something as normal as going on a first date. Slipping into a dress, sitting across from a person she barely knows at a restaurant, trying to think of something witty to say. Instead, Ashlyn returns to her, a pain as sharp as hunger. Her dimpled smile, her warm hands, her body enveloping Ali’s. She grips the toilet brush tighter. “Maybe another time,” she says. “This weekend’s not good for me.” “Then come over here,” Kelley says. “Bring Missy and we could all—” “I’m sorry,” Ali says. “I have to go. Call you later?” She won’t. Kelley sighs. “Okay,” she says. “Call me later.” *** Three days before Christmas, Ali glances out the window as the airplane glides down toward Los Angeles. She hadn’t planned to visit her brother over the holidays. But Will wanted Missy this year; he and his new girlfriend were taking a trip to Hawaii and he wanted to bring Missy along. He’d mentioned the trip to Missy before asking Ali, and Missy had gotten so excited about beaches and volcanoes and roasted pigs that Ali couldn’t say no. She had no real reason to say no, anyway. She’d long agreed that weekends and holidays belonged to Will, even though he’d never taken Missy away for Christmas before. Let alone with a new woman, a leggy blonde who smiled with way too many teeth. But Ali couldn’t complain about her, either. Any moral high ground she may have once enjoyed over Will has long been lost, and besides, she doesn’t have the energy to fight with him. She has barely spoken to Will at all since the day Ashlyn left. She’d yelled at him on his front porch, hungry for someone to blame for pushing Ashlyn away. “She was defending me!” she said. “The guy she killed attacked me and Ashlyn was protecting me.” All the times she’d envisioned telling Will about Hardy Jones, she never imagined she might tell him like this: screaming, her face puffy from crying. Will frowned. “Attacked?” he said. “You think you know everything,” she said. “But there’s so much about me that you don’t know —” She turned to leave but he reached for her arm. “Then why the hell didn’t you tell me?” he asked. “Because you don’t deserve to know,” she spat. She had never been like this to Will—cruel. She knew that she was being unfair and irrational. She wanted to blame him for not knowing something that she had refused to tell him. She wanted to blame anybody for Ashlyn leaving her. Since then, her once-amiable relationship with Will has crystallized into a new silence. He drops off Missy without even climbing out of his car. He emails her any pertinent information about their child. She knows that she has hurt him. She’s finally revealed the shallowness of her trust in him. Even when she had pledged herself to love him until death, she had hidden away a large part of herself that she could never trust him with. After that revelation, what more does she really have to say? So when Will emails her about the Hawaii trip, she types back that it will be fine. The week before Christmas, she packs Missy’s bag and squeezes her tight. She tells Missy to call her each night. Missy doesn’t call once. Ali tells herself that this is because Missy is distracted from having too much fun, but this doesn’t make it hurt any less. One night, on a whim, Ali books a flight to Los Angeles. Kyle is thrilled when she calls him about it. He’s been trying to cajole her into visiting for months. It would do her some good, he’s said, a change of scenery. But the bland sunniness of California only makes her feel even more acutely aware of her own sadness. On the roof of Kyle’s building, she curls her legs in the lawn chair, holding a glass of rosé. Beside her, Kyle lies on his stomach, reaching for his phone. “Let’s FaceTime Missy,” he says. “Let’s show her that she’s missing out.” Missing out on what? Ali’s spent the past couple of days declining all of Kyle’s offers to sightsee, the type of terrible, tacky, touristy things he hates but has offered to do in order to drag her out of the house. She knows that she’s no fun to be around anymore. She’s miserable and she’s made her brother miserable by visiting. She should have just stayed in Dumfries. At least then, her sadness would have only affected her. But she couldn’t stand the idea of staying in her house all Christmas, her loneliness rising up and choking her. “She’s having fun,” Ali says. “With Will and what’s-her-name. Charity. Chastity. Whatever.” “Well, I’m sure she wishes she could be here with you,” Kyle says. Ali laughs. “Please,” she says. “She probably couldn’t wait to get away from me.” She sounds more bitter than she intends to. Kyle frowns. “Ali, no,” he says. “Come on, just admit it. You think I’m a bad mother.” “What? Ali—” “You do!” she says. “You all do. You and Mom and Will. I put someone else before my daughter —” Her voice breaks. She still can’t bring herself to say Ashlyn’s name. Kyle touches her hand. “You did the best you could,” he says. “You took care of two people the best you could—” “I gave up my daughter,” she says. “I gave up everything for her and it still wasn’t enough.” She starts to cry. This is the most devastating part. She doesn’t know what she could have done differently to make Ashlyn stay. Her whole world has shifted ever since Ashlyn’s sudden return, but in spite of all of her sacrifices, Ashlyn still refused to stay. Not just that, but she hadn’t even warned Ali that she was leaving. She hadn’t left a phone number or address where she could be reached. She’d disappeared as completely as she had the first time. More completely, even. At least before, Ali knew that Ashlyn was in Fluvanna. But now, Ashlyn could be anywhere. She will never know either way. She has to stop wondering about it. She has to stop focusing on all the ways that love has failed her. She’s old enough to know by now that sometimes love isn’t enough, but she feels foolish for believing that it could be. That her love for Ashlyn is special, that it can overcome all of the years. Kyle squeezes onto the chair beside her, guiding her head to his shoulder. “Maybe that’s why she left,” Kyle says. “Maybe she didn’t want you to give up everything.” “I don’t know,” she whispers. “I don’t know what to do anymore.” “You’ll be sad,” he says. “And I’ll be here with you.” “I’m sorry, Kyle. I know I ruined your holiday—” “Shh.” He pulls her closer. “We’re gonna get through it. Sometimes you have to bleed until all the poison’s gone. Then you’ll be okay again.” She doesn’t know what the poison is: her sadness or her guilt or even her love. But she closes her eyes, taking a shaky breath, as the sunlight washes over her. *** When her daughter returns home on New Year’s Eve, tanned and happy, Ali climbs the dusty stairs leading to the attic. She hasn’t been in the attic in years, not since Will moved out and she’d needed to find room to store some of his extra things. She crouches past dilapidated cardboard boxes of his old belongings, items he’d forgotten to pick up, the detritus that remains from any dead relationship. Before, when Ashlyn had disappeared into Fluvanna, Ali had constantly found her old things. She’d come home for the weekend and stumble upon one of Ashlyn’s old t-shirts wedged behind her laundry hamper or a pencil in her desk drawer indented with Ashlyn’s chew marks. For a while, she kept these things, like a bird building a nest. Then she realized this wasn’t healthy and piece by piece, she threw each item away until nothing remained of Ashlyn except her memories. This time, she doesn’t worry about finding Ashlyn’s belongings. This time, Ashlyn left neatly, without leaving a trace. But she still wants to scrub the attic, to clean the grimy windows and sweep away the cobwebs until it’s as clean as the rest of her house. She doesn’t, though. An attic will always gather dust, the way her mind will always hold onto Ashlyn. Ashlyn will always belong here. Instead, she kneels, rummaging through a plastic crate. Her daughter calls up to her from the stairs. “Mom!” she says. “What’re you doing?” Ali sneezes, her eyes watering from the dust. “Looking for the sleds,” she says. “Why?” “Because.” She sneezes again. “It’s snowing.” “So?” “So we should go sledding!” She can’t see Missy’s face but she senses her confusion. Ali doesn’t quite understand herself. She’s never particularly loved to sled, but she had always taken Missy when she was small because it seemed like the type of winter activity a child should experience. Missy is no longer small. She’ll be thirteen in a matter of months, a teenager. Ali can hardly stand to think about it. She wants to hold onto the waning moments of her daughter’s childhood. She wants to be the mother again who nurtures her daughter’s innocence, not the one who forces her to grow up. Outside in the snow, they sled until they are tired. She holds her daughter as they ride down hills, her eyes watering from the cold. *** The week before Valentine’s Day, Blaine Richards asks her on another date. This time, she says yes. “Bold move, Kriegs,” Kelley says over the phone. “A first date on Valentine’s Day?” Ali laughs, rolling her eyes. The timing isn’t ideal, but then again, maybe it is. She blames the pageantry of Valentine’s Day for pushing her to finally accept his offer, after months of chatting in the break room, months of talking in the elevator or walking together to get coffee. He’s a nice man. She doesn’t know what she wants from him, if she wants more than the company of a nice man. But she tries not to worry about it. She drops Missy off at Kelley’s for the evening, even though Missy groans that she’s old enough to stay by herself. (She is, but Ali is not ready to admit this.) Then she drives to the Italian restaurant to meet Blaine. He’s a nice man, a nice date. He pulls out her chair and orders a bottle of good wine. He makes her laugh. He listens to her stories attentively, even the boring ones. She can’t help but tell a few boring ones. She hasn’t been on a first date in so long. But this is a good first date with a good man. She has nothing to complain about, no, nothing at all, except for the fact that he is not Ashlyn. In the bathroom, she pauses while touching up her makeup, staring into her reflection. Years ago, she never imagined that this might be her life: nearly forty and spending her Valentine’s Day with a stranger. She would be married, she’d thought. She would be settled. She would be at home with somebody, curled up on the couch, grateful that the days of dating were behind her. She would be at home, she’d thought, with Ashlyn. A dream that faded long ago, but returned suddenly one afternoon when Ashlyn had appeared in her driveway. She never thought she’d find her again. She never thought she’d lose her again. She’s crying before she even realizes it. She dabs her eyes, careful not to smudge her makeup. Then she takes a shaky breath, steeling her shoulders, and practicing her smile before she returns to her date. *** In Florida, Ashlyn finds a dog. Rather, a dog finds her. On an overcast day, she sits on the curb outside the lot, grateful for cloud cover as she picks at her lunch when a gray and white pit bull trots over. The dog’s a stray, no collar, no tags. He has that hungry, mangy look of street dogs everywhere, and for a second, Ashlyn wonders if the dog might try to fight her for her sandwich. She glances around for a stick, something to rattle at him and scare him off, when the dog stops three feet in front of her and sits on his haunches. So he’s not going to fight her for food, he’s just going to sit there with those big moon eyes, watching every bite hit her lips. She rips off a piece and tosses it to him. He sniffs it but doesn’t eat. “Guess you’re not that hungry,” she says, even though it can’t possibly be true. She can see the outline of his ribs pressing against his fur. She rifles through her lunch bag for something else he might want to eat. She thought dogs would eat anything—maybe this one is different. Finally, she tosses a small sugar cookie. The dog sniffs it, then eats it quickly, looking to her for more. She laughs a little. “So that’s your deal,” she says. “You just got a sweet tooth, huh?” Two men from the crew head back from their lunch, stomping noisily down the sidewalk, and the dog skitters off. She’s oddly disappointed to watch him go, even though she felt silly talking to a dog. Still, she brings a sugar cookie the next day and when the pit bull trots over again, she tosses it at his paws. The dog is skittish; he won’t come close enough for her to even pet him, and after he eats, he trundles off. All week, he visits, and all week, she feeds him, eventually breaking up the cookie in smaller pieces to convince him to inch closer to her. At the end of two weeks, she places the final piece beside her. When the dog bends for it, she reaches up a shaky hand to pet his head. It’s foolish, petting a street dog. He could reach up and bite her hand off. She’s never been this close to a pit bull before and she’s surprised to find how soft his fur is. Light scars run along his face. Chris steps up behind her and the dog takes off running again. “You know, that thing would go away if you just stopped feeding him,” he says. But she doesn’t. Soon the dog eats the cookie right out of her hand and soon, he sits beside her for a few minutes and lets her pet him, his tail thumping on the ground. He runs off when anyone else gathers near, and she wonders what it is about her that the dog trusts. Her steady supply of treats? Her quiet nature? Maybe he can sense in her a fellow loner and that’s why he’s drifted onto her path. Each time he runs off, she wonders where he sleeps at night. What else does he eat? He can’t survive off of cookies alone, can he? Finally, one day, she gets tired of wondering. She buys a collar and leash and leads the dog to the animal shelter. At least there, the dog will have a good meal, a safe place to sleep. Anything will be better than living on the streets. But at the shelter, Ashlyn watches the dog circle in a cage as the girl behind the counter thanks her for bringing him in. “What’s gonna happen to him?” Ashlyn asks. “Honestly?” The girl glances over her shoulder. “We’ll probably have to put him down.” “What??” “Not enough space,” the girl says. “And no one wants to adopt a pit bull. A puppy, maybe. But not one like him.” “What’s the matter with him?” Ashlyn asks. “Dogfighting, probably,” the girl says. “That’s why his ears are cut that way. Nobody wants to take in a dog like that. You never know when he’s gonna attack.” That night, she tries to convince herself that she’s done the right thing. Maybe the girl at the desk was wrong—maybe somebody will want to adopt the dog. She hunches over Chris’ computer and researches whether pit bulls are as dangerous as she thinks. She scrolls past the related questions (How many people have been killed by pit bulls? Are all pit bulls mean? Why are pit bulls banned?) and instead she finds news story after news story about pit bulls mauling children. Ripping out throats, crushing jaws, and other horrible things she can’t bear to imagine. Another report argues that pit bulls are unfairly stereotyped, that if they are raised with love, they will not become the vicious dogs people expect. They can’t help it, another article states. Violence is in their DNA. That night, Ashlyn can’t sleep. She thinks about the dog in the shelter, who was once raised to kill, and now roams the streets, distrustful of strangers, only sedated by cookies. Sugar, she names him, and in that moment, she knows that in the morning, she’s going back for him. *** Sugar doesn’t like strangers, which is fine by Ashlyn. She doesn’t like strangers either. The problem is that to Sugar, anyone who isn’t Ashlyn is a stranger. After a month, the dog still lets out a low growl when Chris passes by. Her brother swears, holding his hands up. “Jesus,” he says, “if you wanted a dog, why couldn’t you get a Lab or something? Not fucking Cujo.” Ashlyn tries not to laugh. As soon as Chris leaves, Sugar wanders over to her, snuffling at her bare feet. He’s docile around her, not playful but sweet. He sleeps at the foot of her bed, and each morning, he whines when she leaves him. “I’ll be back,” she promises, even though she still feels stupid for talking to him. But you’re supposed to talk to dogs, according to the books she’s read. They understand language. And she wonders sometimes if that’s the problem, if that’s why he still seems so surprised to see her at the end of the day. Maybe he’s heard that same promise before from someone who didn’t mean it. But she means it. She makes Chris drop her off at home every afternoon right after work, even when he wants to go to happy hour with his buddies. He tries to goad her to join, but she always shakes her head. She has to check on Sugar. “You and that damn dog,” her brother says. She ignores him, scratching Sugar behind the ears. She’s been thinking lately about moving out. She’s thought about it before she adopted Sugar; before, the house was not big enough for two adults, so now, it’s certainly not big enough for two adults and one unfriendly dog. She’s saved up enough money to find a decent place, but when she begins viewing apartments, none of the managers will accept a tenant with a dog. “Is it a small one?” a helpful old woman asks. “Like a little lap dog?” Chris nudges her in the side, wanting her to keep quiet but she can’t lie. What would be the point of lying now? The whole building will see Sugar when she leads him in and out for walks. “No ma’am,” she says. “He’s a pit bull but he’s real nice.” The woman laughs. “A pit bull?” she says. “Oh no, sweetie. No. We have children in this building.” Ashlyn’s other problem: the apartment application. Her stomach drops every time she picks up a form and reads those familiar words. Have you been convicted of a felony or incarcerated in connection with a felony in the past seven years? Check yes or no. She fills out a few applications hopefully, but when she never hears back, she understands why. Chris isn’t deterred. “Just keep trying,” he says, “you’ll get one.” His hospitality is running out, and she can’t blame him. He’s given her a job and a bed. He wants his own space back, and he wants to be able to enter his kitchen without a dog snarling at him. How could she ever blame him for that? Weeks after beginning her search, she finally finds a studio apartment she can afford. The manager doesn’t even glance at her application, only concerned with whether she’s capable of paying rent. The apartment is in a grimy neighborhood, the streets loud with traffic and music, the police sirens wailing loudly overnight. “Are you sure this is safe?” Chris asks, the first time he visits. She laughs. Who could hurt her with Sugar around? Who could even get near? Sometimes she thinks about the careful life she’s built and she feels crippled with loneliness. She works, she walks her dog, she watches television and falls asleep alone. On Saturdays, she visits her mother. Each time, her mother beams, as if she hasn’t seen her in ages. One morning, her mother asks her how Ali is doing. Ashlyn swallows. “I don’t know,” she finally says. “We haven’t talked in a while.” “Are you two having a fight?” her mother asks. “Something like that.” “Well, don’t worry. It’ll pass. It always does.” Ashlyn wishes it were as simple as her mother remembers. Two girls in love, arguing over silly things, always finding their ways back to one another. That night, Ashlyn sits at the foot of her bed and cries. She doesn’t mean to—she’s just too miserable to do anything else. She’d come to Florida because she wanted to do the right thing. She couldn’t allow herself to be the reason Ali lost her daughter. She couldn’t allow herself to be the reason Ali’s entire life was upended. But now, she’s not so sure that she’d done a good thing, that leaving was the best plan. She’d abandoned the life she’d been building for this one: a grueling job and a crappy apartment where she falls asleep alone every night. Her old life with Ali and Missy feels like an impossible dream. Why can’t she ever do the right thing when it comes to Ali? Why is it that every time she tries to love her, she only ends up hurting her? She feels her dog’s wet muzzle pushing against her neck. She pushes him away, but Sugar nuzzles her again, whining softly. “What?” she says. “What do you want?” She doesn’t look up, her face buried in her hands, but Sugar nudges her and nudges her until she finally looks at him. Then he flops onto her lap, rolling over onto his back. She laughs, in spite of herself, and rubs his smooth belly. This dog. This goddamn dog. Sometimes she wonders how Sugar found her, how he sensed, somehow, that she could be his home. Luck, maybe, although she wants to believe that something larger pulled them together. Sometimes, she wonders if Ali somehow sent him to her, if she knew that Ashlyn would be lonely and willed this dog to find her. Ashlyn doesn’t know if love works that way, if you can project it into the world, if it can find you across state lines, behind bars, inside all the places you try to hide. She stares into Sugar’s big round eyes, scratching behind his cropped ears, her fingers grazing his scarred head. Maybe, in her home, he can heal. Maybe, in Florida, she can too. *** Her new parole officer is a tanned surfer from New Jersey named Tobin. Each week Ashlyn arrives for her check-in, she finds Tobin with her bare feet kicked up on her desk, wet hair dripping down her back. She’s less involved than Alex, more laid-back. She doesn’t ask too many questions about why Ashlyn left Dumfries, which Ashlyn appreciates. She doesn’t want to open up to Tobin. She doesn’t want to open up to anyone else. She knows that she should ask Tobin for help finding a new therapist, but what would be the point? Dr. Holliday couldn’t fix her. Maybe something is just broken inside her, something that can never be replaced. At the end of one check-in, Tobin nods to her window. Over the parole officer’s head, Ashlyn catches a glimpse of the beach. “The waves were nasty this morning,” Tobin says. “You surf?” Ashlyn shakes her head. “I used to,” she says. “I probably forgot how.” Tobin laughs. “You never forget something like that,” she says. “The body always remembers.” The next morning, Ashlyn borrows a board from her brother and pads across the beach. Sugar trots alongside her, excited to be off his leash on the deserted beach. It’s early, barely daybreak. Ashlyn is too embarrassed to practice surfing any other time, when someone might actually see her. She hasn’t been on a board since high school. Whenever she flew down to Florida to visit her grandmother, she spent hours surfing, finally dragging herself back inside once she was soaked and tired. Like everything she loved, surfing was second-nature to her. Nothing comes easy now; she doesn’t expect surfing to be any different. Sure enough, she wipes out her first three times. She kneels on the damp sand, coughing, trying to recover from all the water sprayed up her nose. She wants to quit. She could return Chris’ board quietly and take Sugar home. No one will ever know that she’s tried this foolish exercise. But she watches her dog sniffing at seashells and knows that she can’t leave yet, not like this. Her fourth try, she scrambles onto her board, adjusting her weight, and she rides her first wave in decades. The wave is tiny and unimpressive, nothing like the huge swells she used to chase, but she still grins, throwing up her arms, before she collapses onto the sand. Sugar scampers over and licks her face. She laughs, pulling him in close. Overhead, the sky glows pink and orange, and she takes in a deep breath, salt air filling her lungs. Soon, she will bring Sugar home and her brother will pick her up for work. She will build things with her hands. Soon she will be Outside for an entire year and soon she will no longer have to check in weekly with a parole officer. Soon she will be free to go wherever she wants. She will have to find a therapist. She will have to find someone who can fix her so that she can make her way back to Ali. But for now, this is enough, lying on the wet sand with her dog. Outside, all of her triumphs are small. But maybe that is enough. And maybe, soon she will no longer think of this as Outside. Maybe she will only know it as the world. Return Chapter Notes Thank you all for sticking with me this far! Relationships are hard and people are complicated and I've really enjoyed reading your reactions to this relationship and these people. The week before Missy’s thirteenth birthday, Ali goes on her fifth date with Blaine. He’s not her boyfriend, although Kelley has taken to calling him that. “How’s your boyfriend?” she’ll coo when Ali texts him during soccer practice. Ali rolls her eyes. Boyfriend seems like a silly term to use at her age, but she doesn’t know what else to call Blaine. Partner seems too serious, too intimate. Guy I’m seeing sounds too distant and casual. They’re not exclusive yet. At least they haven’t had the exclusivity conversation and she doesn’t know if Blaine is seeing other women. She’s asked herself before if it would bother her if he was, but that speaks to deeper questions about her feelings for him that she’s not ready to explore. It’s young. Whatever they are is young, so she is careful with it, like a person slowly lowering herself into a wobbly canoe, afraid that any sudden movement might cause it to capsize. Like when he asks what Missy wants for her birthday. “I think it’s a little too soon for that,” Ali says. “Too soon for what?” “You know. Gifts.” He frowns. “Why?” he says. “You are going to let me meet her eventually, right?” “I just don’t want to rush it,” she says. “It didn’t go so well last time.” “Well, I’m not like this last person,” he says. “I’m different.” He never directly asks her about her previous relationship but Ali knows that he knows. Office gossip. The knowledge does not turn him away. From his perspective, she is probably the victim. Seduced by a charismatic ex-con who lied about her past. Damaged by this deception and left unable to trust again. Blaine is right about one thing; he is different from Ashlyn. He’s open and expressive and warm, always forthcoming about his feelings. She can’t help it, sometimes his honesty irritates her. Her own brother had laughed when she told him this. “Wait, so you’re mad because your boyfriend shares what he’s feeling?” Kyle said. “You’re mad at the one guy in the known universe who likes to open up?” No, she isn’t mad at this. It just throws her, especially Blaine’s constant checking in to see how she’s feeling. He just wants to grow closer to her, but each time he tries to burrow nearer, she only withdraws further inside herself. She wants to guard the part of herself that he wants to know. He isn’t ready to know the real her. And she isn’t ready for him to know her daughter, a girl who is becoming a teenager, changing into someone Ali hardly recognizes. She knows that this is normal —the moodiness, the secrecy, the inexplicable attitudes. She understands, but it still scares her, how rapidly her daughter is growing up, right in front of her. Now tiny arguments swell into fights, like the night before Missy’s birthday party. Her father called earlier to tell her that he can’t make it—he and his new fiancee are visiting her parents in Seattle—and even though Ali has tried to convince Missy that it will still be fun, she has been inconsolably glum. On the drive back from the grocery store that night, Missy suggests canceling the party altogether, and Ali, who has spent countless hours organizing and planning and decorating, outright refuses. “It’s my birthday,” Missy says. “You can’t force me to have a party.” She climbs out in the driveway, slamming the car door shut. Ali lets out a deep breath, then steps outside too, walking around to unload the trunk. “No one’s forcing you,” she says. “You wanted to have this party.” “But that was before—” “Sweetie, I’m sorry that Dad can’t make it.” Ali grabs the groceries, shutting the trunk. “I really am, but what about everyone else who wants to celebrate with you? What about—” First she sees the duffel bag on her porch. Then she sees, under the faint porch glow, Ashlyn Harris. She’s sitting on the front steps in an army green jacket, her black baseball cap shielding her eyes. Her hands clasped, as if she’s been casually waiting, as if it hasn’t been almost a year since she’s been here last. She glances up, and Ali stops in her tracks. She tries to speak but every word dies in her throat. Ashlyn smiles, pushing herself to her feet. “Hi Al,” she says quietly. Ali drops the groceries, glass jars shattering at her feet. *** In the months after Ashlyn’s disappearance, Ali often imagined her return. Her thoughts grew torturous, the way they had the first time Ashlyn vanished from her life. That time, she’d imagined Ashlyn might re-emerge in the form of a phone call or a letter. She never thought that sixteen years later, she might find Ashlyn fallen in her cul-de-sac, inches away from her daughter. This time, she also nurtured the futile hope that Ashlyn would call her. So Ashlyn didn’t want her to know where she’d gone—that didn’t preclude her from calling just to say that she was alright, did it? But Ashlyn’s silence only grew more deafening, especially once the first six months had passed. By then, Ali knew that Ashlyn’s parole should be up. Wherever she’d gone, she was now free to leave, and if she still couldn’t bring herself to call or write, she never would. Still, she often wondered if she would see Ashlyn again. Maybe by happenstance. Maybe they might pass each other on a sidewalk in a city, or she might see Ashlyn’s face in a bus window. Maybe she would receive a Christmas card from Ashlyn one day, years from now, with a picture of her and her new family. She’d imagined strange and subtle ways she might see Ashlyn again, and she’d often wondered what she might say to her. Would she cry? Would she fling herself into Ashlyn’s arms and give her a kiss? Would she curse her out for breaking her heart? What she hadn’t imagined is this: bending in her driveway to pick up her dropped groceries, swearing at herself, trying to still her shaking hands. In the kitchen, Ali flutters around, throwing the broken jars in the trash and washing sauce off her hands in the sink. Ashlyn follows her inside, carrying the other bag. She glances around the house as if she is visiting a stranger’s home, as if it looks radically different. Does it? Does grief change a house? Ali squeezes more dish soap in her palm. She lathers slowly, not wanting to turn around. She can’t even look at Ashlyn without wanting to cry. She finally glances over her shoulder and finds Ashlyn staring at Missy. “Hey birthday girl,” she says lightly. Ali knows what she’s expecting: eleven-year-old Missy, who would have crashed into Ashlyn, throwing her arms around her. But almost thirteen-year-old Missy only eyes her cooly, then announces, “I’m going to bed.” Ashlyn watches her trounce up the stairs, her face breaking. “She’s having a bad day,” Ali says. She hates how apologetic she sounds. She hates how, in spite of it all, she still feels the urge to comfort Ashlyn. She looks as awkward as Ali feels. And why does she feel this awkward? She should feel thrilled to see Ashlyn, shouldn’t she? Or she should feel livid that Ashlyn had the nerve to show her face again. Instead, she feels a confusing mixture of the two and she can’t decide whether to hug Ashlyn or shove her out the door. She feels frozen in place, slowly drying her hands with a damp rag. Ashlyn shoves her hands in her pockets, staring down at the floor. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I should’ve called.” “What’re you—” Ali pauses. “I didn’t expect to see you back here.” “I finished,” Ashlyn says. “With my parole and I wanted to see you.” Ali leans against the counter, slowly folding the towel into rectangles. “So where were you?” she asks. “Florida,” Ashlyn says. “With Chris. Look, Al, I really wanted to—” But she hears the stairs creak and Ali glances past her shoulder. Missy, listening. Of course she’s listening. Ali suddenly feels exposed. She had imagined a version of this conversation, but she never pictured it taking place in front of her daughter. “It’s late,” she says. “Let’s just talk tomorrow.” Ashlyn nods. She pats her pockets then grabs her duffel bag. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll go find a room somewhere.” Ali knows that she should let Ashlyn go. She should send her on her way and meet her for coffee tomorrow. This is what Kyle would tell her to do. Kelley. Her mother. Everyone who has seen her become a wreck in the past year. Distance. She needs to keep her distance from Ashlyn. She cannot allow herself to wedge the door open each time Ashlyn hurts her. Still, she imagines Ashlyn spending another night in the Clamshell Inn and she sighs. “Just take the guest room,” she says. “We’ll talk in the morning, okay?” “Okay,” Ashlyn says. “The morning.” *** That night, Ali cannot sleep. She tosses and turns in bed for an hour, finally throwing a pillow onto the floor in frustration. Of course she can’t sleep! How is she supposed to fall asleep when Ashlyn is lying in bed one floor beneath her? She rolls onto her side, clutching her other pillow tighter. Hours ago, she had only been thinking about how she would make her way through her massive to-do list to prepare for Missy’s birthday party. Now Ashlyn is asleep in her guest room downstairs. Ashlyn, who she hasn’t spoken to in nearly a year. Ashlyn, who left her. What is she doing back? And why now? Does Ashlyn have a type of sonar that allows her to sense the moment when Ali finally seems to be doing okay without her? For the second time, Ashlyn has suddenly reappeared and for the second time, Ali finds herself drowning in her contradictory emotions. Why does Ashlyn keep doing this to her? Worse, why does Ali let her? She groans, pushing herself out of bed. Before she even realizes it, she’s marching downstairs to the guest room. She doesn’t knock. She pushes the door open to find Ashlyn awake too, lying on top of the covers, staring up at the ceiling. She looks so beautiful like this—cast in moonlight, her face open and thoughtful. She jolts up at the sudden intrusion and Ali wants to apologize. She wants to sit on the edge of the bed and lay a hand on Ashlyn’s shoulder. Instead, she feels hot words bubbling up her throat. “I’m mad at you,” she says. She feels juvenile confessing this, as if they’re both girls in the middle of a playground fight. Adults do not express themselves this openly, but Ali is tired of hedging and hiding, tired of swallowing her anger in a constant need to comfort. Ashlyn is wearing an undershirt and boxers, her skin tanner, her arms more defined, and Ali imagines Ashlyn’s past year. Ashlyn warming in the Florida sunshine while Ali was trapped in a perpetual winter. Ashlyn sits against the headboard, rubbing her arm. “I’m sorry,” she says. “You left me,” Ali says. “I had to,” Ashlyn says quietly.. “You left me and you didn’t even say goodbye. You didn’t even let me say goodbye—” Her voice cracks and she leans against the door, taking a breath. What is she doing here? She’d come down here to, what? To yell at Ashlyn? To unload her anger, to get a few things off her chest so she could finally fall asleep? Instead, she’s close to tears and she hates this, how her anger toward Ashlyn always melts into something murkier and more complicated. Ashlyn springs off the bed and starts toward her. “I had to,” she says. “I had to go. I couldn’t let you lose Missy because of me.” She takes a step closer then another, her hand touching Ali’s hip. Ali knows that she should leave. She should slip out the door and walk back upstairs to her own bedroom. But she’s frozen against the door, unable to move with Ashlyn so close, her hand pressing gently against her shorts. “You broke my heart,” she whispers. “I’m sorry,” Ashlyn says. “I’m so sorry—” She takes another step closer and Ali sticks out her hand, pressing it against Ashlyn’s stomach. “I’m seeing someone,” she says. Ashlyn stops, her face crumbling. “Is it serious?” she asks. Ali wants to tell her yes. She wants to tell Ashlyn that she has met a new person, that she’s never been happier, that she’s never been happier without her. She tries to conjure an image of Blaine’s face. Is it serious? Not yet. Could it be someday? But when she tries to picture him, her mind goes blank. She can’t think of anybody else, not now, not when Ashlyn is inches away from her. Ashlyn’s jaw is tight. She’s waiting impatiently for an answer, and Ali can’t bring herself to lie. She can’t bring herself to say anything that will make Ashlyn walk away from her. “He’s a nice man,” she finally says. “Do you love him?” Ashlyn asks. Ali looks away. “Ash—” “Do you love me?” There are so many things Ali could say. That she has always loved Ashlyn. That she doesn’t know if it is possible for her to ever love someone else. That it scares her, her ability to love Ashlyn through the pain, through all sense of time. It scares her, the completeness of this love that threatens to swallow her whole. She doesn’t say this, though. She doesn’t say anything, not until Ashlyn bends down to kiss her. Not until Ashlyn pulls her closer, her lips trailing down her neck, and Ali feels a single moan escape her. We shouldn’t. The words cycle through her head like a refrain, but she still pushes Ashlyn against the wall, her hand snaking up the back of her undershirt. We shouldn’t. Now she’s pulling Ashlyn onto the bed, heart pounding in her chest, everything feeling so familiar and so new at the same time. We shouldn’t. She’s surprised when Ashlyn suddenly rolls over, pulling Ali on top of her. Ali freezes, unsure of what to do, but beneath her, Ashlyn smiles. She’s different now, Ali can already tell. Not the way she used to be before Fluvanna, but different than the last time Ali saw her. Freer. Leaving freed her. Leaving Ali freed her. She closes her eyes as Ashlyn pushes her panties to the side and slips two fingers inside of her. We shouldn’t and she is riding Ashlyn, her thighs quivering, moaning each time Ashlyn strokes her. She feels like her body is splitting open. She is healing. She is breaking. *** Yesterday morning, when Chris dropped her off at the bus station, he asked Ashlyn if she was sure that she should return to Dumfries. Legally, he meant, or so she thought at first. She had finished her parole three months ago, which meant that for three whole months, she had finally been freed to move throughout the country. Her sudden liberation jarred her. Anywhere. She could go anywhere. For the first time in nearly twenty years, she had nobody telling her where she had to be, nobody forcing her to check in, nobody stopping by her home to conduct inspections, nobody governing her with a set of rules she needed to follow. For the first time, she was finally free, and she didn’t know what to do about it. She should go somewhere, Chris told her. Take a trip. See part the country. Ashlyn tried to imagine where she would like to visit. The Grand Canyon? Niagara Falls? The Golden Gate Bridge? All of these places felt as fake as an image on a postcard, the type of places you visited as a child because your parents thought you ought to experience them. Going someplace new scared her. She finally felt good about Florida, like she had learned its rules. The last thing she wanted to do was throw herself into a new place. “You have to visit somewhere,” Chris said. “Come on, what’s one place you’ve always wanted to go?” It would be a waste of her newfound freedom to remain in Florida, safely inside the little life she’s created. But she knew the only place she wanted to go, and as soon as she told her brother, he sighed. “Of course,” he said. “Of course you’d pick the last place in the world where you should go.” She knew his concerns, and she thought about them during her entire day of travel, the two trains, the bus, and the final walk to Ali Krieger’s house. Dumfries is no good for her; she knows this. She’ll never be more than the Dumfries Killer here, and leaving Dumfries is the only thing that saved her. But Ali and Missy live in Dumfries, and that’s enough to force her to swallow her dread as she bows her head and walks through town. It’s enough to pull her out of her new life, her unceasing desire to see them again. On the train ride down, she practiced in her head what she would tell Ali. I love you. Will you come back with me? Will you and Missy come back to Florida with me? Not now, of course—her apartment is too small. She’ll have to spend time making preparations, finding a house that’s big enough for the three of them. But she can’t live in Dumfries and maybe Ali will see how good Florida has been for her. Maybe Ali will agree that the best thing to do is to join her there. She’d spent an hour on the porch waiting for Ali to pull up. An hour where she imagined what it might be like to see Ali again. Later, she would feel foolish for not considering that Ali might be less than thrilled to see her. She had never envisioned a scenario where Ali wouldn’t run into her arms, where Missy would retreat to her room instead of rushing to hug her. And she certainly hadn’t envisioned a scenario where Ali would storm into her room at midnight and tell her off, hot words leading to even hotter sex. The next morning, she rolls onto her side, as Ali sits on the edge of the bed and quietly dresses. It’s barely dawn, the sky light orange and pink. Ashlyn stares at the smoothness of Ali’s back as she fumbles around for her shirt. “Missy can’t find out about this,” Ali says. “It’ll confuse her.” Ashlyn hates that Ali has to sneak back into her own bedroom at dawn, but she knows that it’s for the best. Ashlyn already feels confused as it is. Was last night make-up sex? Or mid-fight sex? Maybe Ali just needed to release some tension. Ashlyn tries not to think about her new boyfriend. Another factor she hadn’t considered. She feels stupid for thinking that Ali’s life would just stand still without her. She sits up against the headboard, tracing the flowers on the comforter. “It wasn’t just Missy,” she says. Ali bends over, reaching for her shorts on the floor. “What?” she says. “Why I left,” Ashlyn says. “It wasn’t only so that you could get Missy back. I just had to leave. I had to get out of Dumfries. This place was doing things to me and Florida’s been good for me.” Ali pauses. “I know,” she finally says. “I’m glad.” “I missed you every day. But I had to go. I had to get better for you.” “You still should’ve told me,” Ali says. “I couldn’t. You would’ve convinced me to stay and I couldn’t make you choose between me and Missy—” “It’s not up to you,” Ali says. “You have to stop deciding what’s best for me.” For the next hour, Ashlyn lies in bed, unable to fall back asleep. Is that what she always does? Tries to decide what’s best for Ali? She’s never thought about it in that way; she sacrifices for Ali because she loves her. But what if Ali doesn’t want her sacrifice? What if Ashlyn just needs to feel like a hero? Killing Hardy Jones. Banishing herself to Florida. Maybe she’s spent her entire life trying to make heroic choices all because of the one night when Ali needed a hero, Ashlyn had failed her. She sighs, rolling onto her side. She’d returned to Dumfries in hopes that she could convince Ali to join her in Florida. Now she only hopes that she can convince Ali to forgive her. *** At breakfast, Ali pretends as if last night never happened. It’s for Missy’s sake, Ashlyn tells herself, although she isn’t exactly sure. She sits at the kitchen table, nursing a cup of coffee, while Ali bustles around, flipping pancakes and cooking bacon. These are the mornings Ashlyn used to dream of in Florida. When she awoke in her apartment, her dog asleep at her feet, she would wonder about breakfast in the Krieger house. The smell of food cooking, the sound of voices as Ali tried to hurry Missy before school. But she hadn’t anticipated this awkwardness, Ali’s stilted “how did you sleep last night?” that makes Ashlyn’s neck burn when she thinks about the real answer. Missy won’t even look at her, not even when Ashlyn wishes her a happy birthday. “How does it feel to be thirteen?” she asks. “The same,” Missy says, reaching for her milk. “Well, you’ve gotten so tall. You might be my height by high school.” She laughs a little, but Missy doesn’t respond. It’s never been this difficult to talk to Missy before. She used to feel overwhelmed by Missy’s constant chatter, her steadfast attention. Now she finds herself fighting for anything Missy might give her, a glance, a smile. She reaches under the table for a gift bag. “I brought you a present,” she says. Nothing fancy, but a gift that she’s spent weeks making. A sign she carved out of wood that has Missy’s name on it, along with other things that she likes. A soccer goal. A Harry Potter book. Ice cream. She realizes now that she doesn’t even know if Missy still likes any of these things. Maybe the gift will seem stupid, too babyish. But she’d wanted to give Missy something thoughtful, not a store-bought trinket she’d tire of. She imagined Missy putting the sign up in her bedroom. Maybe even her bedroom in Florida. She holds the bag out, but Missy ignores her. “Melissa,” Ali says. “Ashlyn is talking to you.” Missy rolls her eyes, sliding off her stool and trudging over to Ashlyn. “Thanks,” she says, taking the bag, but she doesn’t even look inside. She sets it on the edge of the counter then walks out to the backyard. Ali sighs, watching her go. “I’m sorry,” she says. “She took it really hard. When you left.” Ashlyn swallows. When she’d requested her transfer, she thought that she was doing the right thing. She would leave so that Missy could return home with her mother. This was the meaning of her sacrifice, uniting Ali with her child. But she hadn’t imagined that by leaving, she would hurt Missy. She pushes herself up from the table. She has to apologize. She has to make this right. She has to explain to Missy that she’d done the right thing, the only thing she could think to do at the time. She has to convince Missy that she’d left because she loves her. But when she steps out into the backyard, she finds Missy glowering at her from the porch swing. “You made my mom cry,” Missy says. Ashlyn bows her head. Now she can’t look at the girl. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “She cried every night over you. Now you’re back just to screw around with her.” “No, no. That’s not why I came back—” “You’ll leave and she’ll be sad all over again. She was fine. She was starting to be fine before you showed up.” Missy brushes past her to return inside and Ashlyn sinks onto the porch swing. She finally understands what Chris meant when he’d asked if it was a good idea to return to Dumfries. For once, she should’ve listened to her brother. Maybe, for once, she should have stayed gone. *** At her daughter’s birthday party, Ali tries to focus on picking a good playlist, ushering the girls into the living room for games, cutting the sheet cake into identical squares. But all she can think about is Ashlyn, even though she’d stepped out an hour before the party began. She wanted to take a walk, she announced, but Ali knew that she just didn’t want to be around once Missy’s friends arrived. Ali almost protested—after all the streamers Ashlyn had hung and balloons she’d blown up, shouldn’t she at least stay for a few minutes?—before she too acknowledged that this was for the best. It had been weeks after Ashlyn left before any of Missy’s friends beside Tristan O’Hara came over to play. And even then, always accompanied with a parent, who took a quiet look around the living room before leaving, as if expecting a prisoner in shackles to come leaping out of a back room. Ali hated this, how her daughter was ostracized because of her choices. So she told Ashlyn to come back for dinner when the party was over and Ashlyn said she would. Ali watched her disappear down the street, ambling slowly, both hands in her pockets. Where would she go? Would she be recognized? Would she be safe? In the kitchen, she refills cups of punch, imagining angry mobs chasing Ashlyn down Main Street. She glances down. The red cup is overflowing, punch spilled all over her hand. “Earth to Kriegs,” Kelley says, laughing as she takes the cup. “A little distracted?” Ali glances over her shoulder at the girls laughing on the living room couch. Then she grabs Kelley with her clean hand, tugging her toward the back door. “Ashlyn’s back,” she whispers. “What?” Kelley looks around the kitchen. “Where?” “Not here! I mean, here but she stepped out earlier. She just showed up on my porch last night.” “Jesus Christ. Kriegs. Jesus Christ!” Ali shushes her, even though the girls are too loud and boisterous themselves to hear a conversation all the way in the kitchen. She hoped that confiding in Kelley would clear her mind somehow, but Kelley’s reaction is just as frantic and scrambled as her own. She wipes the punch off her hand while Kelley paces beside her. “So what happened last night?” Kelley asks. She means what happened when Ali found Ashlyn on her porch, but when Ali thinks about the entirety of that night, she can’t help the blush that creeps across her skin. Kelley grabs her arm. “No,” she says. “Kriegs. No, no, no—” “I couldn’t help it. It just happened!” It’s the worst possible excuse for doing anything that you know you shouldn’t. I was caught up in the moment. One thing led to another. She knows this isn’t true. She could have walked out of the guest room as soon as Ashlyn drew near. She could have not gone to the guest room at all. She could have told Ashlyn that if she decided to randomly pop up on her porch after months of silence, then she deserved to spend the night in a crappy motel. She could have done a lot of things to push Ashlyn away. Instead, she’s clung to the hope of foolish women everywhere: maybe she’s changed. She feels pathetic for lingering on this. What exactly is she hoping? That this time, she can love Ashlyn hard enough to make her stay? “So what’re you gonna do now?” Kelley asks. Ali sighs, leaning against the counter. “I don’t know.” “Look, I won’t even try to tell you what to do. But just be careful, okay? I mean, last time—” The living room lights up with laughter again and Tristan slings an arm around Missy’s shoulder. Ali’s chest tightens. She hadn’t been prepared for how hard Missy would take Ashlyn’s leaving. She’d felt like this was yet another way she’d let her daughter down. Her blind spots had become Missy’s, her vulnerabilities transferred to her child. She has to protect her own heart this time. Even more than that, she has to protect Missy’s. “I promise,” she tells Kelley. “I’ll be careful.” *** That evening, Ashlyn walks by her old house. She doesn’t plan to, but she can’t think of any other way to kill time. She’d gone downtown at first to have a cup of coffee. No one spoke to her and she nearly felt anonymous until the barista had gasped, nudging her co-worker when Ashlyn walked in. She’d turned quickly, her ears burning, and starting back toward Ali’s house. She didn’t want to interrupt the party. The last thing Ali needed was to have to explain why Ashlyn was there. But she couldn’t think of anywhere else to go so she found herself instead walking by her old house. She hasn’t been in her old neighborhood in years. When she’d first been released, it never even occurred to her to stop by. Her family had left years ago, and she didn’t know the new people who’d moved in. What could she possibly find there beside memories? That evening, she stands in the driveway, studying the house where she grew up. She can practically hear Chris hollering at her for leaving her skateboard in the middle of the entryway. Her mother singing oldies while she cooked dinner in the kitchen. She toes the crumbling brick walkway, remembering where she’d sat when her father walked out for the last time. She hadn’t really believed he would be gone forever, not until Chris told her he’d left for good. Still, she’d sat on the walkway waiting for him each day after school until Chris told her to come inside, she was making their mother cry. Ashlyn looks like her father. It always fucked with her, how she could resemble a man who’d left without ever looking back. Maybe she’s inherited this from him, a penchant for leaving, an aversion to saying goodbye. When she arrives back at the Krieger house, the party is over. Ali looks exhausted. She chews on her nail, eyeing her disordered living room, the askew couch pillows, the punch rings on the coffee table. “I should clean this,” she says. “I don’t even have the energy right now.” “Did Missy have fun?” Ashlyn asks. “I think so.” Ali cranes her neck toward the backyard, then lowers her voice. “She’s a little bummed. Will forgot to call.” “Oh.” Ashlyn swallows. “Can I talk to her?” “I don’t think she feels like talking right now.” “Can I try?” Ali shrugs, gesturing toward the yard. When Ashlyn slides the door open, she finds Missy on the grass, her back against the tree trunk. Even from afar, she can tell that Missy’s body is tense, closed off. She misses the little girl who lashed out in anger, who once sent a soccer ball flying toward her face. She never had to guess then what Missy was feeling. But Missy is older now, her feelings more inscrutable. Ashlyn lets out a breath, then lowers herself onto the grass across from her. “How was your party?” asks. “Fine.” Missy still won’t look at her, but at least she’s answering. Ashlyn plucks at the grass. “Did you open my gift?” she asks. “Yeah,” Missy says. “It was nice. Thank you.” She’s still reticent, but she’s offering up more than Ashlyn expected. Emboldened, Ashlyn asks, “Well, can I get a hug?” She’s never asked Missy this before. The question itself feels pathetic, the idea of begging for the girl’s affection. But she still wants this, the easy relationship they used to have, when Missy clamored to be around her, eager and attentive, chirping “Hi Coach” every time she saw her. But Missy rolls her eyes, folding her arms across her chest. “You don’t like it when I hug you,” she says. “You never hug me back.” Ashlyn bites her lip. She never realized that Missy noticed this about her. Maybe she thought she was better at pretending to be normal. Or maybe, she just banked on the fact that Missy was too young to notice all the ways that she wasn’t. But Missy noticed. She just didn’t care. She insisted on loving Ashlyn even in the face of her rejection. Her throat tightens. “Missy,” she says. “I’m sorry. It’s not you. It’s Inside—I mean, prison—it did things to me, see? It messed up my head. So that’s why I had to go away. I had to go away to get better, see?” She sounds disjointed and unhinged. She hates that, in all her time away, she hasn’t managed to find a more coherent way to explain herself. But maybe now, she can tell Missy what she’s been through. Maybe now that Missy’s a little older, she’ll understand. How prison altered her brain, how the isolation crippled her. How this entire town weighs her down with memories that she is only beginning to escape. But Missy just scoffs. “You didn’t even say goodbye,” she says. “Missy—” “You couldn’t call or text, you don’t even care about us—” She starts to cry, and Ashlyn feels tears well up in her own eyes. She scoots toward her on the grass. “I do,” she says. “I love your mom and I love you. I love you, Missy.” She’s never said these words to Missy before. She never thought she was capable. Missy turns, burying her face in her hands. “No, you don’t,” she says. “You don’t care, you’re just like Dad.” She could tell Missy that Will cares. That he didn’t mean to forget her birthday or miss her party. That he hasn’t meant to miss years of her soccer games. She could make excuses for him the way Ali probably does, the way her own mother did every time another birthday passed and Ashlyn didn’t even receive a card. She could make excuses for herself. She could blame Inside, or Outside, or Hardy Jones. But she’s tired of excuses. She doesn’t want to be this person anymore. She wants to be someone Missy could be proud of. She wants to be someone that Missy feels safe loving. So even though it still doesn’t come naturally to her, she draws nearer and wraps her arms around Missy. She holds the girl while she cries, brushing back her hair. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m gonna be better. I’m gonna be better for you. I love you, okay? You’re my kid.” She wants to promise that she’ll never leave again but she can’t. She has to leave. She has to go back to Florida, to her job, to her dog. But she holds Missy tight, rocking her in her arms as the night falls softly around them. *** The first time Ali suspected she might like Ashlyn more than a friend was the summer she turned fifteen. The girls had gone to a party at the Dumfries Lake, and tipsy after a few Coronas, Ashlyn decided to lead the group in jumping into the water. Ali didn’t want to get her hair wet, so she’d just watched as Ashlyn peeled off her t-shirt and shucked off her shorts. Ali was staring so hard that one of their friends nudged her, teasing, “Why don’t you take a picture? It’ll last you longer.” She turned red, grateful only that Ashlyn had been too far away to hear. What was the matter with her? She’d seen Ashlyn undress countless times. In locker rooms and at the pool, the girls so comfortable around each other that it wasn’t uncommon for Ashlyn to change clothes while Ali sat on her bed, dropping her pants mid-sentence. Ali’d never thought anything of it, but that evening, in the golden light of summer, Ashlyn seemed different. She was taller now, in the middle of her growth spurt that nudged her a couple inches shy of six feet. She’d begun lifting her brother’s weights, certain that with a little more muscle mass, she could wrest the starting keeper position from the current senior holding it. Now, standing on the grass in her gray sports bra and underwear, her body looked leanly muscled in a way that entranced Ali. But she quickly dismissed the thought from her mind. So she liked Ashlyn’s muscles. Well, she liked muscles on boys, that was why. Didn’t mean she liked girls. Didn’t mean she liked Ashlyn. It scared her, this foreign yet familiar desire. On Ashlyn’s last day in town, Ali returns to the Dumfries Lake for the first time in years. Gone are the days of summer lake parties and midnight skinny-dipping, or packing a picnic basket with Will and buckling Missy into her carseat. She’s had no reason to swing by the lake, but when Ashlyn suggests it, Ali agrees. It’s her last day in Dumfries and Ali doesn’t know what happens next for them. Here are the facts: in the morning, Ashlyn is returning to Florida. She can’t take any more time off without screwing over her brother and his crew; she has to get her dog from Chris before he misses her too much. Earlier, Ali overheard Ashlyn on the phone asking Chris how Sugar is doing. Ali still can’t believe she’s done this—gotten a dog, a pit bull of all breeds!—but she notices Ashlyn’s delight when Chris sends her a picture of the dog, surly but beautiful, resting his head on his paws. Ashlyn has a life. She has a life in Florida, and as much as Ali has hoped that Ashlyn might return to Dumfries, she’s known since she saw the small duffel bag on her porch that this visit was only temporary. But why then did Ashlyn come back? To make up? To apologize before returning to her new life? Why has Ashlyn returned at all, only to just leave again? Ali tries not to think about this. On the shore, she rolls up her jeans to her ankles as Ashlyn teaches Missy how to skip rocks off of the water. Missy can’t quite get the sideways motion down; her rocks sink heavily to the bottom. But Ashlyn is endlessly patient, stooping over to find her new stones, clapping a hand on her shoulder when Missy gets frustrated. “It’s okay,” she says, each time Missy fails. “Try again.” Ali’s chest tightens. The night of the birthday party, she’d stepped toward the backyard and seen Ashlyn holding Missy while she cried. Neither knew that Ali had seen them; she’d stepped back into the kitchen, blinking back tears from her own eyes. The next morning, she asked Missy gently if she knew that Ashlyn was returning to Florida. She couldn’t help it; she didn’t want her daughter to get her hopes up. “I know,” Missy said. “But she’ll be back.” “That’s the thing, honey,” Ali said. “I’m not sure that she will.” “She said that she loves us,” Missy said. “She’ll be back.” Ali said nothing. She wishes she could believe as easily as Missy. She wishes that Ashlyn had not given her reasons to doubt. On the shore, Ali hears a yelp and turns to find her daughter cheering, her arms thrown in the air. She’s finally skipped a rock, and Ashlyn grins, bending to hug her. She looks happy. Ali can’t remember the last time she’s seen Ashlyn look this happy. She swallows hard. She’s grateful for Florida, even if it’s taken Ashlyn away from her. She’s glad that Ashlyn has found a place where she can feel happy, even if it’s not with her. “I used to love coming here,” Ashlyn says later. “I used to love coming here with you.” She’s lying on the grass, her head on her arm, while she stares up at the clouds. Ali tries to remember the lake as she knew it: fishermen casting lines, children chasing each other near the shore, teenagers sneaking sips of cheap beer. That summer, when she’d watched Ashlyn undress, she’d never imagined that a tiny spark of desire could grow into so much more. That twenty years later, she might be sitting at that same lake, wishing that Ashlyn never had to leave. She glances over at Missy, who has fallen asleep beside her. “We were so young,” Ali says. “Sometimes I can’t believe it. I was just a few years older than Missy when I fell for you.” Ashlyn gives her a smile, reaching for her hand. “I’m glad we didn’t screw it up,” she says. “I’m glad our teenage hearts didn’t screw it up. I’ve made so many mistakes, Al. But you’re the one thing I got right. You’re my one good thing.” The summer Ali turned fifteen, she never imagined that Ashlyn would ever leave her. They were best friends. Their lives would always connect somehow, forever intertwined as if life had joined them in one intractable knot. But now Ali knows how fragile it all is. She knows all the ways we say goodbye. *** That night, after Missy goes to bed, Ali brings Ashlyn to her own. She doesn’t want to spend their last night apart. She doesn’t want another secretive tryst in the guest room. She want to make love to Ashlyn in her own bedroom, in the bed where they’d fallen asleep together for months, where they’d tried to heal everything that prison had taken from them. They hadn’t succeeded, not in the way Ali hoped they might. But she’s proud of them for trying, even when life proved too difficult for them to handle. She’s proud of them for not giving up on those two girls who’d found love on a soccer field. She’ll never regret loving Ashlyn. And she’ll never regret spending this last night with her, peeling off their clothes under the moonlight. Slowly now, drinking each other in. Ashlyn guides Ali to the edge of her bed, slipping her panties down her hips. She kneels in front of her, nudging Ali’s thighs apart. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. She apologizes with words, then her tongue, then her fingers, filling Ali with all of her regrets. Later, Ashlyn wraps her body around Ali, resting her head on Ali’s naked breasts. Ali holds her, running her fingers through Ashlyn’s hair. In college, Ashlyn often fell asleep this way. She looks so vulnerable like this, and Ali feels protective, bending to kiss her hair. “Ash?” she says. “What happens next?” She hates how pathetic and needy she sounds, but she can’t help it. She needs to know. Is this the start of something new? A protracted goodbye? Has their entire relationship after Fluvanna been one long goodbye, the swan song of two people who just cannot accept that their young love has died? Ashlyn props herself up. She touches Ali’s cheek. “Come to Florida with me,” she says. Ali laughs. “What?” She glances at the clock on the nightstand. Ashlyn’s train leaves in four hours. How could she expect Ali to drop everything and join her? Ashlyn smiles. “Not right now,” she says. “But later. I need some time to get everything ready but I want you to come with me, Al. You and Missy. You know I can’t move back to Dumfries. It’s no good for me to be here. But if you came to Florida—I could get a house. We could, I mean. You, me and Missy. We could all live together, see? We could be a family.” Florida. She lies back on the pillow, stunned into silence. She’s never considered this as a possibility, let alone one that Ashlyn had been thinking about seriously. Florida. She tries to imagine herself living there, spending winters in the sunshine, away from snowy Virginia. Wading in from the beach, coming home each day to Ashlyn. She feels light with hope, giddy even, just imagining it. Would Missy like Florida? She’ll have to talk to her about it, of course. But where will Missy go to school? What types of schools are in Satellite Beach anyway? Missy’s in the seventh grade; can Ali really uproot her? Take her out of her school and away from her friends and her soccer team, only to start over in a new, unknown town? When she was younger, maybe, but Missy’s almost heading to high school. She’ll be forced to make all new friends at precisely the moment where friendship matters the most. And find her way through a new school district, right when she ought to start preparing for college applications. School aside, what will Ali tell Will? He’ll flip if he learns that Ali plans to move his daughter hundreds of miles away from him. His frequent absences anger Ali, but moving to Florida will only make this problem worse, not better. And the most practical matter: what would Ali even do in Florida? She’s not licensed to practice law there. Would she have to take the Florida bar exam? Could she really do this at this point in her life: study for a strenuous test and hope to find her way into a new firm, competing against energetic twenty-five year-olds while she tries to raise a daughter? “I can’t,” she whispers. “I can’t go with you.” She feels defeated even admitting this. If it were just her, she could try to find a way. But she can’t drag Missy into this foolhardy plan. Not now, not when so much of her future is at stake. She tears up, but Ashlyn smiles, kissing her cheek. “It’s okay,” she says. “I can’t start over right now,” Ali says. “And Missy and Will—” “It’s okay, Al,” she says. “Really. I just figured I’d ask.” Her levelheadedness only frustrates Ali further. She rolls away, onto her side. “It’s not okay,” she says. “You’re leaving and now what? What happens to us?” Ashlyn wraps her arms around her, nestling her face into the back of Ali’s neck. “I’ll still love you and you’ll still love me—” “Ash—” “We can be together, Al,” she says. “We can still be together and maybe when Missy goes to college, you can come live with me.” “It’s five years, Ashlyn,” Ali says. “She still has five years to go.” “We can visit each other,” Ashlyn says. “On holidays and vacations. We’ll still see each other, Al. Not as much as we want to, but we still can. We can do this, honey. If anybody can, it’s us.” She sounds so sure of herself that Ali almost believes her. But she’s not a teenager still, confident that she and her high school girlfriend can stay together while attending different colleges. She knows that relationships are capricious and unruly. Love isn’t enough. And how is she supposed to maintain a relationship with someone she will hardly ever see? How is she supposed to feel close to Ashlyn if she can’t even touch her? “What if you meet someone else?” she asks. “Or what if you just get lonely?” “I won’t,” Ashlyn whispers. “But what if you do? Or I do?” “I want you to be happy,” Ashlyn says. “Just tell me. If you meet someone new. Tell me and I’ll let go. I don’t want to trap you, Al. I want you to be happy.” Ali lets out a deep breath. “This is crazy,” she says. “I love you Al,” Ashlyn says. “I won’t stop fighting for us unless you want me to. Do you want me to?” Could Ali really do this? Enter into a long-distance relationship for the next five years? Would they survive it? She’d once been certain that they would. She had planned to stand by Ashlyn during her entire prison sentence. Her mother had tried to talk her out of it. “Honey, maybe you two should just take a break,” her mother said, and Ali had felt appalled to even hear her suggest it. Of course she couldn’t abandon Ashlyn in Fluvanna. She couldn’t abandon her ever, let alone now, when Ashlyn needed her the most. Back then, she hadn’t focused on the enormity of what it would mean to love someone who is in prison for sixteen years. She hadn’t focused on any of the rational reasons why this might destroy her. She swallows, staring into Ashlyn’s eyes. Then she pulls Ashlyn on top of her. “No,” she whispers. “Don’t stop.”
Away Chapter Notes Thanks again for all the love! This bad boy's about to wind down--a few more updates before I say goodbye, though. In Fluvanna, Ashlyn learned how to mark the days. In the beginning, days were her enemy. After her sentencing, she did the math herself and realized that sixteen years meant that she had 5,840 days to serve. She could hardly conceive of so many days. She was only twenty, which meant that she had only been alive for around 7,300; she thought about the enormity of her life, everything that she had ever experienced, all of the exceptional days and the dull ones, and tried to imagine spending almost that same amount of time behind bars. The days ahead of her seemed insurmountable, impossible to survive. But she learned from the older women that you cannot focus on the entirety of your sentence. No countdowns, no projecting years into the future, no celebrations with each year that passes. You cannot think about the years at all. Instead, you only think about a day, one day, the very one that you’re currently living in. When that day ends, you think about the next and then the next. Eventually, the days amass into weeks, then months, then years. A decade or two. Maybe even a life. But you cannot focus on the enormity of time or it will swallow you. You can only survive it if you think about time in tiny, manageable pieces. She didn’t realize then that this way of thinking would help her Outside, or even that it might help her with her relationship with Ali. But it does. When she returns to Florida, she tries not to obsess about the next time she’ll see Ali. She tries not to think about the miles stretching between them, or the five years until they will be able to live together. She only thinks about each day. Each day that she talks to Ali feels like a gift. The days that they are too busy for a phone call feels like a void, a day that did not actually exist. In Fluvanna, Ashlyn never knew when she would speak to Ali. She called as often as she could, but they could never perfect their timing. Some times Ashlyn called when Ali wasn’t home; other times she reached her but the phone line was so long, they could barely talk. Each phone call was bittersweet, and months later, she still couldn’t help the tears that sprang to her eyes when she heard the warmth of Ali’s voice. Ali’s phone calls were the only thing that tethered Ashlyn to the outside world, that reminded her that anything outside of Fluvanna existed. Then Ashlyn felt desperate every time she failed to reach Ali. She feels a similar desperation now, but she’s grateful that there are so many ways to connect to people, even if there’s no time for a proper conversation. A good morning text message, a funny picture Ali’d seen on Facebook, a voice mail that says “I miss you.” Sometimes, during the week, the best that Ali can do is a rushed conversation in her car on the way to work. But on the weekends, they talk for hours. Ashlyn curls in bed, imagining Ali on the pillow beside her. Chris shows Ashlyn a computer program that allows you to video chat with someone. Ashlyn had watched in wonder as Ali and Missy’s faces appeared on her brother’s screen. For weeks, she saved up her money until she could afford a cheap laptop of her own, a machine that she uses for nothing except to talk to Ali. She has a cheap internet plan so the program always lags, but she still lives for the nights where Ali’s smile is the last thing she sees before she falls asleep. A day, and then another day. Soon it’s been three months, and soon she begins to feel like she and Ali can really do this. But Chris isn’t so sure. “I mean, five years is a long time,” he says one evening. She shrugs, reaching across the bar for her beer. “We were apart for sixteen years,” she says. “Five is nothing.” “But that was different,” Chris says. “I mean, you didn’t have other options and it’s not like Ali exactly waited for you.” She bristles at his implication. “I wanted her to move on,” she says. “We weren’t even talking.” “I know, but—” “And it’ll be different this time. We talk every day.” Almost every day is more truthful, but she’s too annoyed with her brother to care about being factual. She feels oddly defensive of Ali’s honor even though she knows she doesn’t need to be. How could anyone hold it against Ali for moving on? How could Ashlyn resent her for marrying someone else when she was destined to spend the next two decades behind bars? Who could blame Ali for starting a new life when Ashlyn had frozen Ali out of her life in the first place? Chris quietly nurses his drink for a minute. “I just don’t want to see you hurt,” he says. “Hell, don’t you at least want to meet other women? I mean, you don’t want to go to the grave after only dating Ali Krieger, do you?” He laughs a little. But Ashlyn shrugs, steeling her shoulders. “Sounds fine by me,” she says. *** That night, Ashlyn can’t sleep. She keeps hearing her brother’s voice in her head, over and over. Five years is a long time. Maybe Ashlyn has only tricked herself into thinking that it isn’t. Maybe she’s only prepared because she’s had practice serving a longer bid. How is she supposed to expect Ali to handle this? Five years of phone calls and video chats and infrequent visits. Five years of trying to create intimacy across text messages. Ashlyn has never worried about how she would survive the years without Ali’s affection because she’s done it before. She’d survived sixteen years without anyone’s affection; the few times she’d been touched made her feel worse than if she hadn’t at all. But Ali has never experienced this. She doesn’t know the crippling loneliness of prison. She has never had to numb her desires. She has never learned to starve herself of all human touch. “It’s okay,” Ashlyn says during their next phone call. “If you get lonely.” She doesn’t plan to say this; she’s only grateful that over the phone, Ali cannot see her blush. She hates what she’s suggesting, but it seems like the fair thing to do. The reasonable thing, even. But Ali is quiet for a minute. “What do you mean?” she says. “I mean, I get it if you—it’s a long time, is all I’m saying. And I know that you might want to—if it’s just sex, I wouldn’t—” “Honey, stop,” Ali says. “Why are you saying this? Do you want to sleep with other people?” “No!” Ashlyn says quickly. “I just—I mean, I get it. If you need that. The release, or something. You can be honest with me about it.” “Ash, I don’t—” “But if you do,” Ashlyn says. “If there comes a point where you do, it’s okay. I just—I don’t want to trap you. I want you to be happy.” She can’t even verbalize what she has just given Ali permission to do: fuck other people. She hates the thought of Ali in anybody else’s bed, but she hates even more the idea of Ali walking away because she needs physical intimacy that Ashlyn can’t provide. If it’s just sex, how could Ashlyn be mad? Sex with someone you don’t love is only a bodily function. It’s not any more emotional than the process of satisfying any physical craving. Again Ali is silent, but this time, Ashlyn wishes she could see her face. She doesn’t relax until she hears Ali let out a low laugh. “Stop,” she says. “I am happy.” “But if you’re not—” “Shh,” Ali says. “I am.” *** Ali Krieger has always been a serial monogamist. She can’t help it—it’s just in her nature, an unceasing desire to lope from one long relationship to another. Even after she’d lost Ashlyn in Fluvanna, during a confusing and tumultuous time, she hadn’t been able to sleep around. She vaguely felt that she should. She’d unexpectedly found herself single again after a four-year long relationship. She was twenty, in her promiscuity prime, the waning years during which she could sleep around to little or no judgment. If not now, then when? But dating after Ashlyn had felt nearly impossible. Sex was even worse. Each time somebody touched her, she was only reminded of all the ways that they were not Ashlyn. She had only been touched by one person in her whole life and everyone else seemed wrong, their hands clammy and awkward on her skin. After Will, she’d dated a bit, but even then, she knew that she could not go on like this forever. Sex with strangers was only fun for so long before it turned depressing and she fully intended to leave that game behind before she reached that point. So she’s never fully taken advantage of her slut years, not even in college, and she feels appalled that Ashlyn thinks she would want to take advantage of them now. “Can you believe that?” she asks Kyle when he calls. “She gave me a hall pass.” She expects Kyle to laugh. That whole conversation had been so absurd that she hasn’t found any other way to engage with it besides by laughing. Does Ashlyn really think she wants to sleep around? Not even wants, but needs to? Does Ali seem like she’s unable to control her urges, like she’ll be dragged along by her own desires? Doesn’t Ashlyn know that Ali has already considered this when she’d agreed to enter this long-distance relationship? She knew what she was signing herself up for: years of falling asleep in an empty bed. “Wow,” Kyle says. “That’s progressive of her.” Ali rolls her eyes. “Kyle—” “I’m serious! Monogamy is such bullshit. Who says that you have to bind yourself to one person forever? Would fucking someone else mean that you love Ashlyn any less?” He has a point, in the way that anyone who has taken a introductory college course might have a point. An idea can be factually true but have no real world application. Monogamy might be unreasonable, but how is an open relationship any more reasonable? How is the expectation of fidelity any crazier than the expectation that she and Ashlyn can fuck other people without either of them growing jealous? It’s all unreasonable, this entire relationship. “It’s crazy,” she finally says. “I can’t believe she thought I want that.” “Maybe you need to open your mind a little,” he says. “You’re both adults now. You can be honest about what you need.” She glances at the calendar behind her desk. In red, she’s circled the dates where she can possibly visit Ashlyn. The flight is only two and a half hours, but it stuns her, how quickly her calendar filled with work and Missy’s activities, how scarcely the red circles appear. As of now, she won’t have time off to visit Florida until Christmas. “It’s fine,” she says, to herself as much as to Kyle. “It’s only a few months.” *** A month, and then another month. Ali isn’t prepared for how hard she misses Ashlyn, for the way their intimacy contracts and expands as if they are tied together by a rubber band. One moment catapults her closer to Ashlyn, before time pulls them apart. It’s not the sex that worries her, although she does miss it. They’ve tried other ways to stoke their passion, but Ashlyn feels too embarrassed by sexting for either of them to enjoy it. Once they’d attempted Skype sex, but Ashlyn’s camera resolution is so grainy that instead of her lover’s body, Ali felt like she was watching convenience store security footage. The delay was so bad that by the time she heard Ashlyn’s strangled “I’m coming”, Ali had already cleaned herself up and started wondering what she should cook for dinner. It’s not just the sex, but it’s all of the other little parts of being in a relationship that Ali misses. Waking up next to someone. Cooking together, or taking a long drive, or collapsing beside them at the end of the day. She misses all the small, inconsequential ways you feel close to a person. Before, she’d felt as if Ashlyn had a front-row seat to her life. She told Ashlyn all of the little, random things that happened in her day, stories that she forgets by the time they speak on the phone. Sometimes she misses Ashlyn so much, she can hardly breathe. But in her fantasies, they are not rolling in bed together, moaning into each other’s mouths. No, her fantasies are simpler. She imagines Ashlyn sitting across from her at the kitchen table, sharing a cup of coffee. “I don’t see how you do it,” Kelley says one Saturday. “I would be going crazy.” Ali shrugs. Sometimes she feels like she is. She’s started noticing a college girl who reminds her of Ashlyn. Not Ashlyn now, but Ashlyn as she used to be. She’d started running into Riley a month ago; the girl is a sophomore at the local college who is tutoring one of the midfielders on Missy’s team. She picks her up from practice sometimes, and while the parents wait for the girls to finish cooling down, Riley always manages to talk to Ali. Just small talk, but always delivered with a wry awareness of how cute she is. She is cute, in the way that Ashlyn was cute, a blonde tomboy in snapbacks and baggy shorts. “Hi Mrs. Krieger,” Riley said earlier that week, the same way she normally greeted Ali. But this time, Ali said, “It’s Ms. Krieger,” and when Riley smiled, Ali felt so mortified, she’d gone to wait for Missy in the car. What was the matter with her? Why would she correct this girl’s assumptions about her marital status, as if that mattered one bit? Crazy. She’s going crazy, there’s no other way to explain it. That evening, Ali returns home and counts the days until Christmas. 118. Her eyes water. It both seems like too many and too few at the same time. Too few days for her to feel this upset, too many days apart for her to survive it. *** A year after Ashlyn returned to Florida, Ali calls her mother. She can’t help it. She feels uniquely miserable today when she realizes that one full year has passed. She’ll have to do this all over again. She’ll have to do this four more times. The task seems even more impossible than it had when Ashlyn had first suggested it. “You can always walk away,” her mother says gently. She’s said this every time Ali has called her feeling miserable, to the point that Ali does not even understand why she’s decided to call her today. Sometimes she’s grateful to her mother for challenging her; arguing with her mother strengthens her resolve, leaves her feeling even more sure that she has made the right choice. But today, she feels uniquely weak. She can’t walk away. Even if she could, she can’t. Leaving Ashlyn will make her more miserable than loving her. After Christmas, Ali had returned to Virginia, even more committed to their relationship. But now she can barely fall asleep without thinking about the blissful week she’d spent with Ashlyn’s arms wrapped around her. Seeing Ashlyn and being forced to leave her made Ali sadder than if she hadn’t seen her at all. Ashlyn kissed her goodbye outside Orlando International, and Ali had broken down in tears before she even reached security. “I can’t,” she says. “I love her.” “I just feel like you’re stuck,” her mother says. “Like the world is moving on around you and you’re stuck in place.” Ali swallows. She’s felt stuck too. Three months ago, she experienced the unique pleasure of attending her ex-husband’s wedding alone. She’d smiled as Will guided Chastity on the dance floor, performing as much cheerfulness as she could because she knew that everyone would be watching for her reaction. She was glad that Will had moved on. Maybe he’d found a woman who would love him fully, the way Ali never had. But she’d felt strange watching him enter a new life, while she remained in the relationship she’d started when she was sixteen. All around her, friends are marrying and divorcing and having kids. Kelley is in a serious relationship, her first since she and Tristan’s mom had broken up. Everybody is growing and changing, just as you’re supposed to. Everyone but Ali, whose life remains perfectly still, frozen in between the moments when she’ll see Ashlyn again. At work, she tries to avoid Blaine. He’d taken her news that she was seeing someone else in stride, until he’d learned that she was dating her ex-girlfriend who lived in Florida. “Jesus, was I that bad?” he joked. “You’d rather date someone who doesn’t even live here?” He makes quips like that often, especially now that he’s been made a junior partner. She hadn’t been surprised when Blaine was picked for the promotion over her. “Guy’s whip-smart and got a real clean image, too,” Mr. Paul had told her, while breaking the news. She didn’t need to read between the lines to understand what he’d meant by that. She tries not to think about this. All the hours she’d devoted to her job, all of the hours she’d spent at work when she could have spent that time with her family. She tries not to think about the fact that her promotion had not hinged on her work ethic or skill but a scandal that had found her years later. She tries not to think about another thing Hardy Jones has taken from her. But after one particularly frustrating day at work, she arrives home to an empty house. Missy is staying with Will and Chastity this weekend—Ali tries not to think about this new woman, who has been trying to convince Missy to call her Mom —and Ali sinks into the couch, overwhelmed by loneliness. She dials Ashlyn’s number but Ashlyn doesn’t answer. Ali wants to hurl her phone against a wall. This is the reality of the distance. She feels it most acutely during moments like this, when she’s had a terrible day and all she wants to do is relax in Ashlyn’s arms. But she can’t. Ashlyn can never be there right when Ali needs her. Ali will have to learn how to grow used to this, spending her highest and lowest moments alone. That night, Ali finds herself at a bar. Polishing off a bottle of wine at home felt too depressing. She wants to be around people, even if she feels too morose to actually speak. But halfway through her second cocktail, she spots a flash of blonde hair over her shoulder. She turns, her heart thudding. It makes no sense, but she still wants so badly to believe that Ashlyn had somehow sensed that she was needed and found her way back to her. But it’s not Ashlyn. Instead, Ali sees Riley standing at the bar beside her. A crowd of her friends have clambered into a booth near the back. Riley smiles. “Hi Ms. Krieger,” she says. “Having a good night?” She leans on the bar, sliding her ID to the bartender. Ali wants to laugh. She can’t even remember the last time she’d gotten carded. When the bartender hands Riley her ID back and turns to pour her beer, Ali reaches for the card instead. She tilts it toward her, examining it. “Convincing,” she says. Riley laughs, slipping it quickly inside her wallet. “I won’t tell if you won’t tell,” she says. Ali isn’t sure what they’re talking about anymore. The fake ID, or the fact that Riley has found her here, drinking alone on a Friday night. She must seem pathetic to this girl, a grim picture of her possible future. The bartender slides Riley her drink. Ali expects her to return to her friends, but Riley lingers, leaning a forearm on the bar. She wears a black Hurley cap twisted backwards and shorts that hang to her knees. “Can I get your next round?” she asks. “You do know that I’m an officer of the court, right?” Ali says. “So?” “So it’d be unethical to accept a drink from someone who’s underaged.” Riley smirks, pulling up the stool beside her. “Well, I think it’s unethical to let you drink alone,” she says. She’s fresh in the way that young people are: flirty, a little bold, a little eager. A little insecure, like when Ali makes fun of her for drinking cheap beer. “It’s okay,” Ali says. “You haven’t learned how to drink yet.” She orders Riley a more expensive craft beer. She’s finally crossed the line from tipsy to drunk, but she’s sober enough to realize that she’s also crossed an ethical line, from allowing an underaged person to buy her a drink to supplying the alcohol herself. It’s okay, though. Riley is twenty, nearly legal. She has a fake. She would’ve gotten the booze somehow. Ali tries to supply herself with excuses. But she knows the truth. She’s entranced by Riley. She’s entranced because Riley reminds her of Ashlyn. “I used to know someone like you,” Ali says. “Oh yeah?” Riley smiles, tracing her fingertips around Ali’s knee. Ali knows she should pull away. But she doesn’t. She imagines Ashlyn across from her, her fingers dancing up Ali’s thigh. Ashlyn before Fluvanna, before Hardy Jones, before any of the heartbreak. Back when she was young and carefree, a rebellious tomboy who delighted in making Ali laugh. Back when Ali was young and innocent and the world seemed to spread out before them, each choice unfolding into a life they’d spend together. Riley kisses her and Ali’s life rewinds, the years falling off of her. Her skin tightens, the stretch marks fade, the sun spots disappear. She is a girl again, kissing the only girl she will ever love. Life is kind. Life is so kind. *** After, Ali stood in the shower for thirty minutes, trying to scrub off everything. Riley’s touch, her own shame from what they’d done, and the evidence from how much she’d enjoyed it. After the kiss at the bar, Ali had paid their tabs and brought Riley outside to hail a cab. She had no idea where they should go. She couldn’t bring the girl to her home, to a bed she’d shared with the woman she loved, and she was too afraid that she might be recognized at a nice hotel, drunk and holding the hand of a girl half her age. She could barely think with Riley pressing her against the side of the bar, kissing her neck. The Clamshell Inn, maybe. She would never be discovered there. But when a cab drifted to the corner, Ali pulled away. Under the yellow street lights, Riley suddenly looked younger, more innocent. She looked less like Ashlyn, and Ali felt almost desperate, wanting to find new lighting, to return to whatever had made her feel earlier like she had been kissing the girl she’d fallen in love with. But she wasn’t. She was just kissing a girl. A girl barely older than Missy. And when Ali imagined a strange forty-year-old woman picking up her daughter someday at a bar and bringing her to a cheap motel, she almost emptied her stomach on the sidewalk. In the morning, Ashlyn calls. Ali lets the phone ring. In her voice mail, Ashlyn apologizes for missing her call last night. Her mother had had a bad night at the assisted living center; Ashlyn had slept over to comfort her. Ali only feels worse. While Ashlyn had been busy helping her sick mother, Ali had been wallowing in her own self-absorbed thoughts at a bar. She’d been betraying the person she loved the most. She tries to convince herself that it wasn’t cheating. She hadn’t even slept with the girl. Besides, isn’t this what Ashlyn suggested? An open relationship, open to circumstances exactly like the one she’d found herself in last night? Hadn’t Ashlyn told her that it would be okay, as long as it was only sex, as long as she was honest about it? But none of this feels okay as she dials Ashlyn with shaking fingers. None of it feels progressive or reasonable, as she listens to Ashlyn talk about how she’d just discovered that Dumfries High will be streaming the soccer games online next year, so she’ll be able to watch Missy play. She’s so thrilled by this news that Ali can barely bring herself to interrupt her. “Ash?” she finally says. “I got lonely.” She’s sniffling already, wiping the tears from her eyes. There’s a long silence on the other end, so long that Ali feels unsure whether Ashlyn even heard her. “Okay,” Ashlyn says. Her voice sounds thick, husky. “I’m so sorry—” “No, don’t feel sorry, okay? You can’t feel sorry.” Ashlyn pauses. “Is it—I mean, do you have feelings for this person?” Her question is labored, as if it physically pains her to ask. “No, no, no,” Ali says. “It’s nothing, she’s nobody. It was just a kiss. I just—I was lonely and I was drunk and she kissed me—” “I get it. It’s okay.” She seems so levelheaded that Ali begins to feel like she is the strange one for feeling smothered by guilt. “I’m sorry, honey,” she says again. “I didn’t want to lie to you about it—” “It’s okay.” Ashlyn pauses. “It’s okay if you need to—but maybe next time, just don’t tell me.” Ali doesn’t know what’s more shameful: her betrayal or Ashlyn’s confidence that it will happen again. *** In the morning, Ashlyn takes Sugar on a long walk to look at the boats. It’s early, just before sunrise, and she feels grateful for the quiet, the nearly empty streets, just the sound of her own footsteps and her dog’s paws hitting the concrete. She walks to clear her head, which has been swimming since Ali’s phone call. Last night, Ashlyn slumped across a booth from her brother at their favorite bar, nursing a glass of whiskey. As soon as she’d told Chris about the call, he’d slid her beer to the side and ordered her something stronger. He didn’t say I told you so. She was grateful for that, at least. She deserved it, as well as a knock on the head for being so stupid. Wasn’t she the one who’d suggested this arrangement in the first place? Didn’t she give Ali license to sleep with someone else? So how could she be mad that Ali kissed another woman? She isn’t mad, not really. Anger would be purer, simpler to understand. No, she’s hurt, even though she knows she has no right to be. Even though Chris had warned her to be careful. At the bar, he’d squeezed her shoulder. “She was drunk,” he said. “We all do dumb things when we’re drunk.” But Ali doesn’t. Even while drunk, she’s careful. Responsible, even. Calling cabs instead of driving home, making sure to drink water before falling asleep. Ashlyn took a long pull of whiskey, until her throat burned. “I didn’t think she’d actually do it,” she said. Her brother’s jaw tightened. “Fuck this,” he said. “You know what? We’re getting you drunk tonight and then you’re gonna find something on the side.” “Chris—” “I mean it,” he said. “Why should Ali get to be the only one who fucks around? I know for a fact that the bartender thinks you’re cute.” She followed his gaze past her shoulder to Trinity, the tattooed woman mixing drinks behind the bar. Chris told her once that Trinity asked for her phone number; Ashlyn had laughed it off. She barely looked at other women now. Why would she, with Ali back in her life? She tried to imagine herself doing what Ali had done: approaching a strange woman in a bar, buying her a drink, accepting one. Ali perched on a stool, sipping a glass of wine, when a beautiful woman sidles up next to her. What was it about that woman that made Ali finally give in? Ashlyn will always wonder this. It was just a kiss, Ali had said, but who’s to say that it will stop there? Who’s to say that Ali isn’t with this woman right now? Following her back to her darkened townhouse, undressing in a stranger’s bedroom, writhing naked against her sheets. Her brother fulfilled his first promise: he got Ashlyn drunk. Two whiskeys and her head was spinning. Three, and she felt like the ground was tilting. But when he tried to wave over Trinity to join them, Ashlyn went home. She didn’t want to flirt with another woman. She didn’t even think she could. Maybe she needed to. Maybe she needed to prove to herself that she could be with somebody who isn’t Ali. That she is not defective, impossibly latched to a woman who has no problem finding someone else. That she’s not a penguin, mated for life to a person who isn’t bound to her. She could buy Trinity a drink and follow her home. Then she and Ali would be even, mutual in their betrayal. She wouldn’t hurt as bad. But the thought of kissing Trinity made her want to crawl out of her skin. Chris was wrong. She didn’t need to be touched by somebody new. Nobody’s touch made her feel good like Ali’s. Nobody else made her feel alive, instead of like some old, used thing. In the morning, she pats Sugar’s belly while she sits on the dock, watching the boats. It hurts, what Ali did, but Ashlyn can look past it, can’t she? She can still love Ali amidst the uncertainty, in spite of all the way they’ve both managed to hurt each other. She can love Ali like this, even if Ali seeks comfort in someone else’s bed. She can, when the alternative is not loving Ali at all. In Fluvanna, Ali cried once because she’d missed Ashlyn’s last three phone calls. “I’m so sorry, it won’t happen again,” she’d said, and Ashlyn clutched the dirty phone, imagining Ali’s life. She was free in a technical sense, but how free could she be if she was always thinking about Ashlyn? If she spent all her time waiting by the phone in the event that Ashlyn called. If she spent every Saturday making that long drive to visit, only to watch Ashlyn wither in front of her, thinner and quieter by the week. They were serving concurrent sentences, Ashlyn realized, and Ali’s was worse. How horrifying to be trapped in a cage, but how much worse to be free but feel like you aren’t? She’s never wanted to trap Ali again. She doesn’t want to love Ali if it means locking her in a cage. She wants to be like the birds fluttering above the birdhouse, free to fly away but always returning home. *** That Sunday morning, Ali sits on Ashlyn’s doormat, slumped against her apartment door. She’s exhausted—the result of one sleepless night that led to her making the hasty (and expensive) decision to purchase a last-minute flight to Orlando. She ignored the cost as she flung a change of clothes into an overnight bag. She’d never paid so much for a domestic flight to a city where she would stay for fewer than twenty-four hours. She has to be back in Dumfries the next morning, for work and for Missy. But she needs to see Ashlyn, even if it’s only for hours. She needs to know that they are okay, that she hasn’t irreparably damaged a relationship that took so long to rebuild. At the airport, she thought about calling but decided against it. It was barely after sunrise —where else would Ashlyn be? Her stomach sank when she knocked on the door to no reply. She wondered, wildly, if Ashlyn had spent the night at someone else’s place. A pang of jealousy took her breath away. What right did she have to feel jealous, anyway? She was the one who’d transformed their open relationship from a concept to reality. She had probably pushed Ashlyn right into someone else’s arms. An hour after she arrived, she hears footsteps in the stairwell, the sound of a dog’s jingling collar. A low growl, unmistakably Sugar’s. She almost cries with relief. The dog. Ashlyn was just walking her dog. She clambers to her feet right when Ashlyn enters the hallway. Ashlyn pauses, tightening her grip on Sugar’s leash. “Al?” she says. “What’re you doing here?” Ali knows she looks terrible. She’s dressed in sweat pants and a slouchy t-shirt, her hair piled in a bun. Her eyes puffy, from lack of sleep. From crying. Still, she tries to smile as she starts toward Ashlyn, until she hears another growl. Sugar steps between them, his head hunched protectively. Ali stops, staring warily at the dog. “Come on,” Ashlyn tells him, patting his belly. “It’s just Ali. You know Ali, remember?” She holds onto Sugar’s collar and inches him closer to Ali, who stands stock-still as the dog sniffs her shoes. She’s still not completely comfortable around Sugar, even though Ashlyn has tried to get him accustomed to her presence. After her last visit, Ali left a hair tie behind that Ashlyn left in Sugar’s bed, so he could grow used to her scent. When she’d left, the dog seemed calm around her, not exactly friendly but not ready to rip her throat out either. But now he seems edgy again, prickly almost, as if he can sense that something has changed about her, that she is no longer to be trusted. “I’m sorry,” she says, following Ashlyn inside. “I should’ve called, I thought I’d just catch you.” Ashlyn bends to unclip Sugar’s leash, satisfied when he trots over to his bed. “What’s wrong, Al?” she says. “What’re you doing here?” “I missed you,” Ali whispers. She wishes it were as simple as that. A surprise visit, a romantic gesture, motivated by nothing but love. At first, it does seem that simple. Ashlyn smiles, pulling her into a hug, and Ali nestles into her neck, breathing her in. Nothing is different, Ali tells herself. Ashlyn seems happy to see her. Her hug feels the same. Nothing has changed between them, nothing has been ruined. But Ali has to be sure. She kisses Ashlyn’s neck and Ashlyn squeezes her waist. “Aren’t you tired?” she says. “Don’t you want to sleep?” Ali shakes her head. “I didn’t come all this way to sleep,” she says. She has never been religious but she understands now a believer’s desire to be absolved for her sins. She feels that same desperation now as she kisses Ashlyn in her bedroom, unbuttoning her jeans. She has no priest to instruct her, no holy man to inform her of her penance. But she tugs off her clothes, hoping that with every touch she can fix what is broken, that every kiss will bring Ashlyn back to her. On the bed, Ashlyn pulls Ali on top of her. She kisses Ashlyn and asks her to pull her hair. Ashlyn hesitates before giving a tug so gentle, Ali barely feels it. “Harder,” she whispers, kissing down Ashlyn’s neck to the smooth skin between her breasts. Ashlyn wraps her fingers around Ali’s hair but she doesn’t pull. She traces along Ali’s scalp, touching her tenderly. But Ali needs something sharper. “Please,” she says. “Harder.” “No,” Ashlyn murmurs. “I don’t wanna hurt you.” “I want you to,” Ali says. She doesn’t mean to say this aloud. She doesn’t even realize she’s been thinking it until she hears herself. Ashlyn stares at her a minute in stunned silence. “No,” she finally says. “I’m not gonna hurt you.” “I deserve it,” Ali says. “Al—” “Please,” she says. “Punish me.” She starts to cry before she realizes it. She feels pathetic: half-naked and desperate, begging for Ashlyn to hurt her. The first time a lover was rough with Ali, she felt startled by how quickly a Ashlyn to hurt her. The first time a lover was rough with Ali, she felt startled by how quickly a person could turn from sweet to aggressive. She had never experienced this before during sex, not with Ashlyn, who always touched her carefully, like she was treasured and fragile. Ali wasn’t fragile, not any more. She had already been broken, her body splintered by a stranger, and she grew to realize that she didn’t mind when a lover was rough. In fact, she liked it, the pleasure and the pain. Here was a pain she could expect, not one that blindsided her. Here was a pain that she could control. None of her previous lovers had minded her desires, all too eager to enact their fantasies with her. She’d never felt perverse until she sees the confusion in Ashlyn’s eyes. She rolls off of her, hunching over the edge of the bed. “You don’t deserve it,” Ashlyn says. “I do,” Ali says. “I hurt you.” “But I get it, Al. I understand—” “She reminded me of you.” Ashlyn pauses. “What?” Ali turns to face her. “The girl,” she says. “The girl I kissed. She—she reminded me of you. When you were young.” Ashlyn is quiet a minute, then she lets out a breath. “I can’t be that person again,” she says. “Who I was before. I’m sorry, Al. She’s gone.” Ali has always known this. She’s known this since Ashlyn stopped writing, since the trial, since the moment she’d visited Ashlyn at the police station. Maybe even before then, maybe the moment she regained consciousness at the hospital and Ashlyn struggled to even look at her. The Ashlyn she knew—the Ashlyn she’d always known, the one she’d fallen in love with—would have rushed across the hospital room and cradled Ali in her arms. But this girl stood in the corner of the room, trying not to cry. Since when had Ashlyn tried not to cry around her? Since when had they not shared their emotions with each other? Since when had they needed to hide? They’d broken that night, long before Ashlyn split a man’s skull open and long before she emerged from state prison, a shell of her former self. The girl she once was has been lost to Ali for years. Ali will always love that girl, but she will also love the woman Ashlyn has become, this scared, jittery woman who needs patterns and routines, whose very heart seems to beat outside of her body. She touches Ashlyn’s cheek. “It’s not that,” Ali says. “I think she reminded me of who I was. Before he changed me.” Oddly enough, she finds the girl she once was even harder to remember. A girl obscured through the haze of time. Before the attack, before the nightmares, before she fell asleep with a baseball bat behind her bed. Before all the pain, back when she was just a girl who loved soccer and her best friend. Who would she have become if Hardy Jones never crossed her path? This is the sad reality: she will never know. She will never be able to fully account for everything he has stolen from her. “I don’t need you to be her,” Ashlyn says. “I’m so proud of who you are now.” She pulls Ali close and they lie in the bed, holding each other. “What do you want me to do?” Ali asks. Ashlyn kisses her forehead then tugs the covers over them. “Rest,” she says. “I want you to rest.” *** They stay in bed for the rest of the afternoon. Sometimes they talk. Other times, they just hold each other, legs intertwined under the covers. Twice, they make love, passionately and slowly, each touch making Ali feel like she will burst. She’s never known what it is like for someone to love her body. Not like it or enjoy it, but to love it, every inch of her skin, even the parts that she hates. She had been so easy to love before. A golden girl, star athlete and cheerleader, popular and friendly and fun. Now she’s harder, more guarded, more wounded. Even her proudest accomplishment—her daughter—has left a faint webbing of stretch marks across her stomach, embedded into her skin like scars. But Ashlyn doesn’t care. She kisses Ali all over, and after, holds her so close that all Ali can feel is their hearts racketing against each other. She has never known what this is like, for love to tug her out of all of the places she tries to hide. Ashlyn finally gets dressed when Sugar whines to be let out. “Don’t go anywhere,” she whispers, stroking Ali’s ankle as she reaches under the bed for her shoes. But when she returns, Ali has gotten dressed too. She knows one place she wants to go and she asks Ashlyn if they can visit Shady Oaks Assisted Living Facility. During her Christmas visit, Ashlyn had asked, once or twice, if Ali wanted to visit her mother. “She asks about you all the time,” Ashlyn said. Ali always found a reason why she couldn’t. The truth is that she didn’t think she could bare to see Mrs. Harris again. She still resented the woman for abandoning Ashlyn when she’d been in prison. How could she have disappeared during her child’s darkest moment? And how could Ashlyn have managed to forgive her? After her first year in Fluvanna, Mrs. Harris did not visit Ashlyn once. Yet Ashlyn spends each Saturday morning at this depressing home, which, despite its decorative efforts, still feels vaguely like a hospice, like nobody here has much time. On the elevator, Ashlyn tells Ali not to correct her mother when she gets confused. “It just makes it worse,” she says. “That’s what Chris told me, anyway.” But Mrs. Harris knows exactly who Ali is. Or who she was. She lights up when Ali enters the room. “Ali Krieger!” she says. “Now where’ve you been?” Mrs. Harris looks old and wizened now, thin under the hospital blanket. Ali freezes at the sight of her, but Ashlyn smiles, nudging her forward. “Hey Mom,” she says. “Look who I brought to see you.” She guides Ali over to the two chairs near the bed. She’s speaking with a youthful brightness that Ali hasn’t heard from her in years. It’s just play-acting, she knows. She clears her throat and tries to smile. “Hi Mrs. Harris,” she says. “I’m sorry I haven’t been by.” “Oh, that’s alright,” Mrs. Harris says. “Now where’s that brother of yours?” “Kyle?” She glances at Ashlyn, surprised that her mother remembers him. “He’s fine. He’s doing great.” “Well, what’s he up to? He’s always skulking around the house like a cat that ate the canary.” Ali laughs. She reaches for Mrs. Harris’ wrinkled hand. “He’s great,” she says. “Maybe I’ll bring him by next time.” “And what about you? You still work at the Tastee Freez?” She swallows, glancing at Ashlyn again. She hasn’t worked at the Tastee Freez since she was fifteen. Ashlyn gives her an encouraging nod, so she says, “Yes ma’am. I do.” “Well, bring me some ice cream next time!” Ali laughs, squeezing Mrs. Harris’ hand, and promises that she will. The rest of the conversation flows like this: Mrs. Harris questioning Ali as if she’s a teenager, asking about an upcoming soccer tournament, junior formal, her college applications. Ali answers in turn, always careful to not contradict her. At one point, Ashlyn steps out to use the restroom. Ali scoots closer to Mrs. Harris, reaching for her hand again. “I just wanted to tell you that I love your daughter,” she says. “I’ll always love her. I’ll always take care of her.” She doesn’t exactly know why she says this. It won’t make any sense to a woman who envisions the two as teenage girls. But she’s speaking to another part of Mrs. Harris, a part that maybe doesn’t even exist. A part that lingers somewhere in her decaying mind. She wants to set that part of Mrs. Harris at ease, to let her know that she will always be there for the daughter that she will leave behind. Mrs. Harris smiles at her. “I know, honey,” she says. “You just watch out for that man.” Ali frowns. “What man?” “That man. That one who wants to hurt you.” Ali pulls away. Mrs. Harris can’t be talking about Hardy Jones, can she? She doesn’t remember any of that, right? A glimmer of confusion passes her face. “That man,” she says again slowly. “With the truck. Or maybe I just dreamed that.” Ali nods, blinking back tears. “Yes,” she says. “I think it was all a bad dream.” “Well, you girls look out for each other anyway.” “Of course,” Ali says. “Always.” That night, she and Ashlyn sit out on the beach, Ashlyn wrapping a blanket tight around both of them. Ali doesn’t tell her what her mother had asked earlier. She can’t bring herself to ruin the one small comfort Ashlyn might take in her mother’s illness, the fact that the bad memories are gone. Ashlyn nuzzles against Ali’s neck, and Ali stares out at the black glassy water. She imagines that dark country road, two girls driving back from a movie theater. No truck follows them. The girls drive on forever. The girls drive on forever. Years Chapter Notes A little something for the Missy fans. These are the years. Good years and bad ones, years that seem like they will never end, years that skip past before anyone realizes it. Missy Parker learns to measure time in three ways: her age, her grade, and the days until she sees Ashlyn again. Her mother tells her not to count down. Countdowns only distract you from the here and now, she says, you have to focus on life one day at a time. It’s something she’s learned from Ashlyn, an exercise in patience. Missy doesn’t listen. She keeps a countdown calendar on her computer that ticks to every Christmas and Spring Break. After she returns from Florida, she resets the calendar and it starts counting down all over again. Soon she understands why her mother advised her against this. Each time the calendar resets, she feels like no time has actually passed at all. Her father does not like that she spends every long holiday with Ashlyn. But he’s too distracted by the newborn twins to complain. She calls him on Christmas morning but his voice sounds strained, distracted, and she can hear Chastity in the background, cooing to the babies. She imagines his house covered in tinsel, the tree surrounded by noisy toys her father will hold toward the babies’ grubby hands as Chastity smiles behind a camera. At Ashlyn’s kitchen table, Sugar’s wet nose pushes against Missy’s thigh. She rests a tentative hand on his head. She used to be scared of him, but he’s grown to like her, especially since she brings him a toy every visit. “You’re spoiling him,” Ashlyn said, watching him race through her apartment, shaking a rubber chicken. Outside the window, Missy watches Ashlyn and her mother load the surfboards onto the hood of Ashlyn’s car. She tells her father she has to go. She learns to like a Florida Christmas where it doesn’t feel like Christmas at all, where she wears shorts not sweaters, where Ashlyn teaches her how to surf and she dives into the ocean where no one can tell that she’s been crying. *** The year Missy turns sixteen, she decides that she no longer wants to be Missy. For a number of reasons, not limited to: she’s a tall, gangly, girl jock at an age where most of her soccer friends have grown out of sports. One by one, she watches old friends trade cleats for high heels, grass stains for lipstick. She balks when Tristan O’Hara quits volleyball one winter because she wants to be a cheerleader. Not because cheerleading is stupid, although this is what Missy tells her, leading to an unbearable week where Tristan refuses to speak to her. The problem isn’t cheerleading. The problem is that Missy feels as if everyone is growing and changing except for her. She’s still the same sporty girl she always has been, dedicated and competitive, pushing herself even in P.E. while the other girls try to avoid sweating. She still nurtures crushes on girls although she vaguely feels as if that is something she ought to grow out of too. Her friends obsess over boys and dances and parties, but the highlight of Missy’s week is always the game she’s been playing since she was four. Her nickname only seems like yet another way she’s refused to grow up. “You never had a problem with going by Missy before,” her mother says. “That’s because I was a kid. Missy is a little girl’s name.” “Well, you’re still my little girl,” her mother says. Missy rolls her eyes. To her credit, her mother tries to remember to call her Melissa, although it sounds strange even to Missy, a name her mother only called her when she needed to get her attention. Now she is Melissa all the time, which makes her feel older but also makes their relationship seem oddly formal. Ashlyn, on the other hand, always forgets, only catching herself moments later. She laughs. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I like calling you Missy.” “It doesn’t really matter what you like,” Missy says. “You’re never here.” She’s not sure why she snaps. Maybe because this is another part of her that feels like it hasn’t changed, she and her mother both stuck in a continual loop of longing for Ashlyn. It’s not fair, especially since she knows that she’s the reason why her mother hasn’t moved to Florida by now. Once or twice, she’s told her mother that she wouldn’t mind moving, even though she knows all the reasons her mother refuses. Missy’s school is great. She’s already caught the attention of local college recruiters. She has friends. Her father, who she hardly sees as it is. Moving to Florida would mean giving up all of this. She’s told her mother that she is willing to do this, but each time, her mother shakes her head. “We know what’s best for you,” she says. “Well, what about what’s best for you?” “It’s not your job to be concerned about that.” Her mother never complains, but Missy knows how sad it makes her to be away from Ashlyn. Once, she and her mother had gotten in an argument after Missy bombed a biology test. Her mother had been too distracted to hear her phone ring, and when she realized that she’d missed her nightly call with Ashlyn, she sat on the couch, holding her head in her hands. She didn’t look angry. She looked desolate, which was worse than any other punishment she could have rendered. “Why can’t you just come back?” Missy asks. She often fantasizes about Ashlyn returning to Dumfries as suddenly as she’d arrived the first time. She still remembers stumbling upon Ashlyn in the cul-de-sac, how there had been something scary yet familiar about her. A woman who was boyish in the same way that Missy was, who seemed nervous and confused, a little damaged but oddly innocent. When Missy had been ordered upstairs, she’d lingered on the staircase, trying to understand where this woman had come from. Even before she’d understood Ashlyn’s past, Missy’d felt an intractable desire to be near her. Ashlyn was guarded which only made Missy work harder to earn her love. Each time Ashlyn’s defenses fell, Missy felt rewarded. She wonders sometimes if this has always been their dynamic, her striving hopelessly to be near while Ashlyn stays away. “I’m sorry,” Ashlyn says. “It’s no good for me there. Dumfries. It’s bad for my head. You get that, don’t you?” Missy does, but she’s too hurt to admit it. She hangs up. *** A week later, Ashlyn breaks her back. A vertebral fracture, the doctor calls it, which sounds slightly less horrifying than the common phrasing. Only slightly because Missy still feels horrified, imagining the fall. Ashlyn losing her balance and slipping off a roof, landing awkwardly, unable to get up after. On the plan to Orlando, she holds her mother’s hand the whole flight. Time drips slowly, the two and a half hours stretching for an eternity. She’s never broken anything before, only fracturing her ankle one miserable summer that she was forced to spend inside, her leg propped up on the couch. She can’t imagine breaking anything as essential as your spine. What if Ashlyn never walks again? What if she’s completely paralyzed? She squeezes her mother’s hand again and her mother pulls her closer, kissing her forehead. “She’ll be okay,” she whispers, trying to reassure Missy or maybe even herself. In the hospital room, Missy pauses in the doorway. Ashlyn’s lying flat on a stretcher, her neck bound in a brace. She’s so still, she looks almost dead. Missy’s mother rushes to her side, touching her face. Missy feels like a weight has lifted off her chest when she sees Ashlyn squeeze her mother’s waist. She still lingers in the doorway, afraid to come closer. Ashlyn won’t want to talk to her. Why would she, after how awful Missy had been during their last conversation? But her mother gestures for her to come closer so Missy takes a few careful steps. Ashlyn smiles at her. “Hi Missy,” she says. She closes her eyes. “I’m sorry. Melissa.” She reaches out her hand. Missy takes it, blinking back tears. “You can call me Missy if you want to,” she says. *** Her mother stays. At Orlando International, her mother hugs her for a long time outside of the terminal. Ever since their frantic flight the night of the accident, Missy knew that she couldn’t stay long. She’d miss too much school. What she hadn’t anticipated is that her mother won’t be returning with her. Not right now, at least. She has to stay behind to take care of Ashlyn. Ashlyn, who will be bedridden for at least the next few weeks. She can’t walk yet and she still needs help doing basic tasks, like showering. For a week, Missy watched her mother lift Ashlyn and carefully guide her to the bathroom. In Florida, Ashlyn has nobody to take care of her. Her brother, maybe, although the two of them both seemed equally mortified at the prospect of him helping her bathe. It only makes sense that Missy’s mother stays, at least until Ashlyn is back on her feet. “Only for a little bit,” her mother says. “And it’ll be fun. Dad is so excited to have you stay with him.” At her father’s house, Missy feels like a guest. She sleeps in the guest room, the bedroom she once enjoyed now converted into a room for the twins. At breakfast, she watches the boys gurgle and chew, shoveling oatmeal into their faces. She should help her step-mother, who bounces from one baby to the next, wiping off off faces, but she still feels awkward around the twins, as if they’re not her brothers but two precious dolls who belong to someone else. On his way to work, her father bends over one of the boys, wiping his hand with a napkin. Chris or Calvin, Missy still can’t tell them apart. “Good to have you here, kiddo,” he tells her. “I’ll see you at dinner.” He picks up a stuffed dinosaur off the kitchen floor, sliding it into one of the twins’ high chair. It stuns her, how attentive her father is now. How quickly he responds when the babies cry, how he can tell their babbling apart on the baby monitor, how he always remembers which boy is which, who likes dogs and who likes dinosaurs, whose pacifier is blue and whose is green. “Not tonight,” she says. “I’ll be home late.” He frowns. “Why?” “I have a game,” she says. “Remember?” Her father laughs. “Oh, right,” he says. “I forgot you still play soccer.” *** Later that night, she Facetimes her mother, who holds up her phone so that Ashlyn can join too. She still looks like she’s in pain, still in her neck brace, but Ashlyn doesn’t want to talk about how she’s doing. She only wants to talk about Missy’s game. “We watched the whole thing on the internet,” she says. “You did so good, Missy.” “We lost,” Missy says. “Well, not because of you,” her mother says. “Your back line is swiss cheese.” Missy laughs, in spite of herself. She hates losing. Worse had been the lonely trudge back to the locker room before she bummed a ride with Tristan. She hardly remembers the last time she’d lost a game and hadn’t been able to hug her mother after. She wishes that she could leap into the phone and teleport to Ashlyn’s house. She could sit on the couch beside her mother and Ashlyn, Sugar licking at her toes. Instead, she sits in the vacant guest room, staring at the white walls. “You’re getting so good,” Ashlyn says. “Positioning. Reactions. You’re gonna be way better than me.” She doesn’t think this is true, even though she’s never seen Ashlyn play. Maybe even because she’s never seen Ashlyn play. In her mind, Ashlyn has always been mythically talented, a star who had exploded too soon. She had risked everything for Missy’s mother, and sometimes Missy wonders if she could do it all over again, would she? What does a soccer career matter if you don’t have someone to love you? What does a life mean, really, if you’re hurt and you have nobody who’s willing to take care of you. Her mother tells Missy she has to help Ashlyn shower. Ashlyn rolls her eyes. “It’s like I’m an old lady,” she grumbles. Her mother kisses Ashlyn’s cheek. “You’re my old lady,” she says. *** There are two forms of time: before Ashlyn and after Ashlyn. There are two states of being: visiting Ashlyn or missing her. *** A month before her high school graduation, Missy calls Ashlyn for girl advice. Prom advice, more specifically. She scrunches on her bed, talking softly into the phone, worried that her mother will overhear. She already knows that on prom night, her mother will be completely embarrassing—weeping, most likely, and taking photo after photo as Missy tries to escape the house. She certainly doesn’t need her mother to know that what she’s concerned about is what will happen after prom. She’s not going with the girl she’d always imagined she would ask. Tristan O’Hara, who is going with a boy on the football team, Brody or Brady something-orother. Tristan, who has been acting weirdly around Missy ever since she confessed she was in love with her last summer. She had been tipsy off wine coolers at a lake party; she hadn’t meant to embarrass herself by admitting that she had been nursing a crush on her best friend since they were in the same Brownies troop. But she had. Tristan said that she liked boys but she was flattered, really, and of course nothing would change between them. A likely story. Since then, the girls had grown apart and even though her mother tried to comfort her by saying that the separation would have happened naturally when Missy leaves to play soccer for UCLA, she still felt heartbroken. If she were bringing Tristan O’Hara to prom, she would know exactly what would happen after. Well, not the exact mechanics of it, but she would be able to guess at least what she hoped might pass between them. She’d thought about this often, even though it made her feel pervy. How Tristan might sit on her lap in the limo, how after, in the hotel room she’d convinced her mother she needed, she and Tristan would lie beside each other in the big bed and kiss, slowly, her fingers slipping underneath Tristan’s dress strap. But she isn’t bringing Tristan, so there’s no use in even thinking of that. She’s bringing Grace, a cute girl from a rival soccer team, a girl she likes but doesn’t love, which makes her post-prom plans even more complicated. “You shouldn’t do anything you don’t want to do,” Ashlyn says. Missy imagines her sitting at her kitchen table, Sugar asleep at her feet. In her new house, the one she’d bought six months ago. At Christmas, Missy had wandered around the little house, which is nothing like the house she grew up in: single story and white, less than a mile from the beach. She’d loved it right away, clucking for Sugar to follow her to the yard where she tossed him sticks. Once, she’d glanced back inside at the living room where Ashlyn was holding her mother by the tree. She glanced away, always a little embarrassed when they were affectionate in front of her, but mostly aware of how close they were. Even watching felt like an intrusion. This summer, she and her mother will begin packing up the house. She’s dreading the unimaginable task of packing the belongings of two Krieger generations but she knows that she has to help. She’s the only reason her mother stayed, after all, the only reason she’s spent years here, her heart somewhere else. She doesn’t know how anyone can spend so many years away from the person they love. Once Tristan’s moms took her on vacation to Mexico for two weeks and Missy felt like she was dying. She sighs, trying to imagine her prom pictures, her in the tux Ashlyn helped her pick out in Florida, Grace beside her in a dress. But she only envisions Tristan, laughing, her freckled nose scrunched the way it always does when she smiles. “But what if I want to do things?” Missy asks. A long pause. “Jesus,” Ashlyn says. “Come on, Ash, you have to help me. Who else am I gonna talk to about this?” “Why don’t you talk to your mom?” “Are you kidding? She’d faint if she even knew I was asking you this. You can’t tell her, okay?” She suspects that Ashlyn will anyway. Is there anything those two don’t tell each other? She often hears her mother on the phone in another room, updating Ashlyn on her latest misdeeds. A bad grade, a blown curfew, a slightly scraped fender (really, you can barely even tell.) Ashlyn never yells at Missy, but when they talk, she sounds disappointed and surprised, as if she thinks so highly of Missy, she hardly finds her capable of less than stellar behavior. It’s a surprisingly effective method of punishment. “You just have to talk to Grace,” Ashlyn finally says. “Every girl is different, you have to find out what she likes. You can’t just rely on, you know. Moves.” She pauses again. “But Missy? You should be ready. Make sure you’re ready.” Missy doesn’t know what it would feel like to be ready for something like this. Does it matter that she doesn’t love Grace? Shouldn’t your first time be with someone you love? Or is it better to get it out of the way so that you know what you’re doing by the time you do it with someone special? Isn’t prom as good a night as any to find out? Besides, if she waits to sleep with someone she loves, she’ll be waiting for Tristan forever. And she feels like she already has. “How did you know you were ready?” she asks. “I wasn’t, not at first,” Ashlyn says. “But when I started dating your mom—” “Ew, stop,” Missy says, making a face. “I don’t want to hear about you putting moves on my mom.” Ashlyn laughs. “I never had moves,” she says. “I had, maybe, one.” “Gross.” “But it worked, didn’t it?” She leans back against her headboard, staring up at the wooden carving of her name that Ashlyn had made for her all those years ago. Sometimes she thinks that she’d always believed that she and Tristan would work out only because her mother and Ashlyn had. If her mother could fall in love with her best friend, then why couldn’t Tristan fall for Missy? But she knows that this is foolish. Ashlyn is right; every girl is different. Just because you want someone doesn’t make her yours. She listens to her mother bustling downstairs, taking inventory of what things she will sell or bring to Florida. She thinks about her mother standing in front of the Christmas tree, Ashlyn hugging her from behind. Her mother smiling, her face tilted toward the lights. “I guess it did,” she says. *** That fall, her mother and Ashlyn help her move into her dorm room at UCLA. Uncle Kyle, conveniently busy during the bulk of the work, plans to meet them after for dinner. Ashlyn can’t lift like she used to, so she’s been relegated to carrying light things and unpacking the boxes that Missy and her mother drag inside. The whole process is so exhausting, Missy doesn’t even have time to feel excited, not until the end, when she glances around her finished dorm room and spots, outside the window, all the students racing by on bicycles. On her own. Soon she will be on her own and she feels a sudden urge to race through this evening, through the family dinner, until she gets dropped back off at her room and can finally explore the campus. She feels guilty for thinking this, of course. Her mother and Ashlyn have traveled such a long way to help her. Once they leave, she won’t see them again until Thanksgiving. When her mother is calling Uncle Kyle, Ashlyn pulls Missy aside. “I got you something,” she says. A present, Missy thinks, until she feels the hard plastic against her palm. Pepper spray. A tiny tube of pepper spray with a silver key ring. “See, you can just clip it onto your keys and you won’t even have to think about it,” Ashlyn says. Pepper spray? Pepper spray is for suburban housewives too afraid to walk through the grocery store parking lot. Pepper spray is for hysterical women who leap at their own shadow. And why would Missy even need pepper spray here, of all places? She’ll be safe on campus, won’t she? “You won’t need it,” Ashlyn says. “But could you just carry it? Please. For me.” Missy often finds herself thinking about the night her mother was attacked. Her mother had omitted the more visceral details, so over the years, Missy has supplied them herself. A man smashing open the car window, glass raining down. A man grabbing her mother by her hair and dragging her onto the dirt. A man punching Ashlyn until she can’t get up. A man, inexplicably violent, exorcising his anger into the bodies of two girls. Sometimes she looks at her mother and sees it, the way this man has damaged her. How he’s made her wary. Once, Missy had awoken to a rustling sound outside her window. When she’d stepped into the hallway, her mother was already awake, holding a baseball bat. She didn’t have to use it—the sound was just a few teammates tee-peeing the house—but she looked ready to swing. It startled Missy, how quickly her mother could change into this other person. Her mother will worry about her. She will worry about her always, when she doesn’t call, when she stays out late, when she makes regrettable decisions. Ashlyn will worry about her too. So she clips the pepper spray onto her key chain. Not because she’s scared. Not because she thinks she’ll need it. Not even because, in all her imaginings of the attack, she thinks pepper spray would have made a difference. She carries it because she owes them this much, the gift of worrying about her a tiny bit less. She will go out into the world fearless, until the world gives her something to fear. World Chapter Notes Okay, friends, this is where I leave you. Thanks so much for coming along for the ride! This one was special to me and I'm grateful for all of your comments and kudos along the way. In Florida, Ali plans weddings. Big ones and small ones, weddings with elaborate themes and schematics so complicated, she keeps binders full of all the details. Soon her binders cover the kitchen table, and soon she and Ashlyn learn to live around them, nudging one out of the way to set down a coffee cup. Ashlyn never complains about the binders taking over the house. She seems glad that Ali has found something new to throw her energy toward. Florida had been hard for her at first. She missed her daughter and Ashlyn was gone all day at work. For hours, Ali sat around the house like a bored housewife, nursing the nagging notion: shouldn’t I be happier? Isn’t this what she’d wanted for years? A life together with Ashlyn? Weren’t these the days she’d been dreaming of, the way middle-aged people look forward to retirement? Well, why wasn’t she happier? She was happy, of course. Each morning, she opened her eyes and saw Ashlyn asleep beside her. She fell asleep at night holding her. How could that not make her happy? But she wasn’t meant to be idle. She was brimming with extra energy, which meant that she became the type of mother who called her daughter too often, annoying Missy and herself. She could only clean the house so often, take Sugar on so many walks, cook so many meals. The problem was that she didn’t know what to do with herself in this new life. She’d already decided she didn’t have the energy to launch into a new legal career. She wasn’t sure what she had the energy for, anymore. She felt like everyone in their forties was settled into a career and here she was, starting over. Again. Years ago, she’d been excited to leave soccer for law. But now, a career transition only seemed daunting. But, she told herself, Ashlyn had done it. She’d started over, again and again, in the most impossible of ways. She tried to imagine Ashlyn’s first shaky days in a world that had changed without her. How she must have felt like an explorer wandering on a foreign planet. But she’d managed to start over, in Dumfries, and later in Florida. And each morning, she kissed Ali’s forehead before leaving to work. After her back injury, Chris had given her a desk job, so for months, she’d read a stack of books, trying to learn everything she could about computers. Another new start, and soon Ali felt silly for feeling afraid to try something different. On a whim, she took a class at the local junior college on wedding planning. After, the instructor pulled her aside and asked if she was looking for work. “I want to add someone a little more seasoned to my team,” she said. “Not one of these nineteenyear-olds.” Most of Ali’s classmates were young, idealistic girls, enchanted by thoughts of their own wedding someday. To them, wedding planning seemed like practice for their own big day, a projection of their own fantasies. But Ali was old enough to look past the romance. She knew what mistakes she’d made at her wedding that nobody should repeat. She’d attended enough weddings to learn that sometimes the cutest effects couples thought a wedding needed just weren’t worth it. So she joined Save the Date Wedding Planning, thinking it might be a good distraction, at least until she discovered what she truly wanted to do. She hadn’t expected it to consume her, to fill her with a sense of purpose she hasn’t felt in years. She’s almost embarrassed by how much she enjoys something as trivial as selecting table cloths or arranging flower bouquets. “It’s not trivial,” Ashlyn says, in bed one night. “It’s a day that a person will never forget.” She glances at Ali over her book. She wears reading glasses now, even though she complains that they make her look old. Ali bought her a pair after she finally got tired of watching her squint. They’re not old but they will be someday. In all of Ali’s youthful imaginings about her life with Ashlyn, she had never pictured this: two empty-nesters, reading side by side in bed at night, so cozy and domestic and comfortable. Earlier that week, Ali’s boss had asked if she ever planned to remarry. She never knew how to answer that question. She had heard a version of it for years, usually from her mother, but occasionally from Kyle. “Ugh, when’s that girl gonna put a ring on it?” he asked, and she always rolled her eyes. For all his screeds against monogamy, Kyle sure seemed invested in whether Ashlyn proposed. Whenever someone asked Ali why she and Ashlyn weren’t married, she always countered with, why should they be? You don’t need a ring to commit to a person. You don’t need a ring to be happy. She’s been married before, and she’s learned that legally binding yourself to another person cannot ensure your happiness. Marriage won’t make a relationship any stronger than it already is. And in a way, it feels almost silly to think about marrying Ashlyn. To file paperwork and plan a wedding, all to prove that she’s committed to a woman she’s loved her entire life. She’s never particularly sensed that Ashlyn seems interested in marriage, either. If she was, wouldn’t she have suggested it by now? But maybe Ashlyn does want this. After all, Ali has already experienced her own wedding. What if Ashlyn also wants a day she’ll never forget? “Do you want to?” Ali asks. “Want to what?” “Get married.” “Are you… proposing to me?” Ali thinks a second. “Yes,” she says. “Seriously?” Ali smiles. “Sure, why not?” She can hardly believe what she’s saying. She’s never imagined that she would propose to anyone, let alone that it might happen spontaneously, late in bed one night. Ashlyn laughs. “This isn’t how this is supposed to happen,” she says. “What do you mean?” “I was supposed to ask you! I was supposed to do something romantic—” “Want me to get down on one knee?” Ali asks. Ashlyn laughs again, pulling her into a kiss. But when she pulls away, her eyes are wet. “Jesus, Al,” she says. “Do you really mean it?” “Of course I mean it.” “I didn’t think you wanted to do all that again.” Ali sets Ashlyn’s book on the nightstand, then she eases on top of her, one hand snaking up her tshirt. “I don’t,” Ali says. “I just want to marry you.” *** Ashlyn doesn’t want a wedding. She announces this almost shyly the next morning, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, both hands behind her back. She admits it like its a dirty confession, because to a wedding planner, it probably is. Ali has already started making lists: first, the people she needs to alert about her engagement, her daughter, mother, and brother in that order; second, possible wedding dates, given how crammed her calendar already is with other people’s ceremonies; third, potential venues. She’s disappointed by how quickly her wedding planner brain has taken over. Shouldn’t the morning after your engagement be a blissful moment where you revel in your good fortune? Instead, she’s already started thinking about all the work she has to do. She doesn’t even hear Ashlyn’s announcement the first time, and when Ashlyn repeats herself, Ali finally glances up from her binder. “You don’t?” she says. “Why not?” She can’t help it. She feels a little hurt. She wants to give Ashlyn a beautiful wedding, a day she’ll never forget. But Ashlyn shrugs, staring at her feet. “I can’t,” she says. “All those people staring at me. I’ll probably puke right on my shoes.” Before, Ashlyn would have loved a wedding. But she’s not that girl anymore and Ali feels stupid for not realizing this. She pushes away from the table and wraps her arms around Ashlyn’s neck. “Okay,” she says. “No wedding.” “You’re not disappointed?” “Why would I be?” she says. “We can go downtown and do it. Then later, we can have a little party. With Missy and Chris and Kelley. Just everyone we love. How about that?” The next morning, they put on nice clothes and drive to the courthouse downtown. It surprises Ali, how giddy she feels. Even with no fancy ceremony, no poofy white dress, no multi-tier cake, she feels fidgety and excited, holding Ashlyn’s hand during the entire drive. But when they reach the courthouse steps, Ashlyn freezes. Ali frowns, confused for a moment, until she realizes why. In Dumfries, Ali used to visit the courthouse often, spending hours arguing cases or filing briefs or requesting court records. But Ashlyn hasn’t been inside a courthouse since her sentencing. She looks suddenly young again, looking up at the big building from the bottom step. Ali wraps her arms around her, holding her close while the morning sun warms their backs. “It’s okay,” she says. “This time I’m not leaving without you.” *** At UCLA, Missy meets a girl. Many girls, actually, so many girls that her mother gets confused when she mentions one during her call home. Christie, is that the one from the lacrosse team? Hannah is your lab partner, right? Wait, which one is Laura? I swear, Missy, you’re going to have to make me a diagram, I can’t keep all these girls straight in my head. Some of these girls are friends. Some of these girls are more than friends, which is the more surprising part. In Dumfries, she’d nursed a long crush that had gone nowhere and part of her expected the rest of her life to fall this way, longing after girls she could never have. She’d always assumed that the problem was her, not the simple fact that it’s hard to be out in small-town Virginia. But at UCLA, her dating pool of hot, willing girls expands, and she can’t help herself from diving headfirst. “You know you can bring someone with you,” Ashlyn told her last Christmas. “If there’s someone special.” Missy snorted. She didn’t want to meet anyone special, not right now. She just wanted to have fun, and she had some serious catching up to do. While the rest of her peers had been hooking up with strangers in high school, she’d been mooning over her straight best friend. Didn’t she at least deserve a few years to make some regrettable hook-ups of her own? Of course, as soon as she determined she didn’t want to be in a relationship, she found herself falling for her teammate Jade Press. A left-footed striker who embarrassed Missy in practice by nailing each of her PKs. After, she’d cornered Missy in the locker room and asked if she wanted to practice one-on-one later. Missy thought she just wanted to gloat. She didn’t expect practice to lead to dinner, then to dessert, then to kissing outside of her dorm room. Six months later, while they lie on the extra-long twin bed, she asks Jade if she wants to join her at her mother’s wedding. She doesn’t plan on asking this, but she always feels extra sentimental like this, holding Jade, tracing her fingers along her bronze skin. “Wow,” Jade says. “You mean I finally get to meet your moms?’ Jade has, not so subtly, been hinting around to see when Missy would finally introduce her to her family. Missy has already gone to dinner with the Presses, but it’s different, she’s tried to explain. Jade’s parents live in Rancho Palos Verdes, just an hour away. Dinner plans with them can be spontaneous and casual, not an entire cross-country flight. But if she’s honest with herself, she knows that the logistics aren’t the only reason she’s been hesitant to bring Jade home. “There are some things I should tell you,” she says. “About Ashlyn.” “Okay.” Jade props herself up on her elbow. “She’s quiet. But it doesn’t mean she doesn’t like you. She just doesn’t talk much.” “Okay.” “And don’t hug her when you meet her. I know you always do that but she doesn’t like hugs.” “Quiet. Not a hugger. Got it.” “And maybe don’t ask a lot of questions about her past.” Jade laughs. “Jesus, is she like a CIA agent? An international assassin?” Missy cringes. “Okay, and really don’t make that joke.” “Missy, what’s going on?” She sighs. She’s often wondered how she would explain Ashlyn. Part of her had wondered if she even needed to say anything about Ashlyn’s past. Why would she? She’s not in Dumfries anymore. Why couldn’t Ashlyn have a clean slate now? But it does matter. Like it or not, prison is part of who Ashlyn is. “She went to prison,” she finally says. “Years ago, but still. So if you have a problem with that, then maybe don’t come.” She doesn’t mean to come across this defensive, but she can’t help it. She’s protective of Ashlyn. Jade shifts beside her, frowning. “Why would you think I’d have a problem with that?” she asks. “I don’t know. Some people do.” “Well, I’m not some people,” Jade says. Weeks later, Missy squeezes Jade’s hand as their flight begins its descent into Orlando. Soon they’ll be greeted by her mother, who will pick them up, making small talk with Jade during the whole drive. Her mother will try, and fail, to hide her excitement about finally meeting Missy’s first girlfriend. I’ve been wondering where Missy was hiding you, she’ll say, and she and Jade will smile conspiratorially at each other. They’ll catch up with Ashlyn at the house. Jade won’t try to hug her. Sugar will growl, banished to the backyard until he calms down. At the kitchen table, Ashlyn will try to make small talk. She will seem stiff and uncomfortable, but Jade will pretend not to notice. She won’t ask questions about the past. They’ll talk about soccer. Later, they’ll all sit out in the backyard to watch the sun dip below the ocean. Her mother will rest her head on Ashlyn’s shoulder, and Jade will nudge her, smiling. I want to be like them someday, she’ll whisper, and Missy’s stomach will flutter. Me too, she’ll say. Me too. *** On her forty-fifth birthday, Ashlyn applies for her first passport. She’s punted every time Ali asked if she wanted to apply for one, like right after their wedding when they discussed their honeymoon. She would need a passport if she wanted to leave the country, Ali said, and didn’t she want to? They could go anywhere: Paris or Rome, Bali or Fiji, Thailand or Japan. Name any wonderful, exotic place, Ali told her, and she would get her travel agent on the phone in the morning to find flights. But Ashlyn didn’t want to leave the country. Why would she? Everything she knows is here, everyone she loves. The world beyond scares her, Outside further expanding, opening wider than she’d ever dreamed. She’d dawdled long enough that Ali eventually suggested Hawaii. They’d had a beautiful honeymoon, but Ashlyn had always felt guilty about it, like she was holding Ali back. She would get her passport someday, she promised herself, when the time was right, when she was ready. So when Missy is named the starting keeper for the U-21 Women’s World Cup, Ashlyn takes a deep breath and drags herself down to the passport office. In the waiting room, Ali squeezes her thigh, stepping out to make a phone call while Ashlyn hunches over the clipboard. Ali already has her passport. Ashlyn has flipped through it before and seen all the stamps. Germany and France and the U.K., even China. She’s been to so many places, their life in Satellite Beach must seem incredibly small. Again, Ashlyn feels a pang of unworthiness. She should do better. She should surprise Ali one day and plan a trip to someplace far away. A romantic cruise or something like that. But whenever she tries to think of where to go, her mind goes foggy. She can’t imagine being happier anywhere but here, in her little house with her dog and Ali. Maybe that isn’t such a bad thing, after all. She’d never thought about visiting New Zealand, but ever since Missy made the roster, she’s been emailing Ashlyn links to local attractions and restaurants. Maybe it won’t be so scary. How could it be? She’ll be with Ali. She brings the completed form to an older woman behind the desk who begins entering it into her computer. “A few more questions,” she says, reading off her screen. “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” Ashlyn’s neck burns. She glances around the quiet waiting room, the other people bowed over clipboards, and feels the overwhelming urge to lie. But why bother? It’ll only catch up to her. She feels stupid for thinking this form was perfunctory, that she could just fill it out and expect her passport in the mail. A felon can’t even vote in Florida. Why would she think getting a passport would be easy? “Yes,” she says, as quietly as she can. The woman behind the desk doesn’t even look up, clicking a box. “Were you convicted of a federal or state drug offense?” “No, ma’am.” “Are you the subject of an outstanding federal, state or local warrant of arrest for a felony?” “No,” she says. “Nothing like that.” “Should be okay, then,” the woman says. “We’ll let you know.” In the hallway, she shoves her hands in her pockets, pacing. She’s trying not to think about the phone call she’ll have to make to Missy if her passport application gets declined. How could she ever explain that? How she’ll miss the biggest tournament of Missy’s life? This is the tricky thing about Inside. As soon as she pushes it out of her mind, as soon as she imagines herself far away, it always manages to hook into her and drag her back. She almost bumps into a man, who asks if she is standing in line outside the office. “No, sorry,” she says. “I’m just looking for my wife.” She finds Ali on the steps outside, hanging up her phone call. She smiles, and Ashlyn tries to smile back. “How’d it go?” Ali asks. “There might be a problem,” she says. “The lady asked if I had a felony.” Ali frowns. “It shouldn’t matter,” she says. “They usually only deny applications for drug convictions. Don’t worry about it, okay? It’ll be fine.” She wraps her arms around Ashlyn, rubbing the back of her neck. She doesn’t understand what it’s like to live as a felon, to feel your past always dragging behind you. To dread filling out any government form because you know, eventually, you’ll encounter a line about your criminal history. For a while, she’d thought about coaching kids at the Rec Center. She missed Missy and she thought it might be good for her, a way to give back to the community. But she had barely started the application form when she saw the criminal history section, along with the warning that there would be strict background checks. Of course there would be. You couldn’t be a felon and work with kids. She’d crumpled the form before even writing her name. She doesn’t think about Inside, always. But in moments like this, she feels it pressing against the back of her brain. Ali’s soft fingers on her neck pull her out, tether her to the world. “I told this guy that you’re my wife,” Ashlyn says. She still feels strange saying the word, the way she’d once hesitated to call Ali her girlfriend, as if by speaking the word out loud, she was jinxing it somehow. Ali gives her a goofy smile. “Well, I am,” she says. “I know. It still felt weird.” “Good weird?” Ashlyn laughs. “Yes, Al,” she says. “Always good weird.” *** She returns to Dumfries one last time. After their flights to New Zealand have been booked, after they’ve scoured guidebooks for attractions, after their bags have been packed and Ashlyn has checked, once, then twice, that her new passport is inside, after they’ve dropped off Sugar at Chris’, they fly to Virginia for Missy’s sendoff party. Her father had insisted on throwing it. Ali objected on principle, before agreeing that it was likely for the best. The twins were still too young for Will to even consider traveling to New Zealand, and besides, most of Missy’s high school friends still lived in Dumfries. A Florida party just wouldn’t have been the same. Ashlyn understands the logic, but she still wishes the party had been anywhere else, even in Los Angeles, on the rooftop of Kyle’s loft. Anywhere but Dumfries, anywhere but in Ali’s ex-husband’s house. For weeks, she’d debated whether she should even go. “What do you mean?” Ali had said. “Of course you’re going.” “I mean, I wasn’t actually invited.” She held up the invitation Will had sent, only addressed to Ali Krieger. Ali rolled her eyes. “Forget about Will,” she said. “I want you there. Missy wants you there. You have to go, babe.” “He’ll probably kick me out of the house.” Ali leaned over to kiss her. “If you think I’ll even let him look at you funny,” she said, “you’re crazy.” In the cab from the airport, Ali asks the driver to take the long way so that she can go by the old house. Ashlyn stares out the window as they duck under the trees. Sometimes Dumfries feels like another country, a foreign land where she’d spent her youth. And other times, she realizes, her throat tightening as they pull up to the old Krieger house, Dumfries feels like home. The cab idles at the sidewalk and Ali leans forward to inspect the new family that lives there. The brown minivan, the toys scattered on the lawn. No soccer goal in the cul-de-sac, but now a basketball hoop nailed to the garage. Ashlyn tries to read her face but she can’t tell if what she sees is regret or longing or just nostalgia. “I’m sorry,” she finally says. “Why?” “This house. It should’ve stayed in the family.” Ali squeezes her thigh. “I lived in this house for almost my entire life,” she says. “I needed to start over too.” She rests her head on Ashlyn’s shoulder as the cab turns around and follows the road back into the trees. Ashlyn read once that forest fires are good, necessary even. A fire clears away the brush, cleans the forrest floor of debris, opens it to sunlight. When fires burn occasionally, the trees that survive grow stronger and healthier for it. Maybe that’s who she and Ali are. The trees that survived. *** At the party, Ashlyn wanders through the crowded house, searching for someplace quiet. She’s having a good time, in spite of her misgivings. She loves watching Missy like this, holding court among her adoring friends, who grab her to snap pictures together every time she turns around. The house is decorated in red, white and blue, balloons and streamers hanging from all the rafters, and a banner reading GO MISSY! stretches over the staircase. It feels like a pep rally for one, and the palpable excitement causes her to feel jittery about the upcoming tournament. She’s been almost too distracted by the complications of travel that she has barely had time to think about the games. She’s so proud of Missy for making the roster, she doesn’t even care if the team wins or loses. But Missy does, of course. She’s convinced that this will be her chance to impress the coach of the senior national team, and she doesn’t want anything to ruin it. She’s putting too much pressure on herself, Ashlyn knows. She’s been trying to tell Missy to relax. You can’t play tight. You have to play loose or you’ll beat yourself before you even step onto the pitch. She finally manages to find a quiet corner and she slides one of the twin’s action figures off of the recliner before sitting. Across the room, she watches Ali talking to Will. He’s behaved himself, for the most part. He didn’t exactly welcome Ashlyn in with open arms, but he at least managed a smile in her direction when he answered the door. He enjoys hosting the party, turning his house into Missy Central, as he calls it. Missy rolls her eyes when she walks over to Ashlyn. “He doesn’t even like soccer,” she says. Ashlyn squeezes her shoulder. “He’s trying,” she says. “You have to give him that.” Life has taught her this: how to be generous. How to be open to all of the ways that people try to love you. “We got some of our gear,” Missy says. “Want to see?” Ashlyn follows her up the stairs to the guest room. She’s never been in Will’s house before and she stares at the framed photographs on the walls, the side-by-side pictures of the twins, Missy’s graduation picture. Will and Chastity’s wedding portrait. She wonders what Ali’s house had looked like when she and Will lived there together. She feels oddly grateful to him, in a way. He’d taken care of Ali while Ashlyn was away. He’d loved Ali while Ashlyn couldn’t. He’d given her Missy. No matter the mistrust that’s spread between them, she could never hate Will, not for any of that. In the spare room, Missy opens a cardboard box and pulls out her jersey. “Wow.” Ashlyn grins, holding it up. The jersey is new and gleaming, a long-sleeved navy blue kit with an American flag on the arm. She still remembers the first time she’d tried on her youth national team jersey and it dawned on her that she was representing something much larger than herself. She had hoped that she would wear that national team kit for years, that she would make the senior roster, that she would win gold one day, her country’s flag draped across her shoulders. She stopped dreaming of this long ago, but it almost scares her, how badly she wants it for Missy. She traces her fingers over the number one in the front of the jersey, then flips it over. “Hey, why don’t you try—” She pauses. On the back of the jersey, she stares at her own last name. A mistake, she thinks, until she glances up to see Missy smiling at her expectantly. “What do you think?” Missy says. Ashlyn can’t help it. She turns around, her hand springing to her watering eyes. “You shouldn’t have done that,” she says. “What’s wrong?” Missy says. “You shouldn’t have—” She takes a steadying breath. “You should’ve got your mother’s name.” But Missy takes her hand and turns her around. She’s smiling. “You are my mother,” she says. “And I wouldn’t be here without you, Coach.” She’s a young woman now, no longer the little girl Ashlyn had watched practicing in the cul-desac. Soon she’ll fly overseas to her first major international tournament. She’ll stand in goal wearing the name Harris on her back, and Ashlyn will watch in a stadium over eight thousand miles from Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women. She can’t imagine that distance. She’d never known Outside could be so big. But it is, and she suddenly wants to see it. She doesn’t have enough time to go everywhere. But she pulls Missy into a hug, imagining all the countries she’ll visit, the entire world opening up to her like a map. Pick one, Missy used to say, when she wanted Ashlyn to quiz her on her capitals. Ashlyn would point to a splotch on the map and Missy would rattle off cities. Kabul. Brussels. Oslo. She imagines this as her daughter’s life, the cities she’ll visit, the people she’ll love. An embarrassment of choices. Pick one. Pick one. Pick one. *** In the morning, she stands beside Ali in the long security line at the airport. She always feels antsy around TSA agents. They remind her of guards. Anyone stern and uniformed reminds her of a guard. Ali squeezes her hand, smiling up at her. She has this uncanny way of knowing when Ashlyn feels scared, when she needs reassurance. It embarrasses her, sometimes, how easy she is to read. Most times, it makes her feel loved. She squeezes Ali’s hand back. Sometimes she still obsesses over those lost years. Inside, she’d often daydreamed about manipulating time. Would she rewind to that night at the gas station and drive away? Would she fast-forward to her release from this hell? Each choice seemed equally awful, the past impossible to undo, the future impossible to imagine. The reality was that she could be in no other moment but now. She realizes that still, but the difference is that now she couldn’t dream of being in any other time. Every now feels more perfect than the last. On the airplane, Ashlyn reaches for her wife’s hand. She always feels a little nervous during takeoffs. She flies so rarely now, she’s always a little startled by the tiny jolt as the wheels leave the runway. Ali smiles, kissing her. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I’m here.” She slides up the window shade and Ashlyn wraps her arms around Ali, leaning toward the window. She watches as the plane rumbles to life, gently lifting off the runway, as Virginia grows tiny below her, and she enters into the world.
