Page 6 of Chasing Your Ghost

“I can’t,” she said, her words ending with a shattered and choked noise. “You’re all I have, Dad. You can’t leave me.”

“That’s not true. You’ll have Edith and Hugh now. And Olivia and Noah.”

“Those people aren’t my family,” she argued. “I know you’re hoping Edith and I will fix our non-existent relationship if I stay there over the summer, but that’s not how it works, Dad.”

“Then why did you agree to stay there?” His voice was calm, contrasting with her raging emotions, but Riley could see the sadness in his eyes.

“Because you asked me to.” Riley threw up her hands. “And because I don’t exactly have many options.” She honestly wasn’t sure how she’d ended up agreeing to stay with the woman she’d been unwaveringly resenting for the last six years, but what she said was true. She didn’t exactly have an alternative.

Her father had left everything to Riley, and after the remaining balance on his parents’ medical bills and his funeral expenses had been deducted, there had been just enough to pay for Riley’s college fees and for her to stay in res. But because the instructions in her dad’s will had meant the setting aside of a certain amount of money for her studies—an amount that couldn’t be used for anything else—unless Riley got a job with a decent salary in the next few days, she wouldn’t be able to afford rent and groceries.

Maybe she was taking the easy way out by accepting Edith and Hugh’s offer to live with them until she went off to Georgetown in August, but her dad’s encouragement had made it hard to say no. And fine, maybe a tiny, minute, practically inconsequential part of her had wanted to move in with them, had wanted to get to know her half-sister, Olivia, and her stepbrother, Noah.

But Riley didn’t like thinking too much about what it meant that after all this time and all her vehement denials, she wasn’t quite as opposed to living with her mother as she would have everyone—herself included—believe. She was just so tired. So tired of being alone. So tired of being an outcast. She was so tired that she’d agreed to Edith’s offer.

The woman wasn’t even her mother, for goodness sake. That term was reserved for people who didn’t leave when things got too tough. Egg donor was far more appropriate. Perhaps stranger was even more applicable. Abandoner. Deserter. She-who-shall-not-be-named.

They were all far better labels for the perfectly put-together blonde woman who’d looked so hopeful when she’d finished off their impromptu lunch by asking if Riley needed a place to stay before she started at Georgetown—the same college Noah happened to attend and one that Riley had picked without realizing her egg-donor lived only a thirty-minute drive away from the campus.

“I know she’s made terrible mistakes,” Riley’s dad sighed. “If I’m honest, I haven’t forgiven her either for what happened with that priest.”

She frowned, her eyebrows pulling together in confusion. “Then why do you want me to go live with her?”

“Because I know how much she loves you, and if there’s even a chance that you two can work things out, I want you to take it. She’s all the family you have left, Riley, and I can’t bear the thought of you being alone once I’m gone.”

“This is the real reason you wanted me to deliver that envelope, isn’t it?” Riley asked, her eyes closing in resignation. “It was never about the letter. Not really.”

Her dad hadn’t been able to move on because he wanted to know she was cared for, that she had people she could rely on once he was gone. She should have seen through his plan as soon as he’d asked her to take the envelope to Edith.

She’d had no friends because she’d been deemed a freak in middle school after being spotted, on more than one occasion, talking to someone no one else could see. The label had clung to her into high school, so Riley had only had her father and her grandparents.

With all of them gone, she could understand why he’d done what he had, even while it made her feel like the most pathetic human being on the planet. Riley had always been a bit of a loner, but she and her dad both knew it wasn’t by design. She’d simply been too much of an outcast to have friends, and the prickly persona she’d grown into had probably only made it harder. People usually tended to avoid people who called their peers fuckers and asshats on a regular basis, even if the victims of Riley’s cusses had started it first.

“I just want you to be happy, and I couldn’t face the thought of you living in this apartment alone until you start college.”

She looked away and gritted her teeth, embarrassed that she’d been such a social pariah that her dad had been forced to worry about it.

“I would have been fine.”

“I know you would have,” he agreed. “But I want you to be happy, not just fine.”

Riley swallowed the lump in her throat and nodded. “I get it. I just wished you’d told me from the beginning.”

“Would you have gone along with it if I had?” he asked with a smile.

Riley rolled her eyes. “Not a chance in hell.”

“Exactly.”

“You’re a manipulative bastard,” she muttered.

“That’s no way to speak to your dead father,” he teased, making Riley’s face fall instead of earning the laugh he’d intended.

She wiped away the tear that slid down her cheek and sat back down on the old and worn sofa. “I don’t know if I can do this without you,” she admitted in a whisper.

“You can. You’re the strongest person I know.”

Riley scoffed, wiping away more moisture from her cheeks. “I don’t feel very strong.”

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