Page 246 of Heart So Hollow

“Why didn’t he just break up with me if he was so angry?” Brett takes a deep breath, not looking up from her phone, “If he knew everything that…happened?”

“You could’ve shot his dog in front of him and set his house on fire,” I swivel around to face her, “he’s not going to break up with you no matter what you do.”

She contorts her face in disgust, “Why not?”

“You ever wonder why abusive parents don’t just surrender their kids to the state?” I ask, “It’s the same reason some men prefer giving their woman black eyes. To him, you’re property, relinquished only by death. He’d rather kill you than let anyone else have you.”

I can tell she doesn’t like being referred to as livestock to be bought and sold, but that’s the reality, whether she likes it or not.

Brett’s voice softens at this sobering fact, “Was Bowen always like this?”

It still fucks with me to hear his name come out of her mouth, like I’m in some parallel universe where she’s stepped into a part of my world where she never should’ve been.

“In a sense,” I glance at my phone, at the rapid-fire texts coming through every few seconds, “I think he just got better at it.”

Brett gazes out the window at the sprawling fields across the road, “Do you ever think about the small micro-decisions you make every single day?” she muses, “Like if you decide to leave your house two minutes earlier or two minutes later, you could change the course of your entire life?”

“Like the butterfly effect? What’s that story called—The Sound of Thunder?” I can’t believe I remember that, “Are you afraid you flapped your wings and caused a typhoon?”

“Something like that,” she smiles.

I give a shrug, “That depends on how much of your life you think is left to chance. You might be walking blind, but that doesn’t mean everyone else is, too.”

“Like you?” she shoots me a pointed glance.

“I pay attention to what’s important to me. Everyone has an agenda. Your coincidence is someone else’s plan,” I grin back at her, “you just don’t know it.”

She pinches her eyebrows together, “It was a coincidence, though. Meeting Bowen was a coincidence.” She’s trying to make it make sense, but it’s not working. “If I hadn’t answered the phone in my room, if I hadn’t gone down to the lobby at the exact time I did, I never would’ve met Bowen. And I wouldn’t be sitting here now, watching my life fall apart and feeling sorry for myself.”

I shoot her a side-eye, “I think you’re allowed to feel something after busting out a window to escape captivity. But I know what it’s like to obsess over what you think you should’ve done and when.”

“OK,” Brett pauses, taking in my words, “what kinds of things should you have done that you didn’t?”

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

Evie

High School

For a brief moment in time, Bo is all that matters.

I feel myself starting to obsess over him like he’s this pillar of energy that I feed off of like a plant needs water. And it’s both terrifying and exhilarating, because I’m not like that, I don’t need a guy. I’ve never needed a boy to make me feel important. But I start to need him, because now I talk to Bo about anything and everything, and it seems like he can’t get enough of it, either.

At first, I don’t know why I’m so scared to tell Hildy about it. Maybe it’s because sometimes it’s hard to tell what’ll set her off. She’s my best friend, but I’ve seen what can happen when she feels slighted by someone, especially when it comes to relationships—hers or otherwise.

Or maybe it’s just because Bo is Bo and I am me and we live in different worlds where the only thing we share is Hildy. I’m also not one to rock the boat. I don’t want things to change.

But things do change, whether we want them to or not.

The day comes when I click on an email from UCLA and I immediately drop to my knees. I literally drop to my knees right in the middle of my kitchen because I made the softball team and they’re offering me a scholarship, paid in full. I’m going to college on the west coast and all the work I put in and all the choices I’ve made up to now have paid off. Not a day later, I’m bombarded with texts and DMs from the softball girls I met when I visited campus last fall. As if they have to convince me of anything.

I’m in. I’m so fucking in, in every sense of the word.

When I find out, I text my mom, I text my dad, I text Colson and Dallas, I text Hannah, and then I straight up drive to Hildy’s house and run screaming across her lawn. I burst into the house like a lunatic, shoving my phone in her face while I continue hyperventilating.

Hildy screams. I scream. We jump up and down like five-year-olds at Disney World.

She knows how much all of this means to me. And so does Bo. He knows all of it because I’ve spent hours talking to him about how much I want to play ball and how scared I am that I won’t get to. He tells me it’ll happen and I need to quit worrying, that everything will work out how it’s supposed to. Bo doesn’t say things like that. But, now, he says things like that to me.

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