Page 13 of The Hometown Legend

When she’d gotten into middle school, she’d begged to be able to go to school in Mapleton, along with Lydia. Her parents had agreed, since it didn’t mean any extra work for them, given transportation would be handled by Lydia’s older brother.

That had given Rory her own space. Her own time. A little room to breathe.

That was when she’d started fantasizing about a life away from Pyrite Falls and Four Corners. Maybe if she had even more space around her, she’d feel that much more free.

The problem was she’d still been a quitter.

Her quitting continued to the team-building hike they’d had to take one year in school, and she’d gotten midway up the rocks, looked down, scared ten years off her life and refused to go any farther.

She’d achieved her dreams. She’d gotten into college far from Pyrite Falls, Oregon, and away from her family. Away from everyone who knew her.

For three months.

She’d spent a semester in absolute misery and had turned with her tail between her legs after experiencing the most humiliating night of her life. She’d thought one of the guys wanted to make out with her; instead, she’d ended up abandoned in a closet for an hour and when she emerged, she’d had beer dumped on her while they’d laughed about small-town virgins with tits that weren’t any bigger than mosquito bites.

She’d confided in her friend Lydia about the humiliation, and Lydia had been pragmatic:It could be worse. You were at a frat party. You could have been a statistic.

But then, in addition to being a quitter, Rory Sullivan could never be a statistic.

Because she was too invisible to be counted as a statistic.

She was certainly invisible in her hometown.

It was one reason she needed to get out. She’d always felt like she wasn’t going to be the hometown girl who blossomed when she went away. She’d had years to figure out how to blossom in Pyrite Falls, after all, and it hadn’t happened. She’d been picked on at school, and even the one time...even the one time she’d thought she’d triumphed, it hadn’t been enough.

Everyone thought they knew what to expect with her, and as a result she lived down to those expectations.

Not anymore.

She had a plan. She had a job lined up, which felt like a small miracle, since she had often felt like maybe she had torpedoed her chances of success of any kind when she left school.

But she’d been working at the ranch ever since then, and had also been part of establishing the new Sullivan family farm store. She had gotten so much experience coordinating that, and additionally she had experience managing rental properties. Even though it wasn’t a lot of experience, it was still experience. It had started with houses on the ranch, and had expanded to a couple of places in the outlying area since people realized she had been doing such a good job with them at Sullivan’s Point.

That had opened up an opportunity for her outside of Four Corners. It hadn’t been her intention when she had started doing it, but it was certainly her intention now.

She felt like those doors were open again, ones she’d thought she’d closed forever with her youthful cowardice, and now she saw a new chance.

She wanted to take that chance.

To be worthy of the boost she’d been given all those years ago, that she hadn’t been able to do enough with then.

She’d been blindly applying for jobs in cities for the last couple of months, and finally she’d gotten one. There was a building manager at an apartment complex in the north end of Boston, a beautiful historic building, and the long-time manager was retiring, leaving the vacancy.

And that meant...finally, she had a chance to start over. Finally, Rory had the chance to reinvent herself.

She was older now. She was ready now.

She wasn’t a scared eighteen-year-old away from home for the first time. She’d had a lot of time to sit in her failures.

To sit in the quitting.

She wasn’t going to do it anymore.

Of course, she had some regrets about leaving. Because yes, she thought as she parked her car in front of the store, it meant leaving the store. Arguably quitting. Though this was quitting to begin.

Her best friend, Lydia, still wasn’t happy about it. And her sisters weren’t especially thrilled, either.

Though at least they were understanding. Because they knew. They knew what it had been like for her growing up. They knew what it was like for her now.

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