Page 154 of Hunting Pretty

Six p.m.

He’d given me until six a.m. the next morning to decide.

I had twelve hours left. And I was still no closer to having an answer.

I stared around the room and tried to imagine never seeing it again. Never seeing this mansion again.

Or Ebony.

She had pulled me out of whatever dark hole I’d been in and given me ahome.

It may not have been a cozy house filled with photos and trinkets, but it was stable, she was always there when Ineeded her, and she gave me everything I could ask for and more.

The best education.

The best healthcare.

More clothes than I could wear and books that I could read.

Ebony might appear not to have proper feelings but she did. She just hid them.

Some nights, I’d creep to her study when she thought I was already asleep. I’d spot her through the crack in the doorway and she’d be crying into a glass of whiskey and I’d know she’d lost someone on the operating table that day.

She cared about me.

In the way she pressed the back of her hand to my head with a frown or when she framed and hung up in her study an award I’d won for an article I wrote.

She loved me in her own way.

And losing me, her only family left, would devastate her.

Could I do that to my adopted mother? To the only mother I’d ever had?

I pulled Lisa’s photo book into my lap.

“I can’t believe you don’t have any photos!” she’d said as I tore open the wrapping paper to reveal the album filled with a hand-pasted collage. “Now you do.”

I’d never had anyone give me anything so precious.

I opened the book to the first page and choked back a laugh at our two heads pinned together while we shared a toilet seat lid in the girl’s bathroom at our elite private prep school.

She’d caught me crying in one of the giant stalls on my first day. Instead of leaving when I insisted I was fine, she’dclimbed up onto the neighboring toilet seat and literally jumped into my stall.

I’d jolted as she crashed onto the marble next to me like a red high-top Conversed superhero, her uniform untucked, plaid skirt uniform (illegally) sewn into shorts, camera slung around her neck, hair tied into two messy buns and no makeup obscuring the smattering of freckles across her pale cheeks.

“Move up,” she’d said to me as I gaped at her.

She’d plonked her butt onto the other half of the toilet seat lid and just sat there with me until I was ready to face the world again.

Since then, the budding photojournalist had taken more photos of me than I’d ever had in my life.

She’d laid them all out in this book along with concert stubs and dried daisies that I’d turned into crowns for us. A timeline of our friendship.

I flicked through the pages, reliving our friendship.

I laughed at us made up as actual grannies for one Halloween. We’d convinced one of the Drama kids to give us prosthetics to age our eyes and chins and swiped white-haired wigs from the prop room.

We bought cheap dressing gowns covered in cats with scarves and furry slippers.

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