Page 78 of Head Over Heels

I don’twantto walk away.

I want to stay.

It’s an old, almost forgotten feeling.

Stay here.

Home.

Where my people are. Where my things are. Where my life is.

Unpack the contents of the turtle shell. Move them into shelves and drawers. Let myself fill the corners of a place.

Until—

Until someone screws up.

Until someone changes his mind.

Until someone more important, younger, cuter, better…

I can see myself as a child, standing in the foyer of one of my foster houses. The third, I think. I stood with one hand on the pull of my suitcase. Everything I owned was in that suitcase. I waited inside the door for the car that was going to come, pick me up, and take me away. Again.

And suddenly the pressure in my chest isn’t buoyant, it’s suffocating. Like I’ve taken a deep breath but it’s turned out to be seawater.

An anchor can keep you in place or drown you.That was what my foster sister, the one who taught me about carrying my shell on my back, used to say.

I’m shaking my head. Almost violently.

“I have ajob,Chase. In Denver.”

“But why Denver, Liv? When you could have a job here? There have to be marketing jobs here.”

I open my mouth to try to explain, but the truth is, Ican’texplain. Even I don’t fully understand the impulse that led me away from every job that would have kept me in Seattle and made me click on options in San Francisco, Denver, New York, Boston…

I only know that it had felt right to keep moving.

It had feltsaferto keep moving.

I’d been in Seattle too long.

Long enough to make friends.

Long enough to make mistakes, like this one I am in the middle of.

“It’s where this job was.”

It sounds so lame.

“I could give you a job.”

I shake my head, hard. “I can’t stay here and be your nanny—I’d hate myself for that, and resent you.”

He’s shaking his head, too, his face bright, excited, hopeful, an awful contrast to the dark weight pressing me down. “You don’t have to be my nanny. Gillian could do that. Or anyone. I could—listen, what about this. This is what I’m thinking. I could buy the store. And hire you to do marketing and programs. We could do all the weekend teaser programs you were talking about, and more. You could do the admin and I could lead the programs, and—”

“No. I can’t.”

He exhales sharply.

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