Page 85 of From Now On

Eve smiles, then tips her head back to stare at the sky again.

It’s peaceful, the only sound the bubbling jets, and, if I really focus, the distant roar of the ocean.

I let the silence stretch for a few minutes before I ask, “What else is on yourfuck itlist?”

“Not much,” she answers quickly. Too quickly.

“C’mon, Eve. Tell me one thing.”

She bites her bottom lip.

I wait, hoping she’ll trust me.

“I want to visit Paris one day. I’ve never left the country. I’d never even leftArizonauntil I was eighteen and came to Holt.”

“Where in Arizona did you grow up?” I ask.

“Chandler. It’s a suburb outside Phoenix.”

“You liked it?”

“Chandler? Yeah, it was nice.” She shrugs a shoulder, sending fresh ripples this way.

I think I catch a flash of a curve, and quickly lift my gaze. “You don’t sound sure.”

“I’m not. It’s home…and it’s also my least favorite place in the world.”

I wait, hoping she’ll continue.

A few seconds later, she does. “My mom got pregnant with me when she was sixteen. Her parents kicked her out, and my dad—my dad had no interest in being a dad. I think I would have left town. But my mom stayed. She got an apartment ten minutes away from the house she grew up in, went to cosmetology school, and started cutting hair. I grew up within walking distance of my grandparents’, but we never visited them and they never visited us. And I met my dad for the first time when I was in second grade. He came to my school for a fire safety demonstration—he’s a firefighter. I didn’t even know he was my dad at the time. I’ll never forget the expression on his face when he saw me. Like he’d seen a ghost. I look a lot like my mom.”

“Shit, Eve. That’s?—”

“Fucked up? Yeah, I know. The people who were supposed to support my mom abandoned her. Acted like she—likewe—didn’t exist. It was brave of her, to make it hard for them by not disappearing the way they wanted her to. But it was confusing as a kid. Coming to Holt was the first time it felt like I had a fresh start.”

Something we have in common, I realize. And maybe an explanation for the immediate sense of connection I felt. That first night of college, most people were defining their new identity.

Eve and I were embracing the mystery.

“You have a relationship with your dad now?”

“Depends how you definerelationship, I guess.” Her smile is brittle. Fragile, like a facade cracking around the edges. She sinks a couple of inches lower in the tub. “Where did you grow up?”

“Wyoming. The soy milk capital of the world.”

Eve laughs. “I owe you another thank-you for the carton in the fridge.”

“You don’toweme anything, Eve.” My tone is a little too intense for the topic of soy milk, but I mean the words.

“Thank you, Hunter.”

I hold her gaze. “You’re welcome, Eve.”

She blinks first. “What’s Wyoming like?”

“It’s big. You leave town, and there’s all this empty land around. So much open space, it’s easy to forget how huge the rest of the world is. Nothing terribly exciting ever happened in Casper. The views of the mountains are pretty crazy. There are tons of trails for biking or running. Lots of fishing spots. We’d go snowmobiling in the winter. And the aquatic center next to the town rink had two waterslides, so we’d go down those after hockey practice in elementary school.”

It feels good to reminisce about those early years. Back when I was a kid whose only concern was whether his mom had remembered to get Jell-O at the store. Before my brother morphed into someone unrecognizable and altered our family forever. Sean twisted my perception of Casper, same as Eve’s dad and grandparents affected her feelings toward her hometown.

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