Page 21 of After Tonight

“Riley!”

Oh yeah, and it was annoying.

She combed her fingers through her hair, cinched the belt on her robe tighter, and took a deep breath. Then made the climb to the kitchen.

“I can’t believe they’re raising that much money for a prom,” Erika Ames was saying to her husband.

Riley’s dad, Jake, nodded. “It goes up every year.”

“But twelve thousand dollars? For a party?” Erika asked, transferring bacon from the skillet to a plate.

Riley crossed to the cupboard that housed the coffee cups. See, there was no way the bacon was getting cold. Her mom had just taken it out of the pan. Riley sighed.

“That’s scandalous,” Erika said. “The food bank could use that money. The senior center. The daycare.”

Riley filled her cup with coffee that she knew would be nice and strong. Thankfully, that was one thing she and her father agreed on. But as she turned and leaned back against the counter, taking that first sip, she had to admit that it wasn’t really her dad she had a hard time agreeing with. Her dad was a pretty laid-back guy.

Her mom on the other hand was…Kyle. Or rather, she was where Kyle got his do-gooder-save-the-world side. Not that Riley was a complete loser bitch. But she wasn’t the Boy Scout her brother was.

“That’s a lot of money,” Jake agreed, turning the page on the newspaper he held.

“You don’t think they should do something more important with it?” Erika asked. She stabbed a fork into a waffle and flopped it onto Jake’s plate.

Jake folded the paper down and eyed the waffle, then looked up at his wife of thirty-two years. “I think the kids will make some great memories in a safe and fun environment with that money, and I think that’s important.”

Erika’s shoulders relaxed a little and she gave him a smile. “You’re right, I suppose. It would be nice if they could do it for less, but that’s not the most terrible thing in the world.”

Jake nodded and reached for the syrup.

While Erika started in on something else. Something about the garden and some bugs that were eating her roses, and then Jake said something about picking up something at the gardening store in York when he went over later, and again Erika settled. It was mostly blah, blah, blah to Riley, but while she wasn’t listening to the words, she was watching her parents.

Maybe for the first time.

It was strange. All of this was how it had always been. Erika got worked up and emotional and Jake settled her down. Riley had seen that exact thing over and over in her life, but she’d never really thought about it. Now, for some reason, she found herself studying it.

It was so…normal. Her mom and dad just fit together. Sure, some of it was habit. After that long together, how could it not be? But you had to stick around with someone to establish habits. Erika and Jake Ames fit. They balanced each other.

Riley had always found that very boring. Very predictable. Her parents had met when Erika had been a sophomore in high school and Jake was a senior. They’d dated, gotten engaged, then married, then had two kids. Exactly the way everyone else in Sapphire Falls did.

That was another reason Riley had gotten out of town. It seemed that this tendency to just go along with tradition was in the water, and she was afraid to drink too much of it.

“Riley?”

She shook herself and focused on her mother. It seemed that Erika had been trying to get her attention. “Um, yeah?”

“How many waffles do you want?”

A flutter of panic rippled through her chest. For some reason, those waffles felt symbolic in that moment. She couldn’t eat the same waffles made in the same waffle iron in the same kitchen that she’d been eating all her life. She needed more. Different. And if she took a bite of those waffles, and they were amazing and comforting, then she might decide that they were good enough, and that eating them for the rest of her life wasn’t the worst thing that could ever happen…

“I have to go,” she said quickly.

Her mother’s eyes widened. No one, in her experience, walked out on waffles.

“Where? Now?”

“Yes. Right now.” She probably didn’t need to emphasize that quite so firmly.

“But…” Erika looked toward the waffle iron, then over to her husband.

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