Page 18 of Can't Help Falling

He winced. Yikes. Way to find his weak spot and press a scalpel to it. “No, Kylie, I’m not saying I looked into a crystal ball and figured out that taking you to Brooklyn is the best bet. But I definitely know what the lawyer and social worker and judge all told me. Which is that it is going to be at least months, maybe a year, maybe even years,plural, before your mother gets custody of you again. And that’s if absolutely everything goes her way. That’s if she doesn’t get jail time for neglect and abandonment.”

The words jail time were a pin to a balloon. Tyler watched as her anger puffed out of her all at once. Her face went white behind her freckles, her arms fell limp at her sides.

He felt like dirt. No, worse than that. He felt like dirt after it had been run through an earthworm. He shouldn’t have said that. Even if it was true.

“Fine,” Kylie said in a low, quavering voice. “Then why can’t we wait for all of that to get sorted out here? From Columbus?”

It was a young, vulnerable question. And because of that, Tyler only gave her part of the answer. He didn’t say that the judge had thought it would be a good idea to give Kylie a clean start in a place where not everyone knew her mother had abandoned her. Where her grades weren’t skimming the bottom of a week-old garbage can. Where there weren’t people pumping the brakes in front of their McMansion just dying to get a glimpse of the kid who’d made the local news for living on her own for a few months.

Determined not to prick any more balloons, Tyler took a deep breath. “Ky, part of being charged with taking care of you is supporting you. And to support you, I have to work. My work is in Brooklyn. There’s no getting around it. Dad’s gone. I’m your next of kin. I live in Brooklyn. We have to go.”

“I have no choice?” It was a question with a web of knives sewed into its lining.

He sighed. “On this particular part of it, yeah, you have no choice. I have no choice either. I’m as much at the whim of this judge as you are.”

That much was true. Tyler had all but bowed and scraped at the feet of this judge for weeks. If the judge said,“Blow me a bubble,” Tyler would say, “What flavor bubble gum?” His pride had not mattered one whit. He’d do anything if it meant keeping Kylie out of foster care, if it meant getting her out of Columbus and to Brooklyn where he could actually figure out how to do this.

He hadn’t thought of his words as cruel, but the minute he said them, her face blanched and she gave him a look that could only be described as utterly wretched. She just...looked so miserable.

“Kylie—”

“Whatever, Tyler.”

She turned on her heel and stomped up the stairs to her room. He winced when he heard the door slam.

---