Page 43 of Silver Linings

Then she looked straight at him and said, “Get out.”

For a second, he could only stare back at her. “What?”

“Get. Out.” Her jaw tightened, and she went on, “You lied to me. Here you’ve been pretending to be all friendly and nice, and you were just trying to find out what you could about this supposed unicorn or whatever else those conspiracy theory idiots on Reddit were yakking about. So…get the hell out of my house.”

Ben hesitated for just a second before he realized that anything he might try to say would fall on deaf ears.

Very angry deaf ears.

So he got up from his chair, murmured, “I’m sorry,” and headed toward the front door. The whole way, he kept hoping he would hear her telling him to stop, that she wanted to hear his side of the story, but no words came.

Just furious silence.

He let himself out and closed the door behind him.

Chapter Thirteen

How typical that Ben had bumped into my father in a bar. Those last couple of years before he left, my dad had never been entirely sober.

For some reason — probably because I was too angry to think straight right then — my brain wanted to fixate on that single aspect of the whole sorry mess. Not that Ben had known much more about Silver Hollow than he’d let on, or that he’d realized who I was all along.

No, just that my father apparently had continued to rot his brain with Scotch this whole time rather than try to get himself straightened out.

The half-eaten pizza and half-drunk bottle of wine still sat on the dining room table. While one part of me wanted to throw them both out, I knew I hadn’t been raised to waste food like that.

So I closed the pizza box and put it in the fridge, and went back to the table and stuffed the cork into the bottle as best I could before taking it into the kitchen as well so I could set it on the counter.

Beneath the anger, though, was a sort of puzzled hurt.

Who had sent that picture to my father? My mom? My grandmother?

Probably Grandma, I thought then. She was always about keeping the peace, and I know she hated that my parents were so estranged that they couldn’t bear to talk to each other even when it came to important stuff about their daughter.

And I’d always thought my father was happy to have walked away. Certainly, I never received even a card after the first couple of years he was gone. In my mind, I’d seen him moving on, maybe getting married again, having a nice, normal family with not a single whiff of otherworldly creatures about them.

The reality sounded a little more complicated than that.

As for Ben’s motivations, well, that didn’t take nearly as much work to figure out. I’d already looked him up and saw that he had a YouTube channel, one with almost a hundred thousand followers. I doubted he made millions from it, but I had a feeling he earned enough to get by.

The thing about being a social media personality, though, was that you had to keep feeding the algorithm.

And what better to feed it than a real live unicorn sighting?

Angry as I was, at least I halfway understood what he’d been up to. Whether I’d be able to forgive him for his lies was debatable at that point, but everyone had to eat.

Besides, like it or not, I also saw that Ben had been following his passion. Because I knew these mythical creatures were real and somehow managed to slip into our dimension from time to time, I couldn’t dismiss outright his claims of having seen a chupacabra.

Once that sort of strangeness had entered your life, it changed you forever. I knew that sad truth all too well.

Would he leave town after this? Or would he redouble his efforts to find the truth of the unicorn now that he no longer had to tiptoe around me?

Again, I couldn’t know for sure. As angry as I was with him, I also had to acknowledge that I liked him…probably more than I should…and the thought of him disappearing forever without even saying goodbye bothered me a lot.

Which was kind of stupid, considering I’d just kicked him out of the house.

I heaved a sigh that would have done my angsty high school self justice, then got busy with rinsing the plates and wine glasses and putting everything in the dishwasher. There wasn’t much cleanup, and nothing I couldn’t have left until morning, but I wasn’t about to sully my grandmother’s kitchen by leaving dirty dishes out all night.

By the time I was done, I was feeling slightly less roiled in spirit. Not completely calm, because hearing that my father carried a picture of me apparently everywhere he went even though we hadn’t spoken in years had ripped the Band-Aid off a not entirely healed wound, and I wasn’t sure what to do about that.

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