Page 77 of Tangled Up In You
“I’m going to take your word for it. I’ll see you soon.” With a weak smile, she waved, closed the passenger door, and waited with a strange sadness as he finally drove away.
Even the air smelled different here, thick with a sweetness she couldn’t immediately name until she saw the iconic white star flowers crawling up trellises and weaving through arches over doorways.
Jasmine.
She slipped Edward’s phone into her pocket, feeling comforted by the weight of it against her hip. She wanted to feel like herself today, so she’d dressed simply in cutoff denim shorts and a cropped T-shirt, her hair back in a smooth braid. It felt like they’d only driven ten seconds past the blue house with the yellow door, but the walk back seemed miles long. As she passed others—a yellow house with white trim; a white house with green trim; a green house with blue trim—she tried to imagine five-year-old Ren running across these lawns, eight-year-old Ren getting on a school bus, thirteen-year-old Ren sunbathing in one of the huge backyards. She was so lost in her own head, imagining her fictional life here and her actual life thousands of miles away, she swore she could almost hear Gloria’s voice.
“Ren.”
She froze on the sidewalk, awareness dawning that it wasn’t her imagination at all.
“Ren Gylden, you look at me right now.”
Ren spun slowly, heart plummeting into her stomach.
Gloria’s hair was jet-black and glossy when Ren was little, but it was gray now, salt-and-pepper curls she wore half up, half down, the long waves cascading to the middle of her back. She wasn’t wearing her good clothes that she’d normally wear for a trip into the city; she was in jeans and a button-down shirt, the same thing she’d wear to work their booth at the fair or make deliveries in town. Instead of gardening gloves and a big sun hat, she had a canvas purse over her shoulder and a pair of sunglasses on her face. Ren could see her own reflection in the lenses; she looked small and terrified.
Her worst nightmare had come true. Gloria had found out. Gloria was standing right in front of her in this sleepy Atlanta neighborhood. “What are you doing here?” Ren asked.
Gloria took her sunglasses off and dropped them inside her purse. She smiled with saccharine brightness. “Aw, sweetheart, I just came to ask you how midterms are going?”
“I promise, I can explain.”
Gloria’s expression snapped closed. “I don’t need an explanation. I know exactly what you’re doing here.”
“You do?”
“Of course I do, you silly girl.”
Sweat prickled at her scalp and at the back of her neck. Everything, everything was going wrong. Why did she let Edward leave? He would help her. He would know how to navigate this.
Ren tried to channel his easy confidence. “I’m actually fine handling this on my own.”
“On your own? Is that right?” Gloria batted Ren’s bravado away like a lion swatting at a buzzard. “Yesterday, I took an unplanned trip into town for supplies and Tammy had the TV on behind the register. You’ll never guess what I saw.”
“I don’t—I don’t know. What did you see?”
“Just you and some boy holding hands at a party in Nashville, Tennessee.”
Ren’s stomach dropped. She remembered the music, the dancing, the champagne. They’d been watching the protestors when Edward had abruptly suggested they move, distracting her with a kiss to the side of her head and a skewer of fried Oreos. World-weary Edward had seen the cameras and known the danger they presented. It had never occurred to Ren. If there was ever a sign she was destined to be caught, this was it. “Oh.”
“Yeah, ‘Oh,’” Gloria mocked, and laughed harshly. “Tammy was so excited she took a photo of you on TV. She even printed me out a copy, and you better believe I used it to get that boy’s name. We got on the next plane.” Gloria saw them on TV in Nashville yet knew exactly where Ren was headed. Right down to the very street? Understanding was like a door kicked open. Ren snapped to attention at her mother’s voice: “Ask me how much I liked having to do that.”
“Gloria, you didn’t have to come for me. I would have come back. I promise.”
“You think after all the time and effort I put into raising you free of all this”—she gestured to the beautiful street around them—“I’m going to be fine with you hitting the road with some stranger and driving to Atlanta? I trusted you to go to that school, to hold true to the values we brought you up with, Ren. And the first time you’re away from home, you do this? Lesson learned.”
“Everything would be the way it was before! I just…” Ren took a deep breath and looked her mother in the eye. “I need to know the truth, and I worried that if I asked you, you wouldn’t let me go back to school.”
“The truth,” Gloria said, taking a step closer, her expression softening. “Ren, do you think that I would have kept something good from you? Do you think if there was something good for you to find here that I wouldn’t let you go? You think so little of me?”
“No, Gloria, I—”
“Did it not occur to you that I was trying to protect you?”
Ren paused, frowning. “Protect me from what?”
Gloria glanced at the house two more doors down and took a deep, shaky breath. “From a very bad man. Steve may not be your blood, but he’s the best father in the world to you and loves you like his own. He saved me from the hell of my first marriage.”