Page 43 of The Wrong Track

“She’s still looking for an assistant,” Monica told me, but we both turned to Ella. “There’s daycare. Babysitters.”

“The bigger question for me is where I’m going to go,” I said. “I had a lot of ideas before, but I wasn’t thinking them through.”

“You were trying to escape,” she said. “I understood that feeling. At moments, we’ve all wanted to.”

There was no getting away from the choices I’d made. There was a time when I might have been able to fix things but that was four years before and I’d been too stupid and caught up in my own problems to behave like an adult. And since then, I’d careened from one bad decision to the next, and here I was. “Now I just have to do the best I can for Ella,” I answered. She shouldn’t suffer because of me. No one should.

Monica stood and put the baby against her chest so they could rock together. “Are you sure that moving away from here is the best thing for her?”

No. “I don’t think I can explain how much I appreciate everything that y’all have done for me, Miss Monica. Monica. But yes, it’s better for me to leave.”

She sat back down. “Why? Are you still trying to run away? Be honest with yourself, Remy. That’s the hardest thing to do, sometimes, but you need to try.”

I searched my mind for a reason that I could give her. “I hate the weather here,” I said. “I hate it.”

“Well, I can understand that. When Hazel and I vacationed in Florida three Januarys ago, I thought that I never wanted to leave. Winters are tough, but the rest of the seasons are lovely. And when Ella is bigger, she can make snowmen, and you two can learn to ski! There are great things about the winter, too. Is that your only objection?”

I looked through Tobin’s picture window, the one where we waved to him in the morning. “I think it’s better if we go to a place where people don’t know us. Where we can get a fresh start, without all the history.” It was the best way to say that if I stayed here, Ella’s life would always be tainted by my disgusting past. And there was Tobin to think of, too. I could easily ruin his career, his prospects for love, his life.

Monica sat back down across to me. “Now that, I can understand.”

“Really?”

She nodded. “I grew up here and I feel like I know half the town. My husband walked out on me when I was pregnant with Hazel. My parents had warned me about him, as had my friends, but I thought they didn’t understand him. They were right,” she sighed. “He wasn’t mysterious and moody, he was just an asshole.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Believe me, so was I. But I got the best daughter in the world because of him, so I came out ahead. At the time, though, I wanted to crawl in a hole and never show my face again. I was so embarrassed that I’d chosen him, that he’d fooled me and then dumped me, that everyone had been able to read the tea leaves and I hadn’t.”

“It’s not only that I’m ashamed,” I said. “I don’t want people to look at her and think of her father. I don’t want her to know.” I swallowed. “I don’t want her to know about him or about me.” She would have Lily as her role model, not her mother, the dumb victim.

“I see. I can understand that. You do have a little while, though, before she would become aware of any of your history. And I can’t really believe that anyone would bring up to her that her father was…”

An abuser. A drug dealer. A pimp. A murderer. I didn’t know how much Monica was aware of, so I let her words just hang there unfinished.

“And remember, so many people are glad to have you here,” she told me, pointing at herself and smiling. “Hazel too, and Hatch.”

“Hatch is?” I asked doubtfully.

“He’s very glad that you’re Hazel’s friend.”

That made me feel guilty, guilty and bad. I wasn’t much of a friend to her.

“Tobin, obviously,” Monica went on. “He’s thrilled that you moved in. He tells people all the time how much he likes you.”

I sat very still. “He does?”

“He does,” she agreed, still smiling at me. “I’ve heard how fun it is to come home to you and Ella, how much he loves to have dinner with you, especially if you’re doing the cooking. I think he was lonely.”

“Tobin knows a lot of people.”

“He does, and he has a big family, too. But he’s also been living on his own for a while. He likes being with people, but he’s not a real social butterfly. He’s always been happier one-on-one, not in a crowd. That was a reason that he and Hazel got along so well.”

“He hasn’t been alone for that long. He had Lulu,” I pointed out.

She rolled her eyes. “Good gracious, I can’t forget her.” She muttered a word that made my eyes widen. “Excuse me. Lulu isn’t my favorite.”

I couldn’t have guessed. My grandma would have washed out my mouth with soap if she’d heard me use the particular obscenity that Monica had just uttered.