Swear on This Life by Renee Carlino

Author:Renee Carlino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

8. Saying Good-bye

I was breathing hard as I lay the book on my chest, right over my throbbing heart. I remembered that moment when everything started crumbling down around us. There was nothing we could do; we were just a couple of powerless, poor kids, so desperate to find a way to be together . . .

It was the middle of the night by that point, and I was too frustrated to keep going. I didn’t want to wake Cara, so I took a bath, got back into bed, and texted Trevor, but he was already asleep. I went into Cara’s room to see if maybe she was burning the midnight oil on her next story, but she was sound asleep as well. I wasn’t ready to go back to the book, so I spent the next three hours lying in bed, thinking.

When I was eighteen, I saw a therapist who convinced me to go back to Ohio to look for Jase and see where we grew up to try to work through some of my issues. Cyndi and Sharon, being the amazing women that they were, dropped everything to take me there. We found the dirt road right at the five-point-five-mile marker, right where it had always been. There were just two lone wooden posts and a memory of the battered mailboxes. We couldn’t drive down the road because there was a locked gate and a sign that said NO TRESPASSING, but that didn’t stop Cyndi. Sharon had tried to talk her out of it, but Cyndi insisted that we climb the fence and make the half-mile journey down the road to where the two dilapidated houses once stood.

When we arrived at the end of the road, there was nothing. The houses had been torn down. All that was left were two concrete foundations and a couple of wooden beams. I was happy they were gone.

“Say good-bye, Emiline,” Sharon said. “Say good-bye to the horrible things that happened here.”

I cried and cried in Cyndi’s arms. Echoes of Jase were everywhere. I could see a twelve-year-old Jase as he stood on a rock with his arms in the air. Look at me, Em, I’m the king of the world! And there I was, a skinny mess of a kid with my arms crossed, laughing. Well, you’re no Leonardo DiCaprio, that’s for sure.

I laughed through my tears as Cyndi asked, “Are you having a good memory or a bad one?”

I smiled. “This one’s a good one.”

We walked past the gravel toward the tree line and spotted the small structure still standing in the distance. It was the toolshed-turned-fort that Jase and I had made our own.

“Is this it?” Sharon asked. I only nodded.

We tried to pry open the plywood door, but it was so weathered and warped that it was jammed shut. Sharon, a fairly petite woman, came at it with the broad end of a thick wooden stump.

“Watch out!” she yelled as she pummeled the door, busting it open.

After the dust settled, Cyndi patted my back.

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