Wild Swans by Jessica Spotswood

Author:Jessica Spotswood
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Published: 2016-02-17T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter

Twelve

There’s a part of Erica that loves this, I think. Making a scene. Breaking things. Even if those things are her own daughters.

Still, I’m shocked that she aims her arrow so true. You’re the kind of people who drive everyone away. Erica doesn’t know me, but she’s managed to zero in on my greatest fear: that I’m not enough, will never be enough, for anyone to love.

I have to get out of here. Now. I can’t be in the same place as her another minute. Even outside, there’s not enough air.

I run. I’m halfway down the block, past the Cormorant and the SunTrust, before Connor catches up to me.

“Ivy! Ivy, wait!” he calls.

“I can’t. I have to go.” I can’t look at him. I don’t want to see the pity on his face. I concentrate on my feet instead, on not tripping over the uneven brick sidewalk in my polka-dot flats.

“Let me at least walk you home.”

I steal a glance. He’s still wearing the brown Java Jim’s apron. Did he just walk out in the middle of his shift?

“I’m not going home.”

You’re the kind of people who drive everyone away. It plays over and over in my head.

Granddad never talked about Erica much, and I figured that was because their estrangement was painful for him. As I grew up though, everyone else started to tell me stories about her. How she was selfish. Reckless. Troubled. Part of me wondered if they were trying to convince me that something broken in her made her leave, not something broken in me. But both must be true. She is awful, sure, but I am the reason she left. She hated me so much that she didn’t tell my sisters I exist—even before Grace’s custody was an issue. And seeing me again hasn’t changed her mind one bit.

“Ivy.” Connor grabs my hand and hauls me to a stop. “Where are you going?”

I study the roses in front of the post office, afraid that if I look at him, I’ll start crying, and I can’t—won’t—cry in the middle of town. Although I don’t know why I’m trying to save face. The scene back in the courtyard will be all over Cecil by suppertime. How could it not?

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want me to call your granddad?”

“No!” Granddad will find out soon enough, and then there will be more I told you so’s and more fights. Probably more wine and cigarettes and slammed doors. Right about now, I’d trade them for all the loneliness and unanswered questions of my childhood.

Iz and Gracie will never know a childhood without all the drama, I guess.

Or was Erica different—better—before?

I swallow hard. Maybe when I’m not around, my mother isn’t a monster.

“My apartment’s right over on Queen Street. Do you want to go there?”

I finally look up. There’s concern in Connor’s pretty brown eyes, but not pity. And his fingers are threaded through mine. “Don’t you have to get back to work?”

He shakes his head. “My shift’s almost over. I’ll text Kat.

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