Lib Novel Page 69
FORTY-FOUR
MADDOX
I take a step closer as I watch her fight to keep her features even. “Since seeing you again, I’ve thought about it a lot. And all I keep coming up with is that there’s something I’m not understanding. Something I don’t know.” I want to touch her, but I keep my hands at my sides. “What happened, Little Bunny? What made you run?”
She pushes her hands into the front pockets of her shorts. “I wasn’t running. Maddox…” Hannah presses her lips together. “Do we really need to do this? Can’t we just pretend…?”
“No pretending.” Now that I’m here, there’s no stopping. “Just the truth.”
Hannah nods once. “My mom… Right after, when I got back to my dorm room that morning.” She refers to our night in the library. “I got a call from a nurse. My mom had a stroke.”
“Fuck,” I breathe out.
“She was in the hospital.”
“Jesus, Hannah.”
“I had no choice. I had to come home.”
I think about the way our hands parted when we left the library. And how I spent the day thinking about her, and she spent her day…
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask, knowing I have no right to feel any sort of hurt over this. But I still can’t believe she just left.
“I tried.” She repeats the statement from last night.
“I don’t —”
“I put a letter in your mailbox.” She rushes the sentence out.
“You…” I trail off. “What?”
She shrugs like it’s not a big fucking deal.
“A letter?” I try to wrap my head around it.
“No one answered when I rang the doorbell.” She lifts her shoulders again, but it’s a smaller movement this time. More restrained. “So I put it in the mailbox.”
I tried.
What can only be guilt presses in around my lungs. “I never got it.” Saying the words feels like throwing a punch. “I never got your letter, Hannah.”
She gives me a weak smile.
She wrote me a fucking letter. The day her mom had a stroke.
“What did the letter say?”
“Maddox—” Her gaze drops away from mine.
“Please,” I cut her off.
“It said what I just told you.” She pulls her hands from her pockets and lifts them before letting them flop back down to their sides. “That my mom was in the hospital and that I had to catch a bus home. And with the shop—” She looks up at me. “We owned Petals, that flower shop from my résumé. Mom practically lived there, running the place. And if she couldn’t work… then I’d have to.”
The timelines all click into place.
Hannah left for school because Ruth ran the shop. But a week later, Ruth couldn’t run it anymore.
“What else did the letter say?” I need to know all of it. Need to know the extent of the damage.