Page 13 of Fractured Destiny

I sit in the truck a minute, watching the others through the lit windows. I take the folded slip out of my pocket and read the name one more time.

Neeley.

Then I drive home and pick up my guitar.

four

Three Months Later

The pool house is too cheerful.

Fresh flowers on the coffee table. Lemon cleaner in the air. Sunlight bouncing off pale walls. Polished floors. White bedding, Everything bright enough to make my skin itch.

I drop my duffel by the couch and stand in the doorway, key still in hand.

Home.

Technically.

Last time I moved in, my parents warned if I didn’t get my shit together, there would be consequences. The Calder name carries weight, after all.

Shamefully, a few months later they caught me high as a kite, wearing an unzipped red dress and no underwear, climbing out of an Uber at six in the morning with mascara smeared down both cheeks.

I didn’t know about the driveway camera.

By sundown, I was in Yakima, checked into Sundown Recovery Center, my body still buzzing from every bad decision I’d made the night before.

Today, I’m three months sober. I should feel hopeful.

Instead, I’m terrified.

I unzip my duffel and pull out the notebook from the side pocket. Blue cover. Bent spiral. Coffee stain near the top from the morning I threw it across the room during week two of rehab because Roberta, my counselor, kept telling me to write instead of deflect.

An entire lifetime of ugly sits between these covers.

The first few entries are hard to read. Detox handwriting. Slanted. Angry. Half sentences breaking off in places where my brain quit cooperating.

Lake Lyon is all over those pages.

His green eyes. How his guitar spoke to my soul. The way he smelled. His tongue on my pussy. His big, beautiful cock. He gave me the kind of transcendent fucking I remember in flashes sharp enough to cut through the drug-induced fog. The ride home with dried come all over my body. Sobbing in the shower when I realized how badly I’d fucked up.

Beyond those pieces, most of the night is gone. A cloud of MDMA swallowed the details.

Story of my life.

I flip past Lake because I can’t deal. Not today. My mind already has enough to carry.

The next section begins with boarding school and where everything went wrong.

Fifteen-year-old me and Asher Whittaker.

I almost laugh when I see his name in my handwriting. Not because it’s funny. Mostly, because I dedicated many pages to the bastard and he probably hasn’t thought about me in years.

It was my freshman year. Asher was a senior. Good-looking, rich, athletic, polite in front of adults. The exact boy mothers hope their daughters bring home. When he asked me out, I thought I’d been chosen.

Instead of dinner or a movie, he took me to the rowing boathouse with a flask of his father’s bourbon.

I can still smell the dust. Old wood. Lake water. Liquor on his breath when he gave me my first kiss and told me how special I was. Moonlight seeped through the high windows in pale stripes when he shoved himself inside me. It hurt, but I made myself focus on what I thought would happen after.