My mother arrived the next day to help me pack up my things into her van and my Prius. She had arrived so fast, almost too fast.

It was like she’d been lying in the weeds, expecting me to fail.

It was a long nine-hour drive from Sugar Tree to Chicago, and I knew my mother had probably practiced every piece of advice she would give me when she arrived. To her credit, she hadn’t made one comment about Jake, and I wasn’t even sure how much she knew. Maybe she knew everything and was waiting to unload on me once we got home, for fun. Or maybe she knew she’d won and wouldn’t bother with her forty lashes of motherly wisdom. God knew I was raw enough.

Mentally, I was exhausted, not having slept a wink. Emotionally, I felt dead inside. I’d spent most of the night before just walking around Chicago. I thought about Jake a lot, too often, and then Tate, sad that he was once again stuck in a situation that was even worse than before.

“You look awful!” she said to me. Again.

I sure felt like it. I was in sandals, jeans, and a fitted blue tank top. No makeup. My hair was down, still drying, and I didn’t care what I looked like. “Yeah, I know, Mother,” I muttered to her. If she noticed my depressed mood, she was making up for it by being way too chipper. She was in her Sunday best, like she had something to celebrate.

“Well honey, you’re not cut out for this fancy life anyways. You belong in your place back home, and it’s good that you learned your lesson now, when you’re young,” she said to me as we put another bag in her van.

“Yes, lesson learned,” I said dejectedly. Whenever my mother was around, she pulled me into her orbit. I couldn’t defy her, and I wasn’t sure why.

It was a little pathetic that it’d only taken me a few hours to pack up. One of my neighbors, Kyle, a retired corporate type, had even come out to help me with the larger items, not that there was much. I hadn’t known him long or very well, but it was nice of him, and it made me a little teary-eyed. I was just starting to feel like Chicago was home.

It was barely even 10:30 a.m. Most of the large furniture pieces had come with the apartment, and I’d contacted my super that I’d mail him back the keys once I got back home. I didn’t care about the deposit. I didn’t care about anything. Everything had turned out so wrong, and I felt helpless in changing it. I was giving up. I knew that, and I needed to be away from this city that reminded me of Jake.

Last night I’d had several missed calls and texts from Jake. I didn’t listen to his voice messages or read any of his texts. I couldn’t. This was all my fault, and it killed me. If it weren’t for my involvement with Grant, none of this would have ever happened. I still had a hard time thinking about facing reality and telling him the truth about Grant blackmailing me.

Then this morning, I had seven missed calls from Amy.

“I made a hair appointment at this place I like in Lincoln Park,” my mother said, shutting her van door after Kyle had fit in the last large box. “Do you want to go with me?”

After I said my goodbye to Kyle, who wished me well, I looked back at my mother.

“Well?” she said.

I shook my head at the ridiculousness that only my mother would find a hairstylist she loved in Chicago after just a couple of visits.

“I don’t really want to tag along.”

“Oh please. It will only be a couple of hours.”

A couple of hours? Is this a joke? I had made my decision, and I was ready to get out of Dodge.

At that moment, my phone conveniently rang, interrupting the flow of the conversation. I picked it up.

“Amy. Hey.”

“Hey yourself. What the hell? A goodbye text! You weren’t even going to say goodbye to me in person?”

My mother stood next to the van, smiling at me while she eavesdropped on the conversation.

“I would love to get together one more time. Want to meet at South Bottle?”

“Sure. When?”

“In about twenty minutes?”

“Done. See you soon.”

I hung up and turned to my mother. “I have to say goodbye to my friend Amy before we go. I’ll meet you at the hair place. Give me the address.”

She rolled her eyes, wanting me to just tag along with her, but she gave me the address. I drove to South Bottle to meet up with Amy for what would be my last couple of hours in Chicago.

We sat down over beers, nachos, spinach dip, and fish tacos. I went all out since this was my last Chicago meal.

For once, my shy self did almost all of the talking, and Amy just smiled, nodded, and shook her head in disbelief. I told her about how I’d followed Jake, fallen for him, and gotten mixed up in the whole Jake-and-Tate routine that had been two of the best weeks of my life. How I had finally felt whole. And last but not least, I told her about Grant and how badly he’d messed me up. And how it was all my fault that Jake was in this mess, and I needed to go far, far away to make it all stop.

When I finally finished telling her everything, she bit into one of the last nachos on our shared appetizer plate, then took a decent-sized swallow of her beer to finish it off.

Amy wasn’t usually so quiet. It was odd seeing her like this.

“So Grant. He’s basically blackmailing you.”

I hated to admit it, but I nodded. “Kind of.”

“Please. You’re being too nice about this and making it so damn easy for Grant. He’s holding you hostage, telling you that if you don’t play by his rules, he’s going to keep releasing stuff on Jake.”

She had a point. “Not if I leave,” I reasoned.

Amy looked like she wanted to throttle me. “None of this is your fault, Andrea! It’s that asshole, Grant Newman,” she said loudly. “You’re running scared! You are literally running away, pretending this problem will just simply go away, and I get it, but you’re letting him win. I know his type. Been there, made that mistake. He’s a controlling asshole. And I have news for you, honey. Maybe you’ll get away from Grant for now if you go back to Tennessee. But if you don’t confront him, he’s going to keep coming back to you.”

Damn. She was right. How had I not realized that? As I knew full well, Grant wasn’t one to just give up, and he’d proven to me he’d go to extremes. I nodded and spun my phone around in my hand, a nervous habit I’d picked up in just the last day.

“So what are you suggesting I do?”

Amy looked around to see if anyone was within earshot, then she leaned toward me, her elbows on the table.

“I’m suggesting,” she said, speaking with a tone of seriousness in her voice, “that you do something you don’t normally do with Grant. The Bulldogs are here for their three-game series with the Jaguars that starts tonight. So Grant wants to play it like this and post these ridiculous photos on Yawper? Fine. But you’ve got to show him that you can play dirty, too. But my question is, can you, Andrea, play dirty? Because you’re the most wholesome girl I know.”

I nodded. I rarely uttered a dirty word, let alone thought about retaliating against someone. But desperate times called for desperate measures. “What did you have in mind?”