Chapter Four

Savannah

I didn’t have a normal childhood.

Well, I should amend that. I had a normal childhood in my world. For everyone else around me? Probably not typical. Or at least, I would hope not.

My parents left when I was a teen.

They didn’t die.

They just… left.

My sister raised me. She was barely twenty but knew that the foster system for a sixteen-year-old would have been horrible. She had a college friend who had been through the system and to put it mildly, it wasn’t good. According to my sister Grace, it’s another reason their other friend, Lily, felt like she wanted to be a social worker.

It wasn’t that she was really changing much, though. My parents were absent from our lives from the time I was ten. She was only fourteen at the time and had to navigate high school, getting into college, and having a little sister who needed her all by herself.

She’s my hero.

And aside from Grace, whose name is more than fitting, I’ve never allowed anyone to get close. Even Mia, who might think she knows me, doesn’t really.

It’s not that I’m not aware that I won’t let people in. It’s that I can’t.

The two people who were supposed to be with me forever didn’t look back once.

Not when Grace had to sit by my side when my appendix burst and I had to go through emergency surgery.

They didn’t show up when she walked the stage to graduate from college with honors.

Didn’t show up the night I stayed home from my prom, crying, because I didn’t want to admit to Grace that, despite what I told her, I did want to go but knew we couldn’t afford the dress and didn’t want to put that burden on her.

They weren’t there when I walked the stage to graduate from high school or when I got my college acceptance letters, along with the almost full ride scholarship I earned from working my tail off, knowing that was the only way I would be able to attend.

Everything.

That’s what they missed.

And what they left me with was a closed-up heart.

One that no one but Grace has been able to access.

She’s been my entire world.

My rock.

My one and only solid.

I owe her my life because… without her? I don’t even want to imagine where I would be.

I’m staring out the window, watching the rain hit the window in slow streaks, thinking, like I try not to do so often, of the two people who abandoned me.

Where are they right now?

Do they ever think of me? Of us?

Do they have regrets?

And the worst question? The one I know will never be answered?

Why?

Why couldn’t they continue to love us?

I hear my phone chime from the table and I lift my head from the cool glass, looking at from where I sit.

It chimes three more times and I close my eyes.

I know who it is.

The same person who’s been texting me since the night we shared ice cream.

And the best make out sessions of my entire life.

The same man who’s been haunting my dreams since he dropped me off at my car.

A single tear escapes and I angrily swipe at it.

“Grace?!” I shout frantically through the house. “Grace! Grace! Grace!”

“What!? What is it!?” she cries out, sliding around the corner to the kitchen, her hair a mess, sticking up all over the place and a smudge of mascara under her eye.

I shove the piece of paper to her face.

“This! This is what it is! What does this mean?”

She looks down and I watch as her eyes track the words, her lips moving along as she reads. Her eyebrows scrunch together like she’s confused by what she’s reading. I know I was confused when I first saw it.

It’s the first day of summer break. Grace is home from college. I woke up, came downstairs to have breakfast and found a letter taped to the fridge.

“Read it!”

“Be quiet! I am!”

“Are they gone?! Why?”

“I don’t know, Sava! I told you I’m trying to read it and let me read it!”

She sits down on a kitchen chair, leaning over with her head between her hands, placing the letter on the table in front of her. Her eyes scan the page again and again.

She looks up at me, tears streaking down her pretty face.

I want to look just like her when I grow up.

“Yeah, Sava, they’re gone.”

“But… why? Why would they just… leave?”

“I don’t know. I guess because they’re done being parents.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t either.”

I ball my fist and press it to my thigh.

Bite my tongue to fight the tears that are threatening to escape.

Angry that I’m still sad.

Angry at them.

Angry that this is the life Grace and I have to lead because they were selfish assholes.

My phone chimes one more time and I take a shuddering breath before I stand up, snatch it up off the table and silence it.

Along with my emotions.