Chapter 20

Ella

Whether I liked it or not, I was home, standing in the kitchen, trying to get myself to calm down from the conversation I’d had with Will. I had completely lost it and torn into him. It had felt damn good at the time, but now I was upset and felt guilty. Maybe he deserved it and maybe he didn’t, but there was no way I was holding back.

Everything in my life right now was nerve-wracking. School was absolutely insane in ways I didn’t even understand, my father had resorted to sending me text messages and voice mails on a daily basis to harass me about law school, and now I had to be back home. Nervous was not a good enough word to describe the feeling I had while standing in my parents’ kitchen, knowing I was going to be there for an entire month. It wasn’t enough that everything else was crazy, but I had a secret, a big one.

I had never been good at hiding things from anyone, especially not my parents or my sister, but this was too huge to let anyone in on just yet. I had to hide this from everyone, and I wished I could hide it from myself as well. I walked around with a perpetual feeling of butterflies in my chest and stomach, and it was starting to take its toll on me.

I turned my head, listening as my parents came into the apartment, chattering back and forth. I had to act normal. I had to play this off like nothing was going on, like everything was normal and business was as usual.

“Ella,” my mom shrieked, walking into the kitchen. “I thought I saw your bags at the door. How are you?”

“I’m good, Mom,” I said, smiling and giving her a hug.

“You look tired. Are you not sleeping?”

“Who has time for sleep at Harvard?” my father asked.

My mother smiled. “No, I suppose we never slept, did we, hun?”

“Law school didn’t allow sleep,” he said grumpily. “Hello, Ella.”

He was being even colder than normal, and I took a deep breath to calm the agitation rising in me. I had figured it would be like this. He walked past me, not offering his normal slight pat-hug that he forced himself to give, which was fine with me because I wasn’t feeling too hot as it was. I knew exactly what was going through his mind. He thought that instead of standing in his kitchen, home for the holidays, I should be taking the LSAT and applying to law school, doing exactly what he wanted me to do. I was tired of hearing the words “law school.” If I’d had any intention of going, I would have started the process a long time ago. I’d already have all my paperwork in, ready for early interviews. The process was incredibly tedious. I knew this because it was a huge deal on campus when it was time to fill out applications for law or medical school.

I didn’t want to apply to law school, though, and the stack of paperwork had sat on my desk, still blank, just staring at me every day. I hadn’t even opened it, much less started on it, but I was pretty sure my father knew that. He wasn’t a dumb person, and we’d had about a thousand conversations about it. Still, he had sent me e-mail after e-mail and letter after letter of information on the school, the programs, the extracurricular activities, the sororities, and anything else he could get his hands on. He had even sent me a notebook with his notes from his freshman year of law school.

He knew I had zero aspirations of attending, and he knew that no matter how many things he sent me in the mail, I wasn’t going to miraculously change my mind. All I could do was keep moving forward with my own plan and hope that my father eventually came around. I didn’t want this to be something that haunted us forever. I wanted my dad back, even though he was just as grumpy on a normal basis. It just usually wasn’t aimed at me. There were so many times I had thought about caving and just doing it to make him happy. Then, like it was the universe talking to me, I would hear some horror story about the bad guy winning in court. The lawyer representing the criminal always looked so skeevy and sly, smiling at his success, not caring that he had just gotten a known criminal released and back out into society. You were supposed to go to jail if you were guilty, not given the chance to trick people into thinking you were innocent. It was a complete mockery of the justice system in my opinion.

I wished I had an older brother so all of this stuff with the company and taking over when my father retired would fall on his shoulders. Hell, I would even take a younger brother for that matter as long as he was the one my father could pass the torch to when he was ready. Even if Taryn had wanted to follow in my father’s footsteps, that would have been better than the torture he insisted on putting me through every day.

Dad had this obsession with the idea that I, as the eldest, was supposed to shut up about my dreams and follow aimlessly in his footsteps, never questioning the path he had laid out for me. That wasn’t me, though, and he had to have known that since I was a little girl. It shouldn’t be a surprise to him now. I still couldn’t understand why it was okay for Taryn to go to law school but not want to work for his firm when it was not okay for me to not go to law school. I was also pretty sure it wouldn’t be okay for me to go and not work for him. It was a frustrating and impossible situation.

“Hey there, big sis,” Taryn said, walking around the corner. “Nice of you to finally show up.”

She smiled and chuckled, knowing she was trying to start a war. I shook my head and grabbed a bottle of water out of the fridge. Taryn had gotten home the day before, having left a day early from Harvard. I’d had some work to finish up before leaving, so I had trailed behind. I took my water and walked behind Taryn, going into her room and sitting down on the bed. I wrapped my sweater around me, realizing I was hungry again even though I had just stopped and gotten food an hour or so before. Taryn walked over, shoved her clothes into her dresser, and then turned to me.

“You know, Mom and I really missed you at Thanksgiving,” she said. “I mean, I see you at school, but it was weird sitting around the table without you there to sneak off with. I was pretty much forced to tell the same stories over and over again about how Harvard was and what my plans were. You completely stole my ability to run away. You know I’ll hold that against you for at least a year until you make up for it next Thanksgiving.”

I laughed humorlessly. “Maybe next Thanksgiving I’ll be far away from here, living my life as a teacher, not shuttling myself back to New York and having to listen to our father tell me how much of a disappointment I am.”

“Why did you miss Thanksgiving anyway?”

“You know I had to study for the finals I had right before leaving for Christmas,” I said. “I had four finals in two days. I knew I wouldn’t get any studying done here. There are too many distractions, especially during the holidays.”

“I think that’s an excuse,” she said. “Not that I blame you. I know this family can be a complete disaster.”

“It was kind of an excuse and the truth at the same time,” I said. “It’s no secret that Dad and I aren’t exactly seeing eye to eye right now. The last thing I wanted was to come home and deal with that while I was thinking about the exams I had coming up. Senior year is hard—harder than I thought it would be. I can’t afford to screw up even a little bit. I’m slated to be valedictorian. Do you know how big of a deal it is to get that honor from Harvard? I’ll go down in history. I’ll be able to work at any school or any college, even Harvard itself. Of course, I’ll have to get a PhD to work at Harvard, but I’d totally do it to be a professor there.”

“Well, after my first semester, I’m starting to get nervous about going to law school in four years,” she said. “It’s definitely a change from the academy, although I couldn’t imagine going from public school to Harvard. I never would have been prepared.”

“It’s definitely a balancing act,” I said, smiling. “But you’re doing great.”

“You’ve been busting your ass for the last three and a half years. You need to let loose a little in your last year,” she said. “At least do so here at home when you don’t have any deadlines or assignments to take care of.”

I snorted. “Yeah. I’m not so sure about that one. Letting loose has never really been in my vocabulary. In fact, I’m not sure I have ever let loose.”

Taryn shook her head and laughed, knowing I wasn’t the type of girl who ever let loose or threw caution to the wind. There was only one time I could think of in recent years, and that had Will written all over it. Taryn was the one person who knew everything about me. Well, almost everything. I felt completely terrible for keeping a secret from her. I always had. I didn’t care about people knowing about my life, but I knew that no matter what I had going on, Taryn would be there to support me. This secret, though, it had its price, and I couldn’t tell Taryn. Not yet at least. I needed to take care of other things first, get my head straight, and know how to even put the words together in order to tell it to her.

I leaned back and replayed what had happened in the hallway. It had all been so fast, and I knew I had spouted off without thinking. Seeing him had brought more emotions welling up inside me than I had expected. I had thought I had completely prepared myself to see him, but when the time arrived, I’d been completely wrong. I was starting to think I should have stayed back in Cambridge between semesters and volunteered to run the soup kitchen or something. I had no idea how I was going to continue to hide my secret from Will, but I knew I had to try. Everything I’d told myself before about how he felt about me was true, and that didn’t make me want to bring him into my inner circle. Everything he had done rang through my head like a loudspeaker, and I couldn’t turn it off. Will didn’t love me. I knew that. I had just been a placeholder for Megan, someone to make him feel whole again.

Somewhere in my mind, I liked the way it had felt to be there taking care of Avery, eating dinner with him and Will, and being a part of things like Avery’s graduation. I knew that if I continued to play that game, I would let go of caring about being a placeholder. I also knew that I couldn’t let myself do that, especially now.