Gus grins. “Deal!” He shakes Silas’s hand before turning to me and doing the same. “You still doin’ Thursday night trivia?”
I frown. “What? Oh, yeah, sure.”
“Great. Be seein’ you, Row!”
I glare at Silas once Gus ambles back down my parents’ driveway. “Thirty-thousand, dude? Are you fucking serious?”
Silas rolls his eyes as he shoves me aside and marches back to the car. “You want to owe me or the four-hundred pound psycho who just offed your regular psychopathic loan shark?”
I shut my mouth and he grins.
“We’ll set up a payment plan. Now get in the fucking car. Let’s go get your girl.”
Chapter Forty-Six
Evangeline
“Get dressed, sweetheart.”
I’m numb, standing there in my bedroom of the rental house. I feel cold, and shattered inside as I stand motionless, staring at myself in the mirror above the bureau.
I can hear the sounds of my father bellowing scripture and knocking things over in the other room as he hastily packs his things as we ready to leave. Chastity is doing the same thing in her room, albeit without the yelling. Behind me, my mother wordlessly begins to tuck my clothes away into my suitcase.
She looks up, meeting my eye in the mirror — her mouth going small. “Get dressed, Evangeline.”
“Mom-”
She shakes her head. “Just get dressed, please.”
She folds my clothes in quick, precise movements, her fingers lingering on them as she tucks them into the suitcase laid out across my bed.
“Mom, he can’t just- I mean-” I turn to her, still clutching the sheet from Rowan’s childhood bed around myself. “He can’t make me marry Milton.”
“He’s your father, Eva.”
“He’s not God.”
She whirls, her face tight, and her eyes darting fearfully towards the door, as if somehow my father could have heard over screaming out scripture from Proverbs.
“Please get dressed.”
“Mom-”
“You’ll need your toiletries from the bathroom.”
“Mom-”
“And your books, of course. I’m not sure there’s room in the suitcase for-”
“MOM.”
Her shoulders tense as she freezes, her back to me. “Eva-”
“I love him.”
That’s when the tears come. When I finally say the words I’ve been trying to find inside my heart out loud — when I finally commit them to spoken word and admit them out loud to God, to her, and to myself, that’s when I break.
My mother’s arms are around me, pulling me tight against her as the tears come hot down my cheeks. “There there, sweetheart,” she says quietly.
Restrained.
“I love him,” I whisper into her shoulder.
She pulls back, her eyes sad as she cups my face. “I know you do, sweetheart.”
“These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him!”
My father’s ranting comes bellowing from down the hall, followed by the crash of something and the sound of broken glass.
My mother’s eyes dart back to mine. “Get dressed, Eva.”
“I love him, Mom.”
She presses folded clothes into my hands.
“Get dressed,” she says quickly.
I’m crying, the tears coming freely as I let the sheet that smells like him drop to the ground and slowly start to pull on jeans and a t-shirt.
“Quickly now, we’ll be late,” my mother says stiffly, zipping my suitcase shut and hefting it off the bed. She glances up at me, her mouth twitching into a small smile before she takes my hand and leads me from the room.
She pulls me down the hall, past the sound of my father roaring in their room.
“And that we may be delivered from wicked and evil men!”
“Quickly now,” she whispers, hefting my suitcase in one hand, my hand in the other as she pulls me down the back staircase towards the kitchen. She glances up the staircase as we reach the bottom, her face white and her hand almost unbearably tight on mine as she pulls me towards the back door.
“Mom, where are we-”
“Quickly now, Eva,” she says tightly, pulling us out the door and towards the driveway. She opens the back door of our rental car and shoves my suitcase in before her eyes dart to mine. “Get in the car, sweetheart.”
“Mom-”
“Get in the car!” she says tightly, her eyes pleading.
This is it.
This is me being taken away from this place, back to the life I don’t want, with the man I don’t love, and the path I’ve tried hard to stray away from. My heart sinks, and the tears start to trickle down my cheeks as I open the passenger door and slide in. I sit frozen in the seat, my eyes on the floor as I wait for my father and Chastity to come out.