After an hour of sitting motionless on the bed, Maddy startled at a knock on the door. It was Kevin, in his plaid robe. He sat on the edge of the bed.
“I ordered a pizza. It’s downstairs if you want some.”
“I’m okay,” Maddy said.
“You did the right thing,” Kevin said after a moment.
“I just want you to know that.”
“I do know that.”
He sighed and started to explain something about healing, but Maddy couldn’t focus on the words, and even-tually she tuned him out. Her eyes drifted to her book bag on the floor. It was Saturday. Monday would she be expected to go to school like she had almost every morning of her life? She wondered if she really could just get up, work the morning shift, and then go to class like nothing had happened. Was she capable of that?
Suddenly something Kevin said caught her attention, breaking through the thickness of her thoughts.
“What?” Maddy said.
“I’m just saying, I know you think you’re in love with him, but—”
“I’m not in love with him,” Maddy said, quickly defensive. She saw him flinch at her tone and immediately wished she could take it back. He looked at her with helpless eyes, then shrugged.
“Well, like I said, pizza downstairs.” His parenting now done the best he knew how, Kevin got up and shuffled out the door.
His words hung meaningfully in the once-again silent room. In. Love. With. Him.
She knew it was true, despite her knee-jerk rejection to hearing the words out loud. She was in love with him.
Could it be possible that she had just made the biggest mistake of her life?
Her gaze drifted around the room, looking for any distraction, any escape, and came to rest on her bedroom window. There to greet her, as always, was the sign. She thought about what Kevin had told her on that first morning of school. That their luck was going to change. He had been right, she reflected bitterly, he just didn’t realize it was going to change for the worse. That’s the funny thing, she thought. You always want things to get better, but you never know how good you already have it. Maddy certainly hadn’t.
She hadn’t realized that she was happy, with an uncle who loved her, a loyal best friend, and a chance at a good life. It was more than a lot of people could say.
Before, she hadn’t ever hurt anyone, and she hadn’t known what it was like to care for someone and then have them taken away just as quickly. And she didn’t know anything of her own traumatic past. Would she truly be able to live with the knowledge of who her parents were and what really happened to them? If nothing else, there was some small, bittersweet satisfaction in knowing the truth now.
Her hand reached up and felt for her mother’s necklace.
When she touched it, she discovered something heavy hanging against her chest, near her heart. She pulled the necklace out from under her shirt.
There, dangling from her neck, was Jacks’s Divine Ring.
For a moment she just stared at it in numb disbelief.
In everything that happened, she had completely forgotten about it. She held the ring in her hand and inspected its exquisite beauty. She watched the way the light reflected onto her palm and how when she turned the ring, those reflections danced. It was the only thing he had ever wanted, and he had given it to her. Seconds ticked by while she fought to keep her fracturing emotions together. Was she feeling sadness? Yes. But was it also regret? And despair?
Maddy made a decision. He deserved to know. Although she could never be with him, and even though she would never see him again, he deserved to know the truth about how she felt . After what she had done at the station, she owed him that much. Getting up, she rummaged through her dirty jeans on the floor until she found her old flip phone. She turned it on, navigated to the recent call log, and dialed Gwen’s number.
The phone rang three times, then picked up.
“Maddy?” Gwen asked skeptically. Her familiar voice caused Maddy’s throat to tighten.
“Hey,” Maddy got out.
“OMG! Where are you?”
“I’m back home. Gwen, I have a favor to ask.”
There was a brief pause on the other end of the line.
“Yeah, anything. What do you need?”
Maddy looked at the Divine Ring in her hand.
“I need to drop off something. Do you think you could borrow your mom’s car and drive me?”
“I can’t,” Gwen said.
“Oh,” Maddy said, her heart sinking, “okay, then—”
“But I can drive you and then return it before my mom finds out, how about that?”
Maddy smiled in relief.
“That sounds perfect. Can you wait down the street?”
She didn’t know if Kevin would let her go, so she wasn’t going to take any chances.
“No prob,” Gwen said. “I’ll come right now.”
Maddy flipped the phone shut. She dropped the necklace and the Divine Ring back under her shirt and felt the ring thump lightly against her chest.
Rifling around in her drawers, she found some old stationery and a pen. She thought only for a moment, then wrote:
Jacks, I’m sorry for being stubborn and impossible, and I’m so sorry for what happened. I know now that I am drawn toward you just as much as you are drawn toward me, and without you, I will always feel incomplete. I lied in the station, but I did it for a good reason. The truth is. . I care about you very much. Please know that — and please never try to find me or contact me again.
— M
Fishing out a blank envelope from the desk, Maddy stuffed everything in her pocket. Then she stopped.
She didn’t know where he lived.
He had never taken her there, and she didn’t even know where to begin looking — beyond the assumption it was somewhere in the Angel City Hills. She paced back and forth for almost a minute before something occurred to her.
She got down on her knees and looked under her bed. It was too dark to see, so she stuck her hand out and swept it back and forth across the carpet. Hair ties, old homework, her iPod box. Then her fingers curled around a folded crinkled pamphlet, and she pulled it out. Bingo. She threw her hoodie back on, stuffed the pamphlet in her pocket along with everything else, and slipped as quietly as she could out her bedroom window.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“We’re going where?” Gwen’s tone was incredulous as she drove. She had just picked up Maddy in her mom’s blue Volvo, greeting Maddy with a crushing BFF hug. She was wearing a Team Maddy shirt that she had perfectly dis-tressed to match her denim skirt and high-heel sandals.
“Relax,” Maddy said, “I know how to get there.”
“Oh, really? And how’s that?”
Maddy produced the crinkled, dusty Angel map from her back pocket, the one Gwen had bought last summer that had almost gotten them both grounded.
“This thing really works, right?” They took the turn onto Outpost Road from Franklin and wound their way up into the Angel City Hills.
“And how did you even know about those shirts anyway?” Maddy asked, looking again at Gwen’s outfit.
“Duh!” Gwen chirped. “You tweeted about it.”
“That’s not me, Gwen.” Maddy groaned. “It’s someone pretending to be me.”