He pulls me up to him and we cling to each other for long moments, gathering the strength to say goodbye.
He pulls back and the look of torment on his face is heartbreaking. "This is not goodbye, Evie. Remember our promise. Don't ever forget our promise. I will come back for you. I'll write to you with my new address as soon as I get to San Diego and we'll stay in touch that way. I want to be able to carry your letters with me and re-read them again and again. I'll send you my phone number too just in case, but I want you to write to me, okay? Then before we know it, you'll be 18 and I'll be able to come back for you. We'll make a life together."
"Okay," I whisper, "Write to me as soon as you get there, okay?"
"I will." He pulls me against him one last time and kisses the tears off of my cheeks. Then he turns and makes his way to the trellis. As he begins the descent, he looks back at me and says quietly, "It will only ever be you, Evie."
It's the last thing he ever says to me. I never see Leo again.
CHAPTER 2
8 Years Later
Someone is following me. He's been doing it for a week and a half now. He's crap at it. I marked him almost immediately and I've been watching him as he's been watching me. Clearly, he's no professional. But I can't think of one single reason why someone is following me around town. Especially someone who looks like this guy. I've heard that one of the reasons many serial killers are successful at luring victims is because they look like nice, good looking, average guys. But I still can't believe that the Adonis who is trailing me is someone to worry too much about, safety wise. Maybe I'm being naive, but it's just a gut feeling. Plus, he's more the type that you ask (maybe even beg) to pull you into a dark alleyway, than the one you mace for doing so. I've stared at him with a strategically placed compact, through a slat in my blinds, and reflected in store windows so easily, I'm almost embarrassed at his laughable stalking skills. Clearly, he wouldn't be an asset to any ninja organization anywhere, ever.
But the question remains, what does he want? I have to believe it's some kind of case of mistaken identity. Perhaps he's a really inept P.I. who has latched onto the wrong girl for one of his clients.
He's not trailing me today though, which is good because I'm going to a funeral and I'd prefer not to deal with the distraction. Willow is being buried today, beautiful Willow, named after the tree with the long branches, made to sway and bend in the wind. Only Willow hadn't bent when the cold wind blew. She broke, she shattered, she said she'd had enough and stuck a needle in her arm.
We grew up together in foster care and neither one of our lives had started out very pretty. I met her in the first house I was sent to, after a neighbor called the police because of a loud party my birth mom was having. When the police showed up, I was sitting on the couch in my pink Care Bears pajamas, a guy who smelled like tooth decay and beer had his hand up my nightgown, too wasted to move away from me quickly enough, and there were several baggies of meth on the coffee table. My birth mom sat on the couch across from me, watching disinterestedly. I don't know if she just didn't care, or was too wasted to care. I guess in the end, it doesn't really matter.
I sat unmoving as the police hauled the guy off of me. I had learned by that point that fighting was pointless. Disappearing was my best option, and if I couldn't do it in a closet or under a bed, I would disappear into my own head. I was ten.
I thought of that first foster home like a junk drawer. You know, the one you keep in your kitchen for all the little odds and ends that you don't know what else to do with, that have no home? We were all the random pieces tossed there, no relationship to anything else, save for the fact that we were all miscellaneous.
A couple days after I arrived, Willow showed up. A pretty little blond pixie with haunted eyes. She didn't talk much but that first night, she climbed into my bed, settled herself between me and the wall and curled up into a little ball. She whimpered in her sleep and begged someone to stop hurting her. I didn't have to wonder too hard about what had happened to her.
I watched out for her as much as I could after that, even though she was only a year younger than I was. Neither one of us was exactly a force to be reckoned with, two broken little girls who had already learned that trusting people was a risky business, but Willow seemed even more fragile than me, like the smallest hurt would cause her to crumble. So I took the blame and the punishment for things that were her fault. I let her sleep with me every night, telling her stories to try and soothe the demons away. I didn't have a lot of gifts in this world but I was good at telling stories and I wove tales together for her in an effort to make sense of her nightmares. Truth be told, they were as much for me as they were for her. I was trying to understand, too.
Through the years, I did what I could to love that girl. Lord knows I did. But as much as I wanted to and as hard as I tried, I couldn't save Willow. I didn't think anyone could have because the sad fact was, Willow didn't want to be saved. Early on, Willow had been taught that she was unlovable and she wove that lie into her soul until it was what she lived and breathed. It was the basis for every choice she made, and every heart she broke, including mine.
A month later, an 11 year old boy showed up in our house. A tall, skinny, angry kid named Leo who grunted yes and no answers to our foster parents and would barely look anyone in the eye. When he got there, he had one arm in a cast, and fading, yellowish bruises on his face and what looked like finger marks on his neck. It seemed like he was angry at the world and common sense told me that he had good reason for that sentiment.