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  First, I’d had to ask the Wynns if Nora and I could camp out at the old tree. I wasn’t sure if they’d have cared if I had told them it was actually me and Ramsey. But I couldn’t risk word getting back to my dad. He’d become a tad more attentive since I got boobs. He liked Ramsey and all, but camping together was pushing it. Thankfully, Lacey Wynn had agreed no questions asked.

  Next, I’d had to borrow a tent. Josh Caskey was the only kid I knew who had one of his own; thus he wouldn’t have to clear it with his parents. Perks of being the mayor’s son, I guessed. He’d asked me a million questions about why I needed it. I told him the same story about Nora and me that I’d told the Wynns. After a few perverted questions about whether we’d be sleeping naked, he gave me the tent just in time. I’d been only seconds away from kicking him in the balls.

  Lastly, we had our parents. Nora would cover for Ramsey. Not that his dad would care. He was too wrapped up in his new girlfriend. His dad was fat, balding, and broke. Though based on the speed with which he went through women, he clearly had some of his son’s charm. Or vice versa, I wasn’t sure.

  In a spectacular show of how well my dad knew me, he hadn’t questioned me when I told him I was staying the night with Tiffany Martin. I’d considered telling him I was staying with Nora, but on the off chance he’d need me for something, two doors down was too close.

  Two ham sandwiches, a bag of chips, and a couple cans of Coke later, I was set for the most romantic night of my entire life. Or, more accurately, a night of laughing, bumbling out of clothing, teeth clanking, arguing about why Ramsey had a condom in his wallet, and then finally giving myself to him completely.

  Sex was funny like that. It didn’t change us or make us closer. That was an impossible feat. But it was special in its own way because we’d done it together.

  He was my first boyfriend.

  My first kiss.

  My first love.

  My first everything.

  A laugh bubbled in my throat as he kissed up my neck.

  “Stop giggling, Thea. You know what that does to me.”

  Straddling him, I murmured, “I don’t know anything.”

  He lifted his hips, revealing that he was very ready again.

  I moaned, suddenly feeling ready too. “We don’t have another condom.”

  He growled and threw his head back against the pillow. “See, this is what happens when you get a condom from the gas station vending machine.”

  Right, so the reason for our argument about why Ramsey had a condom in his wallet was because the condom I’d brought had popped before he’d even gotten it out of the wrapper. I guess you get what you pay for in the Quick Stop men’s restroom. Lesson learned.

  I slapped his chest. “Hey! I’ve never done this before. Do you have any idea how many packs of gum I had to buy to get eight quarters for that thing without looking suspicious?”

  He smiled, magically producing a chewed-up piece of gum from somewhere under his tongue. “I do appreciate it.”

  “Were you kissing me with gum in your mouth?”

  “Sparrow, I think every time I’ve kissed you I’ve had gum in my mouth.”

  I rolled my eyes and shifted to the side to lay beside him, carefully taking the blanket with me.

  “Whoa, where ya going?”

  “We should probably get dressed. Before things…happen.”

  “Okay, hold up. First of all, I’m going to need you to stop with that getting dressed crazy talk. Secondly, it will take me all of three minutes to run to my house and grab more condoms.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Why the hell do you have more condoms at home?”

  “And here we go again.”

  “Ramsey, I’m serious.”

  “Oh, I have no doubt that you are. But I already told you that my dad keeps a gigantic box under his bed, and tonight, I’m grateful he does for more reasons than just that he won’t be reproducing again.”

  I curled my lip. “Can we please stop talking about your dad reproducing?”

  “Sure thing.” He sat up and snagged his shirt and his shorts. “Now you lay there and I’ll be right back.” His gaze dropped to my exposed breast and his face heated. “I’m bringing the whole damn box.”

  Pulling the blanket up, I hissed, “You’re going to get caught.” I swayed my head from side to side. “And possibly get a little brother if you bring the whole box.”

  He tapped the tip of my nose. “Good thinking. I’ll leave a few.”

  Unzipping the door to the tent, he looked at me over his shoulder. If I had known it was the last time I’d ever see seventeen-year-old Ramsey smile, I would have stared longer, engraining every dip and curve into my memory so I would never forget how utterly beautiful and carefree he looked in that moment.

  But most of all, I would have begged him to stay.

  “Don’t move,” he ordered as he bent down and scooped up my pile of clothes, taking it with him.

  “Ramsey!” I scolded without any way to go after him.

  “Three minutes.” He laughed before his footsteps disappeared into the night.

  Ramsey and I lived unique yet completely common lives.

  We’d grown up hard. We’d grown up fast. We’d grown up fearless because we’d already faced some of life’s greatest demons when we were only in elementary school. But experiencing that had only lulled us into a false security because we honestly believed that we could handle anything the world threw at us, as long as we were together. And maybe that had been true.

  But that night, we weren’t together.

  Minutes after Ramsey had left, Josh Caskey showed up. I wasn’t concerned. I mean, I was naked and pissed the hell off when he crawled through that doorway. Josh was a prankster and my first mistake was telling him where “Nora and I” were going to be camping in his tent that night.

  He was drunk, the smell of alcohol on his breath nearly burning my nostrils. I asked him to leave no fewer than a dozen times before giving up and waiting for Ramsey to get back and handle him. While he slurred random conversation, I stared at my watch, counting the seconds as time ticked on.

  It took ten minutes and sixteen seconds for Josh to snatch my blanket.

  It took eleven minutes and fifty-five seconds for him to pin me to the ground after I’d punched him.

  Twelve minutes and twenty seconds for him to cover my mouth, silencing my screams.

  In the end, it took only nineteen minutes and thirty-nine seconds for him to ruin my entire life.

  I’d been right. Ramsey had gotten caught trying to snag the condoms, which had resulted in a huge fight with his dad.

  It was twenty-two minutes and three seconds before he got back.

  Time had never been my friend.

  Everything happens for a reason is the biggest bullshit adage that has ever been spoken. It’s incredible if you think about it though. One tiny change in a sequence of events could alter your entire life.

  What if we hadn’t rented that house when we moved to Clovert?

  What if I’d picked a different tree to hide in the day my mom left?

  What if Thea’s mom had died an hour later?

  What if I hadn’t broken her leg?

  What if I hadn’t failed fifth grade?

  What if I hadn’t caught Hairy that day in the woods?

  What if her dad hadn’t sucked?

  What if she’d never stopped hating me?

  What if she hadn’t become my world?

  What if…I’d never left her that night?

  None of that happened for a reason. It was all pure chance. I should have expected it and been ready for life to once again snatch the rug out from under me.

  I guess I never expected it to snatch it out from under Thea too.

  After a near brawl with my piece-of-shit dad, I finally got back to our tent in the hayfield. She was on her hands and knees, simultaneously crying and dry-heaving. In all the years I’d known her, I’d never, not once, seen a single tear fall from
her seafoam-green eyes.

  It was the most ludicrous thought in the entire world given the situation, but for a minute, I panicked that maybe she’d regretted having sex with me. I mean, seriously, how fucking self-centered could a person be?

  God, if only I’d been right.

  The earthy fragrance of freshly cut grass hung in the air, and the cicadas sang on an otherwise silent night. The blankets were a mess, and wrappers from our food were haphazardly strewn around the small tent. It was the same as it had been when I’d left.

  However, when she threw her arms around my neck, violent sobs shaking her shoulders, and stammered out the rusty knives disguised as words detailing what Josh had done to her, nothing was ever the same again.

  My mind raced, frantically trying to piece together the who, what, when, and most of all how this had happened. My Sparrow—the girl who had held me together more times than I could count—was falling apart in my arms, and I had not one damn clue how to fix it.

  Shit like this didn’t happen in our small town. Kids got in trouble for smoking weed or bribing one of the homeless guys to buy beer. But assault and rape? From someone we knew?

  It didn’t take long for the anger to find me. It all became too real when I helped her get dressed. A thunderstorm of razorblades rained from the sky as I took in the red welts and purple bruises covering her body.

  A body she’d just given me.

  A body I should have been able to protect.

  Her tears soaking the shoulder of my shirt burned like acid straight to my soul. Because that’s exactly what Thea was.

  My soul.

  I honestly only remember snapshots in time over the next few hours. How they started and ended were jumbled in a sea of pain, guilt, and helplessness.

  I carried her home. We argued that she didn’t want to tell her dad because he’d find out what we’d been doing before it happened. And I snapped at her like the dick I so obviously was that she was being ridiculous.

  Yeah. I said that. I’d spend the next twelve years regretting it too.

  She begged me to stay with her, and despite the adrenaline firing through my nervous system demanding for me to find Josh Caskey as quickly as possible and make him pay for every single one of those tears, I agreed.

  I didn’t sneak in that night. I walked in the front door with her tucked under my arm and went straight to her room.

  She took a shower while I paced a path in the carpet in her bedroom.

  I think she spoke to her dad to let him know she was home, but my mind was lost in a toxic storm of failure and revenge.

  I told her we should call the cops.

  With hollow eyes that shattered a piece of me I would never be able to reclaim, she told me she wasn’t ready, and it wouldn’t matter anyway. She trembled in my arms as she spoke in broken whispers. Josh was rich. His dad was the mayor. She’d borrowed his tent, told him where she was going, and then had been waiting in it naked.

  All of which was my fucking fault. She didn’t say that part. She didn’t have to.

  It was around two in the morning when she finally fell asleep in my arms. Her back was to me and I stared at the side of her face, her sparrow-colored hair tickling my nose. I thought about my mother.

  She’d never looked back in the six years since she’d left. No phone calls. No Christmas visits. Not even a birthday card dropped in the mail. I tried to forget about her as much as possible. However, as I watched Thea sleeping, I closed my eyes and thought back to when I was a kid.

  We’d had woods behind our old house, and when my father was on one of his tangents, she’d take Nora and I out to feed the sparrows. I remembered one particular day when I was eight. It was in the beginning when the abuse first started, or maybe it was only beginning to me because I was finally old enough to see my father for who he truly was.

  Regardless, we were hanging out with a bag of bird seed. Of course, the birds were hidden, waiting on us to drop the food and go. But I was pissed, probably more about the fact that my dad had slapped my mom before we left. The birds caught all my wrath that day. I yelled, kicking and screaming like a toddler and not a kid who in less than a year would have to wrestle my father off my mother. Nora cried at my outburst and I told her to shut the hell up. That was when my mom had had enough.

  She snatched me up by the back of my shirt, tears streaming down her red cheeks, and got in my face. “The sparrows don’t come because you need them, Ramsey. They come because they need you.”

  I’m sure all of this was followed by a quit-yelling-at-your sister lecture and threats that the sparrows would never come if I didn’t shut up and be patient. But the only thing I heard in that scolding was that somebody needed me. For an angry kid who felt worthless and out of control, it gave me a purpose.

  My mother was my first sparrow. I did everything I could for her until the day she left us.

  Nora was next.

  And then there was Thea.

  Yes, I still believed that everything happens for a reason is the biggest bullshit adage that had ever been spoken, but the minute I discovered Thea Hull—with all of her flowing, dark hair and her sad, green eyes—was just as broken as I was, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that someone had sent me another sparrow.

  I’d never been more wrong. Thea hadn’t shown up at that tree that night because she needed me. She’d appeared because I needed her.

  Thea was a fucking eagle—majestic, fierce, and strong.

  I was the sparrow.

  But that night, Josh Caskey had turned my warrior into a sparrow too. I couldn’t let him get away with it. She was never going to tell her dad or call the cops. The spotlight wasn’t Thea’s place. And if she went to the police, that was exactly what would happen. Gossip would make its way around school, and with Josh’s father being such a public figure, the whole town would know before the week was over.

  I wanted to respect her decision.

  But I couldn’t lie there in her bed while she suffered emotionally and physically, knowing what he’d done to her. I couldn’t let him get away with it.

  Something had to be done.

  My sparrow needed me.

  And for that reason alone, I kissed her shoulder, crawled out of her bed, and then destroyed us all.

  Twelve years later…

  I stared at his back as he gave up shaking the gate and walked away. Nora chased after him, but he snatched his arm out of her grip.

  “You’re a coward!” I yelled, crossing my arms over my chest.

  “Would you stop?” Nora seethed at me while jumping in front of Ramsey to stop him.

  “Why the fuck did you bring her?” he snapped.

  “You know why,” she replied.

  “No. I really fucking don’t. She was my middle school girlfriend. You got Suzie Jenkins from third grade hiding in the trunk too?”

  Yeah. That hurt. But pain was the name of my game where Ramsey was concerned.

  I couldn’t see her face, but she cocked her head to the side. After all these years, I knew Nora well. I’d bet my bank account that she had her eyebrows pinched and her chocolate-colored eyes narrowed into slits. She was tall. I was five-five and she had me by at least four inches. But there was literally nothing menacing about Nora Stewart. Willowy was the adjective that came to mind. However, don’t for a second think her stature made her weak. I’d seen her verbally destroy far bigger men than her brother.

  Ramsey probably knew this too, because when she failed to answer him with words, he turned his fury on me. With tight fists and an angry scowl, his gaze hit me like a sledgehammer. I held my ground, twelve years of heartbreak and hatred fueling my courage.

  “What is wrong with you asking her to bring you here today?” he snarled. “How many times do I have to scrape you off before you finally get it?”

  I locked my greens with his browns. “After everything we’ve been through? More than once, that’s for damn sure.”

  Once.

  That was exact
ly how many times Ramsey had “scraped me off” while he was behind bars.

  Once was actually the only contact he’d made with me at all.

  Six years of promises.

  Six years of never leaving each other’s sides.

  Six years of planning a lifetime together.

  Six damn years and he’d written me one letter the entire time he was gone. If I hadn’t realized that it was going to be his last, I would have lit the damn thing on fire and mailed him back the ashes.

  Move on, he’d written.

  Start a new life, he’d urged.

  I don’t love you anymore, he’d lied.

  I’d sobbed the day I got that letter—big, fat, grief-stricken tears. I hadn’t believed it any more then than I did now, but each and every word on that page had felt like a stake through the heart. My Ramsey never would have written that. Not to me.

  For over a year, I’d traced my fingers over the sloppy handwriting just to feel him. It was as close as I could get to him after he’d refused to add me to his list of visitors. I’d never been given the opportunity to speak with him in person. I wrote letter after letter. Each one containing a million questions. A million apologies. A million I-love-yous. A million pleas for him to let me come visit.

  They all went unanswered.

  Once, when I was at the end of my rope, desperate for him to know the truth, I snuck a note inside one of Nora’s letters. I still had no idea if he’d read it. Nora was the only connection I had to Ramsey at all, and he hadn’t mentioned it to her.

  Two years, five months, one week, and six days after Ramsey had gone to prison, I was forced to accept that he was done with me.

  However, I had been nowhere near done with him.

  I’d told him I’d never leave. I’d sworn it. He’d sworn it too. So there was no damn way I was accepting a breakup letter a month after he’d been sentenced to sixteen years in prison.

  If he didn’t love me anymore, fine. I couldn’t change that. But if he expected me to truly move on with my life, then he was going to have to tell me to my face. I didn’t give a fuck if that was said sixteen minutes or sixteen years later. Until then, I was going to keep my word and be there for him if, and when, he was ready.