What You Leave Behind Read Free

part, as if to speak, but she cuts him off before he can move his mouth to form a single syllable. “Just fucking take me home, Liam.”
    “Harp, I don’t want to end this on bad terms. You’re too important—”
    “Don’t do that.”
    He closes his mouth and fixates on the gearshift, feeling worse than wounded, though she thinks he’s anything but.
    “You’re throwing away a decade , throwing  me  away, and you think this will end on good terms?” Harper laughs humorlessly and reaches for the door handle, shakes her head as the tears begin again, this time hot with anger. “You’re right, Liam. Maybe you don’t know who the hell you are anymore. Because I sure as fuck don’t know you at all.” She opens the door and the wind whips into the vehicle as Liam opens his to follow her out to the roadside where this all began. When she hears him, she spits out a strained, “Don’t follow me.”
    “Harp, come back and I’ll take you home,” he shouts to her as his feet move just a bit slower than hers, letting her leave, but wanting her to stay, as he has never been so unsure of anything in his entire life. “Harper—”
    “Don’t fucking worry about it.” She refuses to turn around—to let him see another tear fall from her eyes. With her fists balled tightly, she marches on, dodging two lanes of traffic and crossing the median. “Just go. Go on and find yourself and I’ll find my own fucking way home.”

CHAPTER ONE
     
     
    Hilary is running out of options. It’s been seven days since she collected her daughter from the roadside, soaked and shivering and nearly catatonic, and still Harper’s cries haven’t stopped. Day seven is much like the six days before it. Harper lies in her bed, still aside from the soft up and down motion of her shoulders as she cries, and doesn’t at all acknowledge Hilary unless it’s to ask or tell her to leave. That’s happened once or twice.
    She moves into Harper’s room from just outside the doorway where she stands sentinel during much of the time she’s not at work. As she crosses the carpet and folds herself down at Harper’s bedside, she waits for her dismissal, but it doesn’t come. “What can I do, Harp?” she asks after a bit, her soft voice stained with an ache. The question is met with a deliberate glance away and nothing more, just like the last ten times she’s asked. She waits, but Harper doesn’t answer, doesn’t move, and Hilary studies her in the silence. Her reddened eyes look the same as they did when she was five and afraid of the dark, eleven and cradling a broken arm, seventeen and hiding, curled up on the floor of her father’s closet during his vigil. Hilary palms her forehead and huffs out a breath, grappling for words. “Harper—I just—this is hard to watch, Harp. What—what can I do? Tell me what to do and I’ll—”
    “I’m so sorry this is hard for you to watch ,” Harper snaps, a crisp bitterness accompanying each syllable. Hilary stares at her daughter’s turned cheek as she speaks, and fights the smile that creeps onto her lips in the wake of her venomous words. Any fight is a spark of life, and that’s what Hilary has been hoping for. She refuses to call it a victory though, as Harper turns and levels a wild stare on her. She brings her hands up to clutch beneath her left collarbone, fingernails clawing to get to her decaying heart, as she looks her mother in the eye. The skin of her chest reddens under the scrape of her nails, and she spits out, “It’s hard for me to live .”
    Hilary reaches over and strokes her hair for a moment, before Harper twists away. She gets to her feet and despite Harper’s protest, leans over to kiss the crown of her daughter’s head before she turns to leave. The thump of her footfalls against the wooden stairs is drowned out by Harper’s cries—the sound follows her to the ground floor and clear across the house to the kitchen.
    She doesn’t know what to do or how to help