I Let Her Ruin Herself novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: September

By September, there was a banner over Main Street with Savannah's face on it.

WELCOME HOME, SAVANNAH KETTERING, it said. STAR OF LAKEVIEW.

She had been cast in April.

The cameras had rolled all summer two hours away, and the first episode would air in three weeks.

I was nineteen now, with a birthday I'd spent on a trail with a shovel.

I looked hard at that banner every morning on my way to the greenway.

Then I went to work.

"You're holding it wrong," Wyatt said.

I was standing at the second bridge with a pair of long-handled loppers, trying to cut a fallen branch off the rail.

"I'm holding it fine."

"You're holding it like you plan to hit someone."

"I might."

"Then at least keep your thumbs out of the blades."

He came up behind me and moved my left hand down the handle an inch.

His fingers were warm and rough, and he took them away fast.

I cut the branch, and it dropped into the creek.

"There," he said. "You didn't lose a finger."

"You say that like you've seen it."

"My first week, a guy on the crew did it with a hedge trimmer." He picked up the next branch and tossed it on the pile. "We still call him Nine."

"That's not funny."

"He thinks it's hilarious."

I laughed, and the sound carried across the water.

I had a job on the parks crew every Saturday and Sunday.

Laney had told the district office I was the hardest worker she knew, and she'd kill them if they said no.

The pay was awful.

My mother worked nights, and I took classes at the community college three days a week.

This was the one place where no one looked at me as the girl who watched.

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