They Said She Was Strong So They Never Had To Choose Her novel · Chapter 23 of 24
Chapter 23: Scallions
I flew into Asheville on the twelfth of June.
My mother was waiting at the bottom of the escalator.
She had a water bottle in one hand and a jacket over her arm.
"It gets cool at night," she said. "I didn't know if you'd remember."
I took the jacket.
I didn't tell her I had one in my bag.
On the drive home she talked about the dental office, and the new hygienist who hummed, and the neighbors' twins learning to ride bikes.
She didn't talk about Kenzie.
Then we turned onto our street, and I didn't need her to.
There was a FOR SALE sign in the yard next door.
A rented moving truck sat in the drive with its back rolled open.
"Her father's selling," my mother said. "To pay the settlement. They close on the first."
She parked in our drive and turned the engine off and sat there.
"Go see your room," she said. "Before anything else. Please."
The door to my old room was shut.
I opened it.
The walls were the deep blue of the sky an hour after sunset.
Somebody had painted stars on the ceiling in tiny white dots.
Not random ones. The Big Dipper. Cassiopeia. Orion, low over the closet.
"I did it from a chart in a library book," my mother said from the hall.
"Orion's backwards. The man at the paint store told me after."
I looked up at him.
He was backwards.
Over the bed hung the Horsehead Nebula, in a black frame, the same poster as the one she'd taken down when I was ten.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of They Said She Was Strong So They Never Had To Choose Her are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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