Prologue

-Ellie-

“Intense love does not measure, it just gives.”

-Mother Teresa

There’s a saying, you can’t go home again.

This is particularly true for a girl who never really had a home to begin with.

Home is for people with families.

Home is for people with love.

Home is for people with a life.

I had never possessed any of those things. My entire existence had been composed of one bad choice after another.

Until Flynn.

He was my redemption.

My salvation.

He had come into my life when I hadn’t known I needed him. And I had hurt him. Abused him.

Almost destroyed him.

And in turn I had almost destroyed myself.

We were connected in a way that I hadn’t been able to understand until he blew back into my world all those years later and gave me the thing I thought I’d never have.

Home.

Roots.

A place to call my own.

Every story has a beginning.

Flynn was mine.

He was the journey in between.

He shadowed my steps as I struggled to discover the person I wanted to be.

But I knew that when it was all over, Flynn would be there. He was my beginning.

My end.

My home.

My happily ever after.

Chapter One

-Ellie-

“Mommy!” I yelled down the stairs. I had just woken up and my stomach was rumbling. I had gotten out bed and gone to the bathroom. The floor was cold, my toes curled under my feet.

I walked down the stairs, holding onto the bannister. The house was quiet.

Normally I could hear my mommy singing along to the radio or talking on the phone. But today I didn’t hear anything.

“Mommy?” I called again. My stomach started feeling weird. Almost like a bellyache. There was this fluttering inside that I didn’t like.

I walked into the kitchen and it was dark. Mommy usually made me toast before I went to school. Then she’d walk me to the bus stop.

“Mommy!” I yelled loudly. Maybe she couldn’t hear me. Maybe she was playing a game and I was supposed to go find her!

I ran down the hallway to her room. I threw open the door calling out, “Boo!” But she wasn’t there. The bed was still made. There were clothes on the floor and on the bed.

That wasn’t right.

Mommy always got mad if my room was a mess. She always put her clothes away. I frowned and walked into her room. The special picture of her and my daddy at a carnival that always sat on her dresser was gone.

Where could it be?

I wanted my mommy.

My stomach growled; I was really hungry. I knew I had to go to school soon. I’d never walked to the bus stop by myself. There were mean kids that hung out there, and Mommy always made sure they left me alone.

I walked back out to the living room and sat down on the couch, turning on the television.

I’d just watch Mighty Morphin Power Rangers until Mommy got home.

When Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was over, Mommy still wasn’t home. My stomach was starting to hurt.

I went to the kitchen and found Pop-Tarts in the cabinet. I ate the whole box until I felt sick. Then I went back to watch more television. Rugrats were on. I loved Rugrats. I wished Mommy were here to watch it with me.

I could tell her all about it when she came home and then she would take me to school.

But Mommy never came home.

It became night and I was scared.

And hungry.

I cried and cried and cried for my Mommy.

She never came back.

I was all alone.

**

I knew a thing or two about abandonment.

For my entire life I had been the poster child for major issues. Anger issues. Mommy and Daddy issues. Psychotic issues.

I had been one issue away from a straitjacket.

My label as a troubled child had dogged my steps for a long time.

I didn’t know anything about having a real home. Or starting a real life. Or having people around that cared about me.

Those were fantasies that belonged to a girl with hope.

Hope and Ellie McCallum had never co-existed.

Until three years ago.

Now today I was going to, for the very first time, have everything I’d ever wanted.

A chance at happiness.

Even if the direction my tiny car was headed towards was the last place I had ever wanted to be again, I still felt the bubbling, tentative joy deep in my gut.

Three years was a long time to be gone.

Maybe too long.

Maybe not long enough.

I hadn’t stepped foot in West Virginia since I had made the decision to attend the College of Baltimore. I had needed to cut ties and let myself fly free.

I had been terrified. Scared that I’d crash and burn.

Aside from my stint in Juvenile Detention, I had lived in Wellston, West Virginia my entire life. It was my dysfunctional safety net. It’s all that I knew.

Then Flynn Hendrick, the boy I had bullied and terrorized who later grew up to become someone so much more than that had shown me that there was a great big world out there waiting for me. Even if he was, for the most part, terrified to venture out into it.

He had convinced me that I deserved more than to work at JAC’s Quick Stop and dodge the law for the rest of my life.

He had given me something to reach for.

So I had left.

And he had stayed behind. Putting down roots and making a home that he hoped I’d come back to when the time came.

He never doubted that at the end, I’d come back. He had believed it with an unwavering certainty. A certainty I hadn’t always shared.