TROUVAILLE ... l.danes (REWRITE)

chapter eighteen; the present

I'VE SPENT MY WHOLE LIFE RUNNING FROM YOU

two-thousand-and-two

THE RADIO sings to life with a perfectly-timed rendition of Whitney Houston's 'I Will Always Love You'. She sighs, leaning her head back against the headrest of her car, trying to stave off the tears stinging the back of her eyes as her car rumbles to life. It's too late to run away now. Too late to do anything. She's stayed for too long just to leave it all behind without saying anything, so she sits in the running car, listening to a song that had somehow filtered through the memories of her youth, and dreams of just driving away.

They'd rejected her.

She'd gone to the Hartford Courant for a job interview, had sat through question after question, had beamed when they'd praised her writing ability. And then broke down in the bathroom when they'd told her they didn't want her.

Does anybody want her anymore?

Would anybody care if she just took off now?

Sometimes, she thinks the answer is plainly no. Nobody cared when she left the first time for Harvard, much too busy praising her for getting into an Ivy League school to bother asking her to stay (not that she would have, of course). Nobody cared when she left Massachusetts for Washington D.C, her best friend in tow and everything she had been working towards on the line. And nobody cared when she left D.C behind to come home – not Shawn, not Kimberly. Christ, she's not even sure The Post cared that much when she called them the morning after telling Olive why she'd come back and promptly quit, knowing she could never drag herself back there with the two of them waiting for her.

And now, yet again, nobody wants her.

Fantastic. Truly. It's fantastic that her life has come to this, just another gifted kid turned absolute ship-wrecked disaster. She can't even keep herself afloat.

Her phone rings again. She lets it, ignoring the vibrations against her hips where her blazer pocket hugs her a bit too tightly. Everything has been too tight since her interview ended and they let her walk away, tears stinging the back of her eyes, nausea rising up her throat like acid burning her tonsils. She never thought they'd reject her – when was the last time she was rejected?

Shawn and Kimberly are burnt into the back of her retinas. She squeezes her eyes tighter shut and hopes that that will stop the tears that bubble over her cheeks, but it only seems to make it worse. Is her entire body meant to ache like this? She hasn't cried in this car before. Even when she first came here after finding Shawn and Kimberly together, she'd kept her tears in place and drove to stave them off, fueled solely by caffeine she picked up on the way. She was too awake to cry.

Now, her entire body is exhausted.

Her phone stops vibrating and pings with news of a voicemail. She pulls it out and hits it without looking at the name that flashes on the screen, barely able to see anything through the blur of tears, and is glad she's able to hit the voicemail without even having to look.

"Uh, hey."

She chokes on a cough. Scrambling to look at her phone, the tears are quick to dry up. It's almost as if her body knows that she needs a clear head despite the daze she's trying to induce to get through this voicemail.

His name lights up the screen.

She forgot to block his number.

"Hey, it's me. I miss you. I wish you'd come home Shelley, back to D.C where you belong, back to me. Kim misses you too, you should hear her crying sometimes I – sorry, I guess I shouldn't mention her. I just – fuck, Shelley, watching you walk away was the most heartbreaking thing I've been through. It was like watching my whole life falling apart. I need you, Shelley. I screwed up, that's the truth, and I can spend my whole life begging for forgiveness, but none of it will matter without you beside me. I'm never gonna stop searching for you. I love you, Shelley. Please, come back to me. Come home."