Everything Has Changed (Completed)

now - chapter eighteen

❝ and meet me there tonight
and let me know that it's not all in my mind ❞

I didn't go to school the next day.

My mom decided that I needed a day off after the events of the previous day, and that we needed to spend some mother-daughter time together. I wasn't a huge fan of shopping, so my mother decided we could just walk around downtown for a bit.

She let me sleep in a few hours later than normal, and I left my phone at home, not wanting the distraction.

We started in the same coffee shop I went to the first day we had moved here, my mom ordering some kind of latte while I got the same iced green tea. As we waited for our drinks, we both looked at the picture wall again.

My mother smiled at me wistfully. "Brookville is such a nice town. I wished that we could have stayed here longer when you were ten, but–"

I cut her off. "I understand, you can't control where your job takes you. Plus, I've gotten to live in some pretty cool places."

She smiled at me again, and I asked a question that had been on my mind for a while.

"Do you think your job will take us out of Brookville again?"

She furrowed her eyebrows before shaking her head. "I don't think so. Living in Brookville gives me lots of advantages, and the office can send me to a lot of places near here. If we move, I don't think it will be because of my job."

I looked over at her and grinned.

Pretty soon, our drinks came out and we headed out of the coffee shop.

We walked around the streets, just talking about nothing and everything. Every so often, we might stop in a store and look around, but we rarely bought anything. It was nice to just be able to walk around with my mom and talk. We stopped at a diner to get lunch and then headed home afterward. 

By the time we got back, it was a little after 1:30, and school would have just gotten out a couple minutes ago. I was surprised to find a few of unread texts on my phone, all from Luke.