Small Town Love

Prologue

To love or have loved 

that is enough.

Ask nothing further.

There is no other pearl to be found in the

dark folds of life.

"Les Miserables"

Victor Hugo

It was nearly 10 at night when Daphne finally reached the door to the apartment she and her mother shared.

She was miserable. Her back felt like it was on fire, every move hurt and spending 17 hours on her feet hadn't helped at all.

She was greeted by a white envelope taped to the door and she knew what that meant.

Another eviction notice.

She opened it, her eyes flying over the lines. Her mother hadn't paid the rent for 3 months?

They lived in the outskirts of NYC in a beaten-down house where the tenants seemed to change quicker than the weather did.

It had been the last apartment in a long line of them and Daphne needed to close her eyes for a moment.

3 months worth of rent that were, what, 1500 dollars?

Summer was over, Daphne having spent it working 13 hours a day at a diner and a bookshop, sometimes a bar. It was ridiculous that they had even let her do that. She was only 17, a high school senior now, but a fake ID and copious amounts of Make-up had helped with that.

Daphne didn't enjoy the lies that she needed to tell at all. She had grown used to them though.

Lie after lie, everything so that she could explain away the bruises and the pain, could explain away the drugs and the empty bottle of alcohol that littered the house.

Lie after lie.

She had kept more than half of the money carefully stashed away under a loose floorboard in her closet.

Even during one of her drunk rants, her mother wouldn't actually crawl through Daphne's closet and rip out the very last floorboard. At least it had worked for the last year and a half.

Daphne could just hope that there was enough money under that floorboard to pay the rent. And if there wasn't...she would need to raid what little she actually kept in her college fund.

She pushed down the tears that wanted to overcome her and she wondered another time why she was even bothering anymore.

She was just so tired.

She was as quiet as she could be as she entered the apartment she and her mother shared. She could smell then the stench of alcohol as she slipped off her backpack and then pulled off her coat and carefully hung it up at the door. Then she took off the beaten up converse that had already seen much better days.

To their defence, it should be said that Daphne wore them near-daily and had done so for the last 4 years.

She had bought them from some of the birthday money that her aunt and uncle had sent her that year.

She couldn't help but smile as she thought about her aunt and uncle. While Daphne hadn't seen them in years (the last time had been when she had been 14 and her mother had sent her to Maine for a week over the summer), they still stayed in contact. At least as well as it worked.