“I thought I would love it. All those new people, new experiences.” Jenny picked at a thread on her jeans. “But it turns out the world is big. Even a place as small as Columbia felt overwhelming. I didn’t know who to talk to or how to act. I spent almost every day of those two years desperate to get back here. I remember one night I got a flat tire and no one on the highway stopped to help me. I was standing out there in the rain, trying to change my tire, sobbing like a baby and thinking that if I were in Barren Springs, if I were home, I would’ve had ten people stopping to help me.” She cocked her eyebrows at me. “Can you believe that shit? What a goddamn wimp.”

She wasn’t wrong, though. That was the thing about Barren Springs; for all its ugliness, there was hidden beauty, too. The way people relied on each other when things got bad, the resourcefulness of a community that most of the world ignored, the sheer stubborn willfulness that kept people breathing when it might have been easier to give up. The rolling hills and the wind in the trees. I had to remind myself of those things on the days I wanted to burn the whole place to the ground.

“When I met Zach and then got pregnant, it seemed like the perfect excuse to drop out of school and come home. Maybe part of me even planned it that way. And God love him, Zach never uttered a word of protest, even though he’d always wanted to move to a big city, get a job at some fancy company. I thought he might resent me for it at some point. But he never has. I’m the one who gets itchy feet sometimes, tries to talk him into moving, and he’s the one who wants to stay. God knows why.” She glanced at me. “He gave up all his dreams for me and Izzy, and right now I could kill him for it.” Her eyes glistened with tears, a few of them spilling over onto her pale cheeks. “I’m furious with him for agreeing to this life because if he hadn’t none of this would have happened.” She flapped a hand at me. “And I know how unfair and awful that is of me. You don’t have to say it.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

That startled a laugh out of her, whisking tears off her cheeks with the backs of her fingers. “You’re a breath of fresh air, Eve, honestly. Nothing seems to surprise you.”

I shrugged. “It takes more than what you just told me, that’s for sure. You’re not the only one who looks back after all this and wishes for different choices.”

Jenny stared at me like she was trying to unravel my thoughts, crawl inside my brain and fish out the things I wasn’t saying. “Like what?” she asked.

“Nothing in particular,” I said, eyes drifting away. “Whatever choices led to our daughters dying in this park.”