The Good Daughter: A gripping, suspenseful, page-turning thriller. Alexandra Burt

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       Chapter 2

       Dahlia

      The ER waiting room is quiet but for the hypnotic tick of an old plastic clock hanging on the wall. A whiff of latex and disinfectant hangs in the air.

      Bobby’s uniform is tidy, his blue button-down shirt and navy-colored slacks pressed immaculately. His hair is short, his face freshly shaven. A lifetime ago Bobby and I went to high school together, but he stuck around and I left Aurora days after graduation. We haven’t spoken since I’ve been back in town.

      “I can’t believe this,” I say and struggle to line up the events. My clothes are wet; so is my hair.

      Bobby smiles at me. “You’ve been back in town for what … a few months, and I see you’re still the same old troublemaker.”

      For a split second I’m a teenager again, remembering how we’d roam through town, wandering around in abandoned buildings, acquiring cuts and bruises and sprained ankles along the way. “Seems that way, doesn’t it?” I finally say.

      “I waved at you the other day, at the gas station. I was going to follow you and pull you over.”

      I feel some sort of way about his words. That’s how we met a long time ago; his father pulled my mother over by the side of the road. Bobby sat in the backseat of his father’s cruiser, I was in the backseat of my mother’s car, and we stared at each other.

      I ignored Bobby at the gas station because of the way I’d left fifteen years ago. That and the fact that my life is nothing to be proud of. I have been dreading having to make small talk with him, catch up, swap stories about our lives.

      “How long has it been?” Bobby asks. “Just about fifteen years?” he says as if he’s kept track of time.

      I do the math. I arrived in Aurora just shy of thirteen. I did one year in middle school, then went to high school. In high school, I saved every dollar I made; I bagged groceries, worked at the car wash, even put away my allowance. There wasn’t any money for college, and I didn’t have any motivation or big dreams short of getting out of town—but Bobby was going through something then. His mother had cancer, had been well for years, but then it returned. There seemed to be something else; he was preoccupied with things I knew nothing about, things he was reluctant to share. I left Aurora at eighteen. Fifteen years exactly.

      The last time we spoke was the night I left.

      “If you think about it, why not go to Colorado, or California? If we’re going to leave, might as well go far,” I had said but he had remained quiet. We had talked about leaving Aurora for years, leaving Texas altogether; we had imagined it many times.

      “You want to hear what I think?” he finally asked.

      I sensed sarcasm. He started talking about having a different perspective and maybe I should be thankful for what I have instead of griping about what I don’t. That night, he made his way through a six-pack in no time, and by the time he was on the last beer, he didn’t make a whole lot of sense. He went on and on about choices some people have that others don’t. Had we not talked about leaving Aurora since tenth grade, had we not imagined what life could be like somewhere else?—but suddenly there was no more I vent and you listen. He was judgmental and mean and not what I needed that night. We parted ways then; he was drunk and I was angry.

      At home, I saw my mother hadn’t lifted a finger to fill out the paperwork I needed to apply for financial aid. I threw my clothes and a few books in a duffel bag, waited for the sun to come up. When I heard my mother rummage around in the kitchen, I went downstairs.

      “You still haven’t filled out the forms.” It came out sharply, just as I intended. All my life there had been missing paperwork and incomplete forms. “Are we still doing this? We still don’t have the right paperwork?” I asked. There were the missing papers when I was a kid—what I now know to be shot records and residency documentation—and school was the mother of all wounds. She would never let me leave, wanted to attach an eternal tether to me, to make sure I’d never be more than she was.

      We argued. I told her I’d leave. She said she’d pay for a community college close by. I told her I wanted to go out of state. We argued some more. Eventually she turned silent and ignored me.

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