He Thought I Was Being Good, I Was Just Getting Ready to leave Chapter 15

He Thought I Was Being Good, I Was Just Getting Ready to leave Chapter 15

The next day, I heard my mom chased Harrison out of the diner with a broom and told him never to come back.

I didn’t pay much attention. I was looking at my computer screen. An acceptance letter.

The truth was, I’d been planning this even before I left Silver Creek.

My mom didn’t need money. And with everything I’d saved over the years, I could probably never work another day in my life and still be fine.

The reason I kept working all those years wasn’t for the money. It was to keep myself grounded.

When I graduated college, Harrison suggested I shouldn’t bother getting a job.

“How much can you even make in a day? If you want something, just say so. Why do you need to work for someone else? Your daily allowance would be more than your monthly paycheck.”

He said it like it was a conversation, but his tone wasn’t soft.

He wanted someone who’d be available whenever he called. Someone whose whole world revolved around him. If I couldn’t do that, there were plenty of other options.

But for some reason, I was determined to have my own career.

So I kissed him and said softly, “Please? Let me try.”

He couldn’t resist when I begged like that. He let me kiss him a few times before he finally agreed.

My first monthly paycheck was nine hundred dollars. I saved up for almost a year and bought him a pair of cufflinks.

When he held them, I stood on my tiptoes, one hand behind my back, and pointed at the box with the other.

“I bought these with my own money. Not a single cent of yours.”

He’d probably never used anything so cheap. He couldn’t even fake a compliment.

He just smiled thinly. “Oh, so sweet of you to buy me a present.”

I shook the memory away and pulled out my phone, typing into a social media platform: [Is it too late for a twenty-six-year-old to study abroad?]

The page filled with ads and consulting agencies. I clicked on a forum post. The top comment said:

[I’m in school right now overseas. What if I told you my classmate is seventy-five?]

[There’s no better time than today.]

I smiled to myself. I’d actually made this decision a long time ago, earlier than anyone else.

All this searching online, it was just me trying to convince myself.

A few days later, my mom said Harrison had gone back to Silver Creek for something.

I told her I was planning to study abroad. She was immediately against it.

“Have you lost your mind? You’re twenty-six. Almost twenty-seven. And you want to go back to school?”

“The only thing you should be thinking about right now is getting married. This is the prime age for marriage. And you want to study? You’ve read too many books. Your brain is fried.”

I knew she wouldn’t accept it right away. But the moment she sent me to college in Silver Creek, she should have realized something.

My world was always going to be bigger than she wanted it to be.

Society is so hard on age.

You graduate and they expect you to have a perfect job. You start a job and they expect you to find a perfect partner. You get married and they expect you to have two kids right away.

Everyone is conditioned to think life has to follow a strict timeline.

My mom was one of the worst. She laid down an ultimatum. “If you go abroad, don’t bother coming back. I’ll pretend I never had a daughter.”

She had controlled me my whole life. Now that I was slipping out of her grip, she was panicking.

I didn’t change my mind. For the rest of that time, my mom and I didn’t speak a single word to each other.

The day I left, I wasn’t going to say goodbye. I just wanted to quietly grab my suitcase and walk out the door.

But when I looked down, my bag had been stuffed full of things. And tucked inside was a thick stack of cash, wrapped tightly with rubber bands.

The nearest bank that exchanged foreign currency was eight miles away.

I held that stack of money in my hands and looked at my mom’s closed bedroom door. My eyes burned.

At twenty-six, the plane climbed into the clouds.

At thirty thousand feet, my life began again.