It’s like she slapped me clean across the face. Hot tears press against the back of my eyes. “Go home? Home to what, exactly? Go back to being the Girl Whose Mom Died in that small, gossipy town?” Carolina had been our dream. She stares back, and I can see it in her eyes: sometime in the last twenty-four hours she’d already imagined doing this alone. Without me. The wall inside me grows. I let it stretch so tall and wide that I can’t see its top or its edges. The barrier slides into place so completely that all of the muscles in my face go still at once. I envision a surface that is flat and
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