A/N: This chapter contains themes that might be upsetting for more sensitive readers. If you're concerned and would like to know what those themes are, you can PM me.
She sits on the opposite side of my kitchen counter, cradling a cup of tea. Her hair hangs loose, behind her left shoulder and in front of the right. There are bags under her good eye. She woke up late - the hearing wasn't until 11 A.M. - but I can imagine that the hours before dawn were mostly restless. Now, with our dinner set aside, she looks like only a bed would bring her solace, but she has insisted that she will stay up and tell me the darkest bedtime story I'll hear for a while - the one about her long-term relationship with an abusive man.
Jason has been sentenced to six months in prison. That isn't long enough, but it's something, and according to Lindsay, it's far more justice than what often comes from these cases. When he gets out, contacting Mabel in any way will be seen as violating his parole, which will make him susceptible to further jail time. While this news has settled my stomach, Mabel looks more depressed than I've ever seen her, because she is still very much in love with her imprisoned fiancé. And although I'd like to reach across the counter, grab her by the shoulders, and tell her that she should not love a man like Jason, I'm smart enough to recognize that I need to treat this situation more delicately.
My heart thuds along faster with every silent second that passes, because the longer it takes her to collect her thoughts, the more intricate the story becomes. I patiently draw circles with my finger on the countertop, until finally she looks up from her tea and speaks.
"I guess I'll start with the time that you came to visit us in Piedmont. At New Years'."
And then my heart's threatening to rocket out of my chest, because apparently we're going to talk about that, too - the kissing, and the empty promises, and the betrayal.
In the winter that Mabel was sixteen, she drove me to a bus station in San Francisco and kissed me in her car, and told me that in the coming summer we could try taking our friendship to another level. We could go on a date. And at the time, that was what she wanted. Or what she thought she wanted. Or what she didn't want, but what she wanted for my benefit. She simply didn't know.
In the same vein, Mabel didn't have a clue about her sexuality. She didn't know if she preferred beards or boobs or skirts or biceps or vaginas or penis-
I laugh against my will.
Mabel's eyes snap up. "What?"
"Sorry. Just- you don't need to give me the full anatomy of men and women."
Her expression lightens up for the first time today, with a smirk. "Are you twelve years old?"
"No. I'm sorry. Please carry on."
"Are you going to let me tell the story my way, or are you going to keep interrupting?"
"I'm going to let you tell it your way."
"Good. Okay then."
So, anyway, Mabel was confused about her sexuality.
When school started back up in January, Mabel became so bogged down with her responsibilities and commitments that for the most part, she was distracted from thinking about me. She had been promoted to captain of the cheerleading squad at the start of junior year, she had volunteered as an organizer for the senior prom in May, and she was tutoring multiple freshmen in English out of her bedroom - the knowledge slut, her friends called her - all because she had a hard time saying no to helping people.
And on top of all that, and the daydreams of marrying a guy fighting for her attention against the daydreams of touching, kissing, and holding hands with girls, Mabel was well aware that the gorgeous charmer who often served her at her local coffee shop was paying Mabel a lot more attention than his other customers.
It had started out as a crush. She would always sit on the side of the booth that gave her a view of the counter, and because she was always in the company of the same four friends, and the conversation often landed on the same few topics, she would find her attention drifting to the young man serving coffee, with the thick beard and the slick gelled hair. It was a crush, nothing more, and outside of the man's appearance in a couple of Mabel's dreams, she didn't think about him very much.
Until Elise told Mabel that the guy was checking her out. It was just the two of them - they were working on an assignment together and had stopped at the coffee shop after school.
"What?"
"He keeps looking at you."
He was somewhere behind Mabel. "What's he doing?"
"He's cleaning tables, but he keeps looking at you."
Naturally, Mabel started panicking. "Do I have something in my hair?"
"No."
"Maybe he's checking you out."
"No," she laughed. "Definitely you."
"Shit. How old do you think he is?"
Elise shrugged. "Thirty?"
Mabel slapped her hand. "Be serious."
"Twenty, at most."
He was twenty-one. She found that out by hunting him down on the coffee shop's website and typing his name into Facebook. It was still a crush, but now there was something bubbling in her stomach every time she approached the counter for her mocha latte and he was there, because he always looked at Mabel like her coming in was the highlight of his day, and she had watched him serving people for long enough to know that that wasn't his typical demeanor.
And then one day in February, Mabel was grocery shopping after dark because the Pines had run out of milk. She put a tub of instant coffee in her basket and the familiar voice said from behind her, "I didn't peg you as the type to drink crappy coffee."
Mabel spun around with her mouth hanging open. "That's for my dad," she blurted out. "I don't drink it."
At the terror in her voice, the boy's grin began to fade. "Mabel, I was messing with you."
She gazed up at him, wonderstruck. "How do you know my name?"
"I write it on your cup every time you come in."
"Oh," she laughed. "Yeah."
"How are you, anyway?"
"I'm good, I'm good. How are you?"
"Yeah, I'm okay. I, uh-" he stepped closer, like he was about to disclose all of his secrets - "I was hoping to run into you outside of work, actually. I don't usually do this, but... do you have a boyfriend?"
Mabel's brain was screaming. "No."
"Could I get your number? I know we haven't really talked much, but... well, I'd like to."
"And in my head I was like, yes, I'll give you everything you've ever wanted, you beautiful bastard!" Mabel looks up. "Sorry. Too much?"
"A little," I say, wincing.
"Okay." She takes a long sip of her tea, then holds my gaze for a few seconds. "I gave him my number, he told me his name. Then... it gets a little more depressing from there."
As soon as he turned away, and Mabel was warped out of her fantasy land and back to the banality of the grocery store, basket dangling from her hand, she felt awful. She realized that her and I were not dating, and may never be, but after swapping spit at that New Years' party, handing out her number to somebody else still felt dirty. Like cheating. And that night when I was texting her, and she was receiving texts from Jason at the same time, she felt sick to her stomach.
I, of course, was not informed of the new man in Mabel's life, but she came very close to telling me on numerous occasions, sometimes drafting a wall of text on the notepad on her phone, and never sending it to me. If I'd known about Jason, I probably would have sprinkled my texts with less heart emojis and blatant attempts at flirting, that's all.
They went on their first date a week after the grocery store encounter. Mabel put her hair up in a bun, wore her snazziest top, and told her family that her friend was throwing a small party - but more of a fancy gathering, without alcohol, obviously, and the kind of party that Dipper wouldn't be invited to, not that she thought Dipper was a loser or anything, just that it was a no-boys-allowed kind of party, yeah, that was it, and while some parents might have grown concerned at their daughter hyperventilating out an explanation for where she was going, Mabel's mom and dad didn't bat an eyelid.
She met Jason at an Italian restaurant on the outskirts of town, and although she was nervous at first, Jason's tranquility was contagious, so she slipped into the easiest conversation she had ever had.
It came in waves, after that - the guilt that she was hiding a boyfriend from her bestie, followed by the tremors of excitement that surged through her whenever she thought about him. Some days she would walk into school as bright as the sun, and other days she would be stalked by a fat rain cloud.
Their relationship moved fast, as did everything in the life of Mabel Pines. Within a week they were making out in the back of his car, and within a month they were having sex in his apartment. One day she dropped into his coffee shop after school by herself, murmured dirty things to him over the counter, trying to make him blush, and then when he brought her coffee over, there was a beautiful silver chain wrapped around it and a heart-shaped locket. She was smitten.
And all the while, she didn't tell a soul. Mabel was well acquainted with all of her parents' predispositions, and dating a boy five years her senior was sure to be a huge no-no in their books. She couldn't tell her friends, because they couldn't have kept a secret if their lives depended on it, and she couldn't tell Dipper, because he would have started turning up at the coffee shop on an incognito mission to find out everything about Jason, and conclude that Jason wasn't fit to date his sister.
It was early in May that Jason hurt her for the first time.
He was two hours late to meet her at her house, and he wasn't answering his phone. With her parents at one of those middle-aged-people parties where they sip wine and mentally compile a list of things to bitch about on the drive home, and Dipper at a friend's, this was literally the first time her house had ever been free for a rendezvous with her secret boyfriend.
Jason was a technophile, and he had enabled a setting on his top-of-the-line phone that permanently tracked his location and broadcast it to anybody that knew his email address. It sounded absurd to Mabel, but on this one occasion, she felt no shame in opening up Google Maps and pinpointing the location of her boyfriend.
She found him outside a burger restaurant, on a picnic table that had been set up adjacent to a row of dumpsters. He was with his three friends - and roommates - and they were stacking empty beer cans as high as they could. Children with building blocks. Mabel folded her arms and watched, incredulous, but none of the boys noticed her. She had to walk up behind Jason and tap him on the shoulder.
He swiveled around, totally off-kilter, and frowned down at her. "Hey. What are you doing here?"
"What am I-" Mabel grabbed his hand and dragged him away from the table, even if Jason's friends were too preoccupied to eavesdrop. "You were supposed to meet me tonight. At my place? I've been calling you for the last three hours."
"Oh, I'm sorry babe," he said, with such a poor attempt at remorse that Mabel was thrown off guard. It was like a drop of alcohol had transformed his personality, in an utterly unflattering way. "I totally forgot."
"You forgot? That's it? Jay, I've been reminding you every day for the past week. I'm leaving in two weeks, I'm gonna be away for the whole summer. This was the only chance I was gonna get to show you around my house, in like, forever. Does that not mean anything to you?"
"Well we can go now. I mean, if you're okay with the guys hanging out too."
Her mouth dropped open. "The guys? Obviously not! I don't give a shit about 'the guys.'"
"Hey, come on," he said, as if Mabel was the one in the wrong here. "Those are my friends."
"I'm aware of that. They are also the people you live with - are you telling me you honestly can't go an hour without them by your side? Because that's pretty pathetic."
"Keep your voice down, would you? They're staring."
"Oh, I'm sorry," Mabel shouted. "I don't want your stoner friends wandering around my house making the whole place smell like a weed farm."
In one motion, Jason turned his back on the table, obscuring Mabel from his friends' view, and grabbed her arm, right below the shoulder. That alone set off alarm bells in Mabel's head, but when Jason began to clamp down with his fingernails through her sweater, she surveyed her surroundings for any sign of help. But she didn't trust any of Jason's friends, and the restaurant they were outside of sat on the corner of a desolate intersection.
"Let go," Mabel said, trying to keep her voice as still as she could.
"You're acting like a fucking lunatic."
"Jason, you're hurting me."
"Are you going to calm down?"
"Yes," she squealed, and when she felt his grip loosen she yanked her arm back, immediately covering it with her other hand. She looked up at Jason but she couldn't hold his stare for long - there was madness in his eyes. Barbarity.
The wind picked up, and for a moment the only sound in the vacant parking lot was the rustling of palm trees and Jason's friends trading undecipherable banter. Mabel hugged her arms to her chest, the air feeling thirty degrees colder all of a sudden.
"Do you need me to drive you home?"
"I'll walk," she said to the ground.
"Alright." He stalked back to his friends.
Somehow, she suppressed the tears all the way back to her front door. In the safety of her bathroom, she took off her sweater and her t-shirt and held her shoulder close to the mirror. The skin was pink, and half-dried drops of blood surrounded the three piercings his fingernails had made. She touched each of them and flinched; they'd be sore for a couple of days.
She turned the lights off in her bedroom and lay flat on her back in bed, so that her family wouldn't bother her when they got home. She didn't move for hours, just stared at the ceiling with her mind running wild, never deciding on one coherent train of thought. What was she supposed to do now? She didn't want to believe that the fairytale she had been living in for the last few months had been nothing more than a facade.
So she tried not to believe it. The next morning when Jason texted her a string of apologies, she accepted them. When she met up with him later that week, he held her for a long time and apologized again, and Mabel melted into him in disbelief that somebody so soft could ever be so abrasive.
But ever since that bruise on her arm, she had found her thoughts often fluttering back to me.
"Me?" I'm finding it hard to keep my mouth shut after every sentence.
"Yes. You."
"Why?"
"I kept thinking that I'd made a huge mistake. I was so excited to date Jason, and when we started dating I was convinced he was the perfect guy. And I kept thinking that I'd had the chance to date you instead, and I hadn't taken it. And now I was on my way up to Gravity Falls and you were gonna be there waiting for me, and I hadn't even told you I was seeing someone else."
"But you didn't want to date me," I say, shaking my head.
"I did. I wouldn't have told you that outside the bus station if it wasn't true."
"No, hold on, that doesn't make sense. If you wanted to date me, you wouldn't have hidden away from me as soon as you arrived. You remember the day that you drove up here? We hung out in the Shack for all of twenty minutes before you locked yourself in the attic and went to bed."
"Because I didn't know how to tell you. I knew that you were still expecting us to... you know, be together, and I didn't know how to tell you that I'd met somebody else, and that in doing so I had forgotten all about you. My best friend. Every day it got harder and harder to tell you until I couldn't even imagine doing it anymore."
I take a breath and rub my forehead. If she were to repeat that a hundred times over, it might start to make sense. "Sorry," I say, placing my hand on her wrist. "I know this isn't what the story should be about."
"No, it is, though." She turns her wrist over and takes my palm with hers. "If I had just told you about him, you would have helped me. I mean, if I had told anyone they could have helped, but you literally wouldn't have let me go back to him. And then... well then I wouldn't be sitting here with a black eye. I wouldn't have had to hide my bruises for years."
She's right. I would have been upset about her having a secret boyfriend, but after a few weeks of crying were out of the way, I wouldn't have let her stay with him. I would have assured that she broke up with him while I was in earshot.
"Pacifica," Mabel says, swallowing hard. "That summer, I was messed up. I was so awful to you, and to Jason. I mean, I don't care that I was awful to him, that doesn't matter anymore."
Her hand escapes mine, and when I finally tear my eyes from hers, I see her slip the silver ring off her finger. I hadn't expected her to still be wearing it. She slides it across the counter and leaves it next to our dinner plates, which is a remarkable display of composure. I can only imagine what I'd do with it in her situation. Toss it in the trash, toss it out the window, stomp on it a few times, try and break it with my teeth, lose all of my teeth, go to the dentist, ask the dentist to break it with their drill.
"I'm not trying to make up excuses for what I did to you, because there aren't any. But that night at the lake house, when I followed you up to your room, I think that was my cry for help. That was me trying to escape him. While we fell asleep I had this vision that I'd wake up in the morning beside you and we'd be together and everything would be fine. Then when I actually woke up I realized that I'd cheated on my boyfriend. And I never, ever thought I'd cheat on anybody, but I had. I'd sacrificed my morals. And at the time, the only way I could think to make up for that was to run back to California and be with him."
I know - I know I shouldn't be feeling sorry for myself opposite a girl who just escaped an abusive relationship. But I can't help myself. I've waited so long for an explanation and now that I'm hearing it, it's simply unsatisfying. Maybe I never needed an explanation, or an apology. Maybe some things do just hurt forever, a little pinprick every time they pop into your head.
"Is any of this making sense?"
I shrug. "Maybe in a few days. Once I've thought it over properly."
She looks down at her hands, tears glazing her eyes.
I reach over the counter and take both of her hands this time. "I'm not mad at you, which I think is a good sign."
I smile when she smiles, which is also a good sign. I think. But then the final memory I have of Mabel from that summer flashes through my mind, and my eyes widen. "Oh my god. I slapped you. I hit you, after Jason already hurt you, I..."
"It's okay," she says, leaning forward. "It's okay. I was never scared of you, or anything, like I was of him."
"I'm so sorry."
"It's fine, really. I deserved a lot more than a slap in the face."
My head shakes back and forth. "You didn't."
"I'm not saying I deserved being beaten around for years. I mean... it doesn't matter, anyway. I was never angry at you about that, okay?"
"Okay," I say, but as I study the bruise on her face I'm questioning what makes me any better than her ex-fiancé.
Mabel doesn't have a lot to say about the years that followed.
Her relationship with Jason was made up of patterns. Their spells of happiness lasted, on average, two months at a time. During those spells, they were models of true love. In public, they were the gushy, touchy-feely couple that all of their friends envied, and further down the line, when their families were introduced to the budding romance, they were so naturally sweet around each other that any concerns about their age gap were quashed within a month. And then in the privacy of Jason's apartment, he would do something to rub her the wrong way, and Mabel would mutter something under her breath, and he would see no other course of retaliation than to push her into a wall. The same pattern, over and over, like clockwork. The only difference was that each time, her determination to draw the line and dump his ass faded just a little further into the distance. She began to accept the reality she had chosen. After all, she had been told all her life that relationships were complicated, and this was exactly that - a complication.
She took most of the beatings on her upper arms and shoulders. Sometimes on her back. Cheerleading became difficult as her upper body strength and peppy attitude were gradually sapped away from her. She wore a white t-shirt under her other clothes at all times, so in the locker room after practice she wouldn't have to reveal her shame to the squad - all those girls that could have helped her.
Things only got worse when college started. Her admittance to the California State University in Sacramento opened up what her parents called a perfect opportunity, and what she considered a perfect storm - she could move in with her boyfriend, who was now living alone and working in Sacramento himself. And that meant she would be seeing less of the Jason who floated around Piedmont like an angel, keeping up appearances, and more of the Jason who occasionally saw her as his personal punching bag. In the end, she applied for a dorm room anyway, claiming that it would be more convenient for her - true, but she also applied for a dorm room so that there would be somewhere to escape to.
The contrast drove Mabel insane. One night they were out late at a frat party, and when Mabel dragged Jason away from the newest batch of douchebags he had taken under his wing, because she had an early class in the morning, he was so irritable that he waited until they were back in his car, then he backhanded her cheek. Flummoxed, Mabel jumped out of the driver's seat and started running down the road, yelling over her shoulder for him to drive himself home, but Jason was chasing her along the residential street, stammering out apologies with his voice breaking. Eventually Mabel stopped and keeled over, giving in to her own tears, and Jason was there, and she fell into his arms because she was alone in a new city. She had nobody else to run to. "Not the face," she pleaded, into his chest, while he stroked her hair. "You can't hit me in the face. Not where people can see."
And he didn't.
Until a couple of nights ago, at least.
She got home from her shift at the diner. She took off her heels and set them neatly among her other shoes. She walked into the living room, kissed her fiancé on the cheek, and sat next to him in the armchair without thinking much of his unresponsiveness.
After a minute, barely audible over the TV, he said, "What's that girl's name that works at the diner?"
"Pacifica?"
Jason nodded. "Thought so. Quite an uncommon first name, isn't it?"
Mabel fidgeted on the chair until she was facing him, wondering where this was going. She wasn't anxious at all, until Jason reached for the remote and switched off the TV. "Mhmm," Mabel hummed. "Kinda like Mabel."
"Right. Tell me," he said, frowning at her, "is there anything I should know about Pacifica?"
"Like what?"
He shrugged. "Well, I didn't know she was gay."
"Yeah. Why does that matter?"
A few heartbeats of silence. "I didn't know you were gay either."
Mabel shook her head, tried to grin. "I'm not."
"Really? Not even a little bit?"
"Jason, what are you talking about? I've been with you for four years. I only ever dated boys before that. Where is this coming from?"
Jason stood up, took a swig of his beer, and began pacing the room. Mabel swallowed. This was always how it started.
"I was at a bar earlier tonight," he said, pausing to dig his toes into the carpet. "It's out in the woods. Place called the Factory. You ever been there?"
"A couple of times."
"I got to talking to this guy there. His name was Hassan. Started telling him what I was doing in town, told him about you, and he said he remembered you."
Mabel furrowed her brows as she tried to put a face to the name. She came up blank.
"Do you remember him?"
"No," she said. "Honestly, I don't."
"He was at your seventeenth birthday party."
"That's possible. It was a surprise party, some of the people there I recognized from the Factory, but I didn't know them by name. Wendy and Pacifica probably invited them to boost the numbers."
Jason nodded, seemingly accepting the answer.
Mabel felt a sudden surge of anger, defiance against being interrogated like this, in her uncle's home. "What the hell does this 'Hassan' have to do with anything, anyway?"
"He also knew Pacifica. They went to high school together. He told me that you and Pacifica were the best of friends."
"We were."
"Best friends? Weird, then, that you never mentioned her until a few weeks ago. After you'd already introduced us. And even weirder that she served us at the diner before then and she barely acknowledged your existence."
Mabel's throat constricted, because she suddenly had full clarity as to where this was going. Jason knew about that one night up at the lake house. She wasn't sure how that was possible, but she was going to have to get used to it, and fast. "We didn't talk for a long time. After I stopped spending my vacations here we fell out of touch."
"Mhmm. And why was that?"
She shook her head and held on to hope. "No real reason."
"Hassan was under the impression that you two were a little more than besties."
Again, a streak of fury. She stood up. "Well I don't even know who Hassan is! Are you going to trust your fiancée or a random stranger you met at a bar?"
"No, see, that's the thing. Maybe I wouldn't have listened to him, maybe I would have told him to shut the fuck up and stop spreading shit about my future wife, but it wasn't just my chat with Hassan, was it? It's the fact that you've been disappearing with this girl for hours at a time during the night, it's the fact that you waited until now to tell me you were 'best friends,' and, here's the best one - I had to search the whole town the other morning only to find out you'd slept in her apartment all night, without telling me shit."
Mabel knew, at this point, that there would be no positive outcomes to this argument. Her fiancé had traversed too far down the spiral of rage. She could, at least, begin to tell the truth now, and minimize the damage. "We kissed," she said, her eyes cast to the floor. "Once."
Jason scratched his beard. "When?"
She swallowed. "I don't remember."
The punch came so fast that she had no time to raise her arms. No chance to soften the blow. Crack, his right hand, into her right eye. Her ears rung and her vision blurred as she staggered backwards to the wall and slid onto her rear. She channeled every ounce of her dwindling strength to lift her hands to her face, to block any subsequent punches, but through her fingers she saw Jason pacing back and forth, consumed by the monster inside of him.
Then he was crouching in front of Mabel, and she hung her head, hot tears stinging the skin around her beaten eye. "Come on, Mabel, look at me," he said, like he was trying to get a kid to look at the camera. "Tell me it was just one kiss."
She wouldn't look at him. "It was more than once."
"When?" he pressed, showing no remorse for her feebleness. "When did it happen, Mabel?"
"I told you, it was more than one time. I can't remember all of it."
"When was the last time?"
"My seventeenth birthday."
He was silent for a moment. Mabel couldn't see him, so she tensed her body, prayed to god that one punch was all the fight he had in him for tonight.
When his voice did come, only inches away from her balled-up form on the floor, it was smaller. Like Mabel had broken a part of him. "Six months after we got together," he said.
She heard him stand and walk elsewhere in the room. She would not look up. Half of her fought to remain strong, knowing that one hiccup in her fidelity was not deserving of the years of bruises she had endured. The other half of her wanted to cry into her partner's arms and tell him how sorry she was, that she never meant for him to find out, that she never wanted to hurt him like that. That half of her would come to life if she looked up and saw him visibly working through the turmoil.
So she didn't look up.
The tears fell to her knees, soaked into her jeans. She listened to faint footsteps on the carpet for a few minutes, then to silence for another few. There was no way of knowing how long she had been trembling on the floor until the clock on the wall began to chime, startling her out of her protective stance. Eleven o'clock. Though she had trouble looking through her right eye, she slowly scanned the room and saw that Jason had gone. His beer bottle lay on the table beside the armchair, empty. Mabel waited for the last of the clock's chimes to fully stop rattling in her ear, and then clawed at the wall to help her stand up.
No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't keep her legs from shaking, but she didn't let it stop her from tiptoeing through the house's entryway and out the front door, across the gravel driveway, and into the back seat of her car. She didn't think to drive. She didn't think she'd be able to. She didn't think much at all.
The shock kept her awake for several hours. An owl kept her awake for another. But in the blink of her eyes, it was morning. She pushed herself up from where she had sprawled across the back seat, and squinted against the aggressive daylight. That in itself sent pangs of pain through her eye, and then she made the mistake of touching it with her fingers. Even keeping it closed hurt. She caught a glimpse of it in the rear-view mirror and gasped at the swelling, and almost, almost brought a fresh onslaught of tears, but she stopped herself in case that was going to hurt the amorphous red blob even more.
She checked the time on her phone. 9:09 A.M.
She looked out the window at the Mystery Shack. Then she turned her head the other way, and looked out at the road.
The Shack. The road. The Shack. The road.
Jason would be in the Shack. If this was anything like their regular altercations, she could walk back inside, and Jason would be awake within the hour, and he would come downstairs and they'd hug and they'd kiss and he'd make her an extra-big breakfast with all of her favorite delicacies under the sun. Just his way of saying sorry.
And then the road led to the rest of the world, a world full of people that weren't at all like Jason. People that wouldn't beat her. People that she could learn to love just as much as she loved her Jason. People that could help. One of those people would be at the diner, right now.
Mabel dug around in the center console for a hair tie and smoothed her wily locks back in a ponytail. She straightened out her work uniform with her hands. Clutching onto the door handle, she took one last look at the Mystery Shack. She could go inside for her car keys, but stepping over the threshold of the door might have been all it took to fall back into his arms, and that wasn't what she wanted. She hopped out into the warm morning air. She straightened her back, squared her shoulders, and took her first steps along the road to the rest of the world.