Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 84533 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 423(@200wpm)___ 338(@250wpm)___ 282(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84533 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 423(@200wpm)___ 338(@250wpm)___ 282(@300wpm)
The blood had dried into the wooden floors. My mother’s blood. My blood.
But no one was there either.
I was completely alone.
Two days later the police came while I was gardening and took me back to the city. I ran away again, and again and again, every time going home. I didn’t want to be anywhere else. I didn’t understand what Chosen had done, why everyone had abandoned our world and the good work we were supposed to be doing for the Lord, but I didn’t know how to be anywhere else either.
And when I turned eighteen, it was a lawyer who came, looking for me.
Mother had been working with him before she died. She was going to leave The Enlightened. Leave Chosen and take me with her. It was wrong, what she had done. This was our home. Chosen knew the right way. He had been handpicked by the Lord to lead us to Righteousness. We were supposed to follow him. We didn’t use banks and speak to lawyers.
But she had done some of those things, hadn’t she?
She’d come from a wealthy family, the lawyer said. Had inherited money when her parents died. I knew nothing about that, knew nothing about people or family before Mother met Chosen and moved onto the mountain.
But the land had been purchased by my mother, the lawyer told me, and she’d been supporting our community before she was killed, and she’d left a will.
The land was mine.
The money too, not that I cared about that.
All I knew was, no one would force me out of my home again.
CHAPTER ONE
Cyrus
How could I not fall in love with a town named Tranquility? That’s what I told myself when I sat down and looked at a map of Colorado, trying to figure out where in the fuck I could disappear to. Leaving the state was always a possibility, but I wasn’t sure I could even do that—not alone, at least, and not forever.
It didn’t make sense, when you thought about it. I wanted to withdraw, to fade into nothingness, but I also couldn’t find it in myself to leave the state I’d been born in. The one I’d shared with my mom. Where we had stayed up all night, giggling and talking like the best of friends, eating popcorn with extra butter and Lawry’s Seasoned Salt on top. The state where she told me she would always love me no matter what, and if there was ever anything I needed to share with her, that her love for me would never change, which had given me the courage to come out to her at twelve years old.
But it was also the place where I would come home some days and see her passed out on the couch with a needle in her arm. Where I held her while she cried and told me she was sorry she fell off the wagon again, promised she would kick the drugs and be the mom I deserved. And she tried. She always tried, but it never worked, and one day when I found her, I couldn’t wake her up.
She had never woken up again.
And no matter how much I’d sworn I would never do the same thing, depression and loneliness had led me straight to drugs’ doors, where I’d busted the thing down and had taken my fill…until I’d woken up from my OD, lucky I wasn’t dead too…
And after a year sober from drugs, sex, and an ex-boyfriend who liked to provide me with both, and liked me to provide his friends with both, I’d landed in Tranquility.
But, unsurprisingly, there had been no magic fix. After a few weeks there, I still felt as alone on the inside as I always had. People were friendly enough. They waved on the streets, and held the door open for you, and all those things you heard about small towns, but at twenty-five, I was starting to believe I was the problem. That something inside me was broken and maybe it would never be fixed.
Like I did most things, I buried that inside me and got into the shower to get ready to go to work at the hardware store.
On the way, I stopped by the local coffeehouse to get my iced, extra-shot latte. I might have given up cocaine and heroin, but I could never give up caffeine. A guy was allowed to have one vice, right?
“Hey, Cyrus. How are you this morning?” Melody, the barista, asked. I heard she was the owner too, but she worked the counter every time I was there. She was kind, really kind. Probably too kind for me, and though it seemed like she might be trying to be my friend, I was hesitant. I had a knack for hurting people, and for getting hurt myself.