Written in 56 minutes.

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Sunday, October 15, 2000

Hardy House: Living Room

“Oh, this is a lovely surprise.” Audrey was beaming when she saw her granddaughter step inside the front door, pause on the landing, but the brightness of her smile dimmed when she saw Elizabeth’s expression, the way her eyes refused to lift in greeting, the way Elizabeth held her bag, almost protectively in front of herself. “What’s happened?”

“I—” Elizabeth glanced up, then looked away quickly. “I just wanted to know if I could…I don’t know. Sit in my old room for a while. I just—” She stepped back when Audrey came forward. “I just need somewhere to sit. Where no one can find me.”

“All right.” Audrey folded her arms, worried she might rush forward to hug Elizabeth and send her granddaughter fleeing. “Well, your room is just as you left it. And my darling, you know that you never have to ask, don’t you? It’s your room. And this will always be your home.”

“Thank you. I’ll—I’ll just go up then.”

She practically fled up the stairs, and Audrey remained rooted to the floor until she heard the soft click of the door upstairs. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Elizabeth look that way, sound that way —

Not for months. Years.

What had happened?

Luke’s: Office

Luke sifted through the ledger, grimacing when another stack of invoices and papers cascaded from the pages. He hated doing quarterly taxes — hated even more that he didn’t trust anyone to handle his money. Certainly not anyone working for him right now.

“Luke.”

“I’m busy,” Luke grumbled, looking through the mess from the remains of his cigar. “Come back next year.”

“Luke.”

He lifted his gaze to the door, frowning when he saw his bar manager. “Claude, can’t you do anything?”

“Your kid came in, grabbed a bottle of Hennessy and went to sit at a table in the corner. Figured you’d want to know.”

“Hennessy?” Luke repeated. “Christ. A whole damn bottle? You didn’t want to give him any the rotgut that costs us pennies?” He didn’t wait for Claude’s answer, hurrying out to the main room of the bar. There were only a handful of patrons this time of day, most had come to listen to that night’s band warm-up and run their set. A few had no where else to be —

And there was his boy, slouched over one of the tables in the back corners, table that Sonny or his ilk usually commandeered when they came to the club because you could get a good look at the rest of the bar — and the entrance.

“I didn’t ask you to sit down,” Lucky muttered when Luke pulled out the chair across from him. He took another long pull from the bottle, scowling when Luke tugged it from his grasp. “Hey—”

“You wanna get drunk in solitude, you go somewhere people don’t know you, but I’m guessing you came here because you can’t afford this on your own dime, so you decided to rip me off.”

Lucky pressed his lips together, sat back with a sullen expression. “You gonna charge me? Since when did you turn into a penny pincher?”

“Since I saw my tax bill.” Luke paused. “Drinking in the middle of the day? Only one thing makes a guy crazy enough to do that, and it’s a girl. You and Liz have a fight?”

“A fight?” Lucky repeated. “No. Maybe. I don’t know. We were talking and then it took a nose dive, and all of sudden, she’s running away from me, and crying—” he stopped, shook his head. “Yeah, okay, we had a fight.”

Luke got up, put the brandy bottle back where it belonged, then poured two tumblers of a cheaper, but decent whiskey. He returned to the table, set one in front of Lucky. “It happens that way. You say something, and she hears something something else. Before you know it, you’re yelling. I’m sure it’s not that bad.”

“Well, Elizabeth thinks I only fell in love with because she got raped, so—” Lucky tossed back the entire content of the tumbler, grimacing as he swallowed the liquor. “You tell me.”

Luke tipped his eyed, squinted. “That’s a pretty big left turn, Cowboy. How’d she get on that road in the first place? I thought she put that away a long time.”

“Yeah, because that’s the kind of thing that you just turn the page on, right, Dad?” Lucky demanded his eyes hot. Reminiscent of the angry teenager he’d been. “File away in a folder, and forget.”

Luke counted to ten, then took a deep breath. “I just meant that I thought she was past the worst of it. She seemed like her old self again, most of the time.”

“Her old self.” Lucky rolled his eyes. “You never met her old self, Dad. You don’t even know what we’re talking about here.”

“Well, I know she was a kid when she rolled in here. Angry, resentful. Lashing out, and looking for attention.” Luke lifted his brows. “Barbara told me that she was working for Ruby because she’d used all her money coming here on a first class plane ticket. That she had a piss-poor attitude and a chip on her shoulder. Ruby liked her.”

“She’d be one of the few,” Lucky muttered, staring into the empty tumbler, twisting it back and forth in his hands. “Lizzie had two goals — ruin Sarah’s life and impress me. And she failed most of the time. At both.”

Luke exhaled slowly. “Lizzie,” he repeated. “You, ah, don’t call her that much anymore. But it’s how you introduced us. At Kelly’s. Lizzie Webber. When you’d stop doing that?”

“I—” Lucky squinted, looked at him. “What?”

“You’re describing someone you don’t like very much,” Luke said.”You called her Lizzie. You don’t do that. You call her Elizabeth. Always. Just thought it was interesting. You talk about them like they’re two different people.”

“Lizzie and Elizabeth,” Lucky echoed. He scrubbed a hand down his face, closed his eyes, kept them closed as he continued to speak. “She was trying to tell me about this job offer. From Chloe Morgan. To be her assistant. She’d have to travel a lot. She’d never be around. And she was telling me she used to like fashion. Used to follow all that stuff. I didn’t know that.” He looked at his father. “I didn’t know that. But I should have, I guess. She got all girly over meeting Brenda, you know? Desperate to get into the wedding, and stole Ruby’s invitation. I figured it was…you know, for me. But maybe it was Brenda.”

“And now she has a chance to get back into that?” Luke pressed. “Is that why you were fighting?”

“It’s how it started. And—no, I didn’t know that. Why would I have known that?” Lucky told him. “We weren’t friends or anything. She was just around all the time, and she was at the diner, and around Sarah. Why would I have known what she was into? We were friendly, Dad, not friends.”

“Because you didn’t like her.”

“No. That doesn’t make me an asshole, Dad—”

“No. It doesn’t. But it means that there’s some truth in what Liz said, isn’t there? You didn’t like before she was raped. Now you’re in love. So—”

Lucky winced. “I might have said something about how she’s better now,” he muttered.

“Starting to see how you got here, aren’t we, Cowboy?” Luke pushed his untouched whiskey towards his son. “Look, no one is saying that you fell in love with because she was raped. Or I’m not saying that,” he added when Lucky glared at him. “I’m saying you didn’t give her much of a chance before that. And then, after, you got to know her better. You fell in love with her.”

“She doesn’t see it that way—”

“Well, give her a break, Cowboy. If you used the actual words better now then you’re probably lucky she didn’t run you into a fence with the car.” When Lucky frowned at him, Luke shrugged. “Your mom has a wicked temper when you cross her. I’d be careful. At any rate, maybe you give her some space and come back to this when she’s had a chance to calm down.”

Hardy House: Elizabeth’s Bedroom

Elizabeth slid her fingertips across her walls, still adorned with the posters she’d put up when she’d first moved up — pinups ripped from Bop and Tiger Beat of boy bands and soap opera hunks. She sat on the edge of her bed, staring at the remnants of her old life. The pieces she’d never pulled down. She hadn’t wanted to let her grandmother know anything was that awful, and then she didn’t have the time, she was so rarely here.

And after the fire, she hadn’t had the energy for any of it. Then she’d moved out—and they’d sat here. Evidence of the carefree girl she’d been once.

You were a brat, and you’d be the first to say so. You were shallow and obsessed with how you looked and getting me to look at you. To get anyone to look at you. That’s not who you are now. You’re a better person.

“Better person,” Elizabeth murmured. She stared at her finger tips, at chipped nail polish she hadn’t had time to remove and repaint, then looked over at the closet. Did she still have any here?

She folded back the door, and bent down, rooting through the shoebox full of old makeup, trying to find a bottle that wasn’t hopelessly dried out. Suddenly, redoing her nails was all she could think about.

She moved to a different box, then saw one in the corner — this one was larger, a moving box left over from one the Johnsons had shipped from Colorado once Elizabeth had fled their house. They’d probably been relieved to be rid of her, Elizabeth thought wryly. So relieved they’d paid the exorbitant shipping.

Her amusement faded. You were a brat.

With her stomach rolling, Elizabeth tugged at the box, pulling it out of the closet. She sat on her carpeted floor, her legs folded in front of her, and pulled back the flaps. When she removed the third spaghetti-strap tank, she remembered now what this was, and when she’d pushed it to the back of her closet.

After the rape, when she’d worn nothing but those sweaters, flannels, and denim, she’d packed up anything that she thought was too revealing, anything that drew attention, and shoved it into the closet. Bright colors, shorts, skirts, anything that didn’t hit the knee—

She’d needed to pull some pieces out when they were trying to trap Mr. Murty into admitting he’d attacked her. Elizabeth slid her fingers over a scarlet red tube top. It had been her favorite color once. She’d bought the dress for the dance in the same shade. So sure that if Lucky could see her at her best, that he’d fall in love with her.

Because I knew you had a crush on me

He’d known, and he’d still said yes to hanging out at the dance together. Still said yes to going out with her sister. Had known and decided to break her heart in person by backing out of their plans. If he’d just called — would she had lied to him—

No. Elizabeth closed her eyes, squeezing her hands into the fabric of the tube top. No. It wasn’t his fault she’d been raped. It hadn’t been her fault. He had a right to be an asshole teenaged boy, and she’d had the right to be a girl with a broken heart.

She shoved the clothing aside. It was time to go through it — to donate what was out of style, and maybe put some of the pieces back in rotation. She hadn’t died that night in the park — there was no reason her fashion sense needed to have so much in common with her grandmother. And she’d already started to wear red again, hadn’t she?

At the bottom of the box, she found her fashion magazines — Vogue, Elle, Coutour —and her silly teenage ones — YM and Seventeen, and of course, Teen Vogue.

She’d hidden all these pieces away, the revealing clothing, the magazines, everything that made her feel like she’d made herself a target somehow. Worrying about what she wore, what people thought about her, what she looked like — everything that she thought was the reason Tom Baker had grabbed her in the park.

Maybe it was selfish and self-centered to take this job, to put herself in front of what Lucky needed, and maybe it was going back to who she’d been once. But maybe it was just what she needed, the last piece to make her whole again.

She’d take the job. And damn the consequences.

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