“Please don’t tell,” I begged. “They’ll take me away if you do. I won’t get to go to school here anymore, or see May and Hayes every day or even you. Please, Frankie. Don’t tell.”
Her lips parted and sadness filled her lustrous green eyes, sadness for me.
“They’re hurting you though, Risk. You’re always so beat up coming to school and it kills me to see you like that. They’re your foster parents, they’re supposed to take care of you, not hurt you.”
“They don’t hurt me all of the time,” I assured her. “Owen only does it when he’s mad, Freda just shouts sometimes. She only smacks my head when she gets goin’, she doesn’t do anything worse.”
“Risk.” Frankie’s eyes glazed over with tears. “One smack is enough for it to be worse.”
“Please,” I pleaded. “Don’t tell. I don’t want to leave Southwold. Please.”
Frankie didn’t reply.
“I’ll be eighteen in a few years, then I’ll be an adult and out of the system,” I rambled on. “I just have to stick it out for a few more years, then I’ll walk away and never look back.”
“D’you promise?”
“Yes, Frankie. I promise.”
“And promise you’ll do everything not to make your foster dad mad.”
“I promise.”
“Okay.” She rubbed her eyes. “I won’t tell. I hate that you’re asking me this. I shouldn’t listen, but I don’t want to hurt you so I won’t tell.”
I was so relieved, tears fell from my eyes. Frankie surprised me when she got up on her tiptoes and wrapped her short arms around my body. She squeezed me so tight it almost stole my breath. A wave of emotions I had never experienced before crashed into my heart. I had been a burden, an outcast, a misfit and unloved for as long as I could remember and this tiny, red-headed girl made me feel wanted with one conversation and one little hug.
“We’re friends now and that means I’ll take care of you, okay?” she mumbled against my chest. “You can come to my house any time you want to get away from them. I promise.”
“O-Okay.”
“Promise we’ll do everything together, that we’ll take care of each other.”
“I promise, Frankie.”
When I hugged her back, it felt right. Like I had found someone who liked me for me and accepted all that came with me. I knew we were going to be good friends because finding someone like Frankie, someone who saw through the façade I portrayed and still wanted to have my back was rare. She was rare. I think I started to love her that day because she made me feel like I wasn’t the broken one, the stray kid who couldn’t find a family.
When I was with her, I was wanted and I knew that she wouldn’t ever send me away like everyone else did.
I just knew it.
CHAPTER THREE
RISK
Present day . . .
Home.
I had been back to the UK and travelled up and down it multiple times since I left to pursue my dreams in the States nine years ago, but this was the first time since I had left that I was returning to my home town. Southwold was a small town on the coast in the East Suffolk district of Suffolk, England. The town had a population of a thousand or so people and what kept the place afloat was the tourist economy. Tourists came for the pretty views and the beaches which Southwold offered, but the hotels, B&Bs, the golf course, cafés, restaurants and the market town atmosphere were the only reason people stuck around for their weekend getaways. Half of the homes in Southwold were second homes or let to holiday-makers so you rarely saw the same faces twice unless they were locals.
Growing up, I saw the appeal in Southwold that many of its residents were blind to.
I loved how calm, how quiet and picturesque it was. It was a place where someone could find themselves, or in my case, lose myself. When I left Southwold I was only eighteen years old, but I was a broken person. I spent a long time forcing myself to never think of my past, to think of her, but being back home made that impossible. Everywhere I looked, I saw her. Frankie Fulton, my ex-girlfriend, was Southwold to me and I always figured that was why I loved the town, but never came back to it.
They say you don’t know what you have until it’s gone or that sometimes you have to lose someone to realise that you really love them. I never understood any of that because I always knew that I had the love of my life in Frankie and I knew I loved her long before I lost her. The shitty thing was, I knew all of those things and I still lost her. I had nine long years to think about why we ended and though I didn’t think it was the right thing to have had happened, I accepted it. That didn’t make it hurt any less. I knew I was a rock for Frankie, but what she didn’t know was that she was an entire boulder for me.
She knew everything about my past. All of it.
May and Hayes had been my best friends for years, but even they didn’t know the extent of the things that I had been through. Frankie was different. We started out as regular classmates at school, then when I was twelve I noticed that she was pretty and that was the beginning of how she became my entire world. She took care of me before I was hers to take care of. She gave me my first hug that I could ever remember. She had my back from the jump and didn’t take no for an answer. A deep bond developed between us. She had always been there for me when I felt trapped and all alone in a home, and world, where I wasn’t wanted. She kissed every bruise, allowed me to unload
