When Ethel had first pursued me, my mother had been against it. She thought the Pruitt family's background wasn't good enough. It was Ethel who knelt outside our front door for three days and three nights, forehead split and bleeding from bowing against the stone, before my mother finally relented.
My father drove in silence. I caught his reflection in the rearview mirror. His brows were knotted tight, his jaw locked. Whatever he was thinking, he kept it to himself.
About twenty minutes in, I glanced at my phone. The green dot had stopped moving.
"Faster, Dad."
He pressed the accelerator without a word, and we pulled up near Ethel's location moments later.
The first thing I saw was her car, parked in front of a villa.
I threw my door open and headed straight for the building.
What I didn't notice was the reaction behind me.
In the car, both my parents were staring at the villa. The color had drained from their faces at the exact same instant.
Before I'd taken ten steps, my father was out of the car and blocking my path.
"Donnie. Are you sure Ethel brought that man here?"
Something in his expression stopped me cold. It wasn't anger. It wasn't skepticism. It was something I couldn't name.