Free Before and Ever Since (9781101612286) by Sharla Lovelace

full of books no one had read in years, and the random knickknack décor that had replaced my obsession with heavy metal rock stars years earlier. Instead, I noticed the crack that ran from the window to the ceiling. The tiny gaps around the window that light peeped through. The heater vents at the floor that fronted outdated and probably not-to-code-anymore ductwork.
    While a part of me groaned at all that needed to be done, and how long that meant Ben would be around making my life complicated, a tiny immature part of me also wanted that. To delay things. To make it too difficult to sell the house I knew every crack and crevice and sound of. To keep that door knocker knocking, and keep being able to walk in at any time and see all the pieces of our lives that still settled there all absorbed into the surfaces. And on the shallower end—to keep the woman who’d been caught naked with my husband from getting the sale.
    I got up and went to the window. Holly hadn’t been around for me on that front. Not when I’d decided enough was enough. She was always about forgiveness. About how love endures and all that crap. Where was
his
love for me when he was banging other women in his office, in his car, and in Dedra’s case—in my bed? No, that was it. Holly didn’t agree with me, and that was okay. It wasn’t the first time. I filed for divorce the next week. I got the house. He got the bed.
    I peeked through the wooden slats of the blinds that didn’t used to be there. Once upon a time, my window just had red curtains and looked out onto a view no one cared for. No one but me.
    The view from my window was of the roof over the garage. Nothing pretty like Holly’s view of the backyard with its begonias and sunflowers and wisteria growing over a wooden arbor. I couldn’t care less about wisteria. My rooftop access was like manna from heaven.
    I raised the blinds as far as they would go so I could see out, and I smiled to see that it really hadn’t changed. The big oak next to the garage still towered over the house, low-lying branches reaching across the garage section and blanketing that whole area in a shimmering wall of leaves. Like a personal cave just for me—for most of the year, anyway.
    I pried my fingertips between the wood of the window and that of the sill, and wiggled until it moved. One inch up, however, and I felt it. The spinning, the ringing, the feeling of being sucked away into blackness.
    â€œOh, shit,” I said, sinking to the floor. The sound of my own voice sounded oddly far away, and all I could feel was the cold of the wall against my palm.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    I was there in my room—although an odd version of it. It was both familiar and not, and I recognized the bedspread with a start. It was the one I’d gotten for my eighth birthday, that looked like multicolored shredded yarn had been smashed together. I loved that bedspread, and had been secretly sad to replace it when I was fifteen. Somewhere there was a book with a snipped off piece of it hidden inside for a keepsake.
    â€œOh my God,” I said softly, still staying snug to the wall, like that was safer.
    That thought made me chuckle that anything tangible would really be safer in that situation. I reached out tentatively with my left hand to see if the same rules applied as before. It wasn’t so much a stopping point as it was just a feeling that I couldn’t move any farther.
    It didn’t matter. Once I watched my eleven-year-old self fly through the door and pounce on that bed, I was paralyzed anyway.
    It was the freakiest kind of bizarre. I held my breath as I watched mini-me kick off the black sneakers I remembered decorating with puff paint smiley faces.
    â€œCome on,” she called out, and the craziness continued with Holly coming in.
    She strolled in with all her twelve-year-old maturity, arms crossed and eyes looking down with disdain