Free A Game of Vows by Maisey Yates

was always dirty. I actually felt lucky to only have one parent. There was no fighting in my house. I could always hear the neighbors screaming at each other. My father never yelled. He just barely ever said hi, either.”
    She could stay out all night and he’d hardly ever raise an eyebrow when she’d come in at breakfast. She could still see him, sitting in his chair with a bowl of cereal in his lap and a beer already in his hand.
    “How were the sheets?” he asked.
    “I didn’t have any. Just a mattress on the floor and a blanket. We didn’t have a washer and dryer so … I used to hitchhike to the Laundromat sometimes so I could clean my blankets and clothes.”
    She shook her head. “I mean … would you want to talk about that? Who wants that life?”
    He frowned. “No one. Is that why you erased your past?”
    She swallowed. “One of the many whys. But let’s not even get into that.” It was one thing to talk about her parents, suchas they were. To talk about the things that had been out of her control. The poverty, the neglect. She could handle that.
    But she’d made her own mistakes. Those were the ones that stayed closest to her, like a layer over her skin, protective and confining at the same time, impossible to remove. A part of her she wished away every day, and one she depended on to move forward.
    “Fine by me.” He looked out at the view. “Tell me, Hannah, what is it like to walk away from everything?” His tone was husky, sincere. Surprising.
    “I … It’s like walking out of prison,” she said. “Like I imagine it might be, anyway. You spend all this time in a place you know isn’t right, and yet, you have to stay. Until one day, you just walk out into the sunlight. You’d never go back, even though going forward is frightening. Because there’s so much possibility when before that … there was nothing.”
    “How did you end up in Spain? Why Spain?”
    Admitting she’d sort of put her finger on the globe in a random place would seem silly. As silly as the fact that she’d chosen her new last name from an upscale department store she’d seen on TV. But that was the truth. She’d been so desperate then, to shed who she was, to try and be someone else. To make something else of herself. “I wanted to get very far away. I wanted out of the country because …”
    “It would be easier for you to get away with false transcripts.”
    “Yes. Of course they were very good, and I had changed my name legally by that point.” She didn’t know why she was telling him all of this. Only that with him determinedly keeping his focus on the street below, the darkness surrounding them, it seemed easy.
    “And where did you get the money for it?”
    The fifteen thousand dollars she never wanted to talk about. Fifteen thousand dollars she did her best to
never
thinkabout. It had bought documents; it had supplied her with her plane ticket and passport, ID that carried her new name.
    A gift. The money had been a gift, not payment, because how could a price be put on what she’d given? At least, that was what they’d told her. The Johnsons, from somewhere in New Hampshire. The couple she’d given her baby to. Oh, they’d paid all the legal adoption fees, and her hospital bill, but in the end, they’d wanted to do more. To get her on her feet. Provide her with a new start so she didn’t end up back in the same place.
    They had. They truly had. She should be grateful. She was.
    But thinking about it was like drawing her skin off slowly. It still made her feel raw, freshly wounded and bleeding. Still made her ache with guilt. Guilt over everything. That it had ever happened. That she’d made the choice she had. And then there was the guilt that came along with the occasional, sharp sweep of relief that she’d chosen to give the baby up. That she hadn’t kept him. That she hadn’t spent their lives repeating the cycle her parents had been a part of.
    “From a friend,” she said. It was a