When I was a tiny baby I was abandoned by my parents.

I hadn’t been left on the doorstep of an orphanage or church.  I wasn’t abandoned in some frilly basket by a tearful mother.

Even that was too romantic of a story for me.

I was left in a trashcan.  Meant to die, I figured.  Or rather, Grandma told me I should figure as much when she was telling me the story.

Even my grandma didn’t know who my dad was, but my mom was her daughter, and she explained to me once, after I’d been nagging her for stories about my missing mom, that, “Some women should never be mothers.  I’m one of those.  And so was my daughter.  She won’t come back.  I guarantee it.  You’re lucky I’m still around.  I got nowhere else to go, or I’d be out of here, too.”

That was about as sentimental as we got in my family.

And even I knew that my grandma would have never taken me in if her friend from childhood, Dante’s gram, hadn’t insisted.

I didn’t know her well, but I did know that I owed his gram a lot.  My grandma told me so all the time.  When she got mad, I often earned rants that started with something along the lines of, “You should thank Mrs. Durant every chance you get.  She was the one that talked me into taking you in.  You can bet your bratty little ass it wasn’t my idea.”

I’d been found in the trashcan at some point, obviously.  No one would tell me how old I was, but I was a baby for sure, a tiny one.  Someone had heard me crying, called the cops, and I’d ended up on the news and in the local hospital.

Gram had seen the story on TV, and I don’t know all the details, but she’d put the pieces together and known that Grandma’s daughter had recently given birth, so she’d gone and taken a look at me.

One look, Grandma swears, and it was impossible to deny that Renée Theroux was my mother.

I thought that was weird.  All babies looked the same to me.

But Gram and Grandma had been sure, Gram had pressed Grandma, and the rest was history.

Grandma had taken me in, made room for me in her tiny trailer.  It did have an extra room.  She liked to bring up how she’d liked that room.  She’d enjoyed having an extra bit of space to herself where she could sew and store things.  We had many, many conversations like that, where she reminded me of all of the reasons why I was a burden to her.

And I wasn’t ungrateful.  The place was a dump, but it was a fact that it was better than a trashcan.

Even so, everyone around these parts knew the story, so from my first day of school to present day—I still hadn’t lived down the fact that I’d been thrown away like trash.

But that wasn’t the worst part.  The worst part was, deep down inside, I knew I was trash.  No one wanted me, that was a fact.  What was that if not trash?

Needless to say, it was a sore subject, and it didn’t take much to make me lash out when I was teased for it, which was often.

Some days it felt like my life was nothing but one long fight.

But that day was different.  That was the day I realized that I just might not be alone in that fight.

When Dante emerged from the office, triumphant from my perspective, considering all he’d gotten was suspended for fighting and then chewing out the vice principal.

I gave him an ear to ear smile.

He returned it with a small one of his own.

And that was it.  He was my very first friend.  It was that simple.

I look back on that pivotal encounter of ours often, and I always end up asking myself two questions.

Like most things in my life, they are at odds with each other.

Did that meeting save me?

Or did it ruin my life?

CHAPTER

FOUR

"Love is like war. Easy to begin, but very hard to stop." 

~H.L. MENCKEN

PRESENT

Our layover was in San Francisco.  It was only for twenty-four hours, just enough time to go out drinking and sleep before we hit the air again.

And boy was I going to drink.

It’d been a doozy of a day, and I was planning to throw one hell of a drunk.

And my girls were with me all the way.  Leona knew more about Dante than the others, but Demi and Farrah knew enough to understand that I needed to go out and find some distraction.

San Fran was a bi-weekly stop for our static crew, and we knew just the bar to go to.  It had cheap drinks, hot men, and was within staggering distance of our hotel.

The pilots insisted on going with us.  They always did.  Flight attendants were pilot catnip, and every girl on our crew was hot, so we were catnip times four.

Also, and much to my disappointment, Leona was dating the first officer.

She was young, only twenty-six, but just a little over two years ago she’d been through a really ugly divorce.

I’d gone through it with her.

And now she was finally dating again, but it was a fucking pilot.

Said pilot was with the captain buying us all a third round at the bar while we lounged on a long, red couch and blatantly scoped out the room.

It was packed with men, and even though we were in San Francisco, at this particular bar most of the men were usually straight.

“Never date a pilot,” I told Leona, for maybe the thousandth time, as I watched her not quite boyfriend smile at the female bartender.

“He’s a nice guy,” she defended.  “I think it’s going well.”

“He’s totally into Leona,” Demi added.

“Of course he is,” I agreed.  “Look at her.  But it’s not about her or how he feels about her.  He’s a pilot.”

Leona waved me off.  “Time will tell.  They can’t all be bad.  There are exceptions to every rule.”

I decided to drop it.  She wasn’t budging, and much as I hated it, she might just have to learn this one the hard way.

I nodded my head at a hipster dude at the bar.  He’d gone so full-on hipster that he was borderline lumberjack.  “I might give that one the time of day.”

Leona’s delicate nose scrunched up.  It was pretty dang cute.  Everything she did was cute.  Normally I hated cute girls, but with Leona, it was just part of her charm.  “You don’t like beards.  You always say how they smell bad, how they’ve done tests on men with beards like that, and they always find shit in them.  Literal shit.”

I giggled.  “You said literal shit.”

“I did.  That guy is not your type.”

“Who cares,” I shrugged.  “He keeps staring at me.  I like it.”

“He’s not the only guy staring at you.  Why him?”

“Because tequila.”

Demi giggled.  “That’s the best toast ever.  We’re all getting shots of Patrón.  Because tequila!  This is happening.”

I nodded.  The more the better.  Leona thought that I was impaired and it was affecting my judgement, but the sad truth was that I wasn’t even close to being drunk

I needed to remedy that and quick.

Demi had just brought us all limes and shot glasses over brimming with tequila when Leona said quietly, her eyes aimed right over my shoulder, “Bastard at six o’clock.”

Fuck.

“Because tequila!” we all chanted the toast.

I did the shot and chased it with a deep gulp of my cocktail.

I’d won the last round.  Dante was supposed to disappear after a defeat like that.

What was his fucking problem?

And I wasn’t even drunk.  I downed the rest of my cocktail and still didn’t get there.

What a fucking lousy day.

I was so annoyed by that that when I turned to watch Dante approaching, I already had a few bullets in the chamber.

I began to stride toward him, deciding to meet him halfway.

“You’re back,” I said when I got close.