“We’re moving. Mr. Wilkinson needs me to run our Canadian operation. We’re moving to Edmonton at the beginning of June.”
I sniffed. Then a laugh burst out of me. “Canada?” I laughed again. “No.”
“Yes.”
My laughter dissolved into fresh sobs. “No. We’re not moving again. I can’t…”
“You can and you will.”
“I won’t,” I said, staggering to my feet. “I’ll stay here. I can live with Angie until I turn eighteen. I’m not going.”
“You are. And that’ll be the last you see of Isaac.”
“You can’t do this. You can’t stop me. When I’m eighteen—”
Dad gripped me by both shoulders. “I’m your goddamn father and I have the final word. You’re done with him. If I hear that you so much as text him, I’ll have him arrested for statutory rape and I’ll let the entire world know it. Hollywood has zero tolerance for sexual predators these days. Whatever chance you think he has at a career will be demolished. I’ll use every resource at my disposal, every press contact, every string I can pull…”
…pour poison in their ears…
“When I’m done, he won’t be able to get a job in a Los Angeles McDonald’s, never mind a movie.”
“Why?” I cried in a croaking whisper. “Why would you do that to him? To me?”
To my shock, my dad’s eyes filled with tears and his grip on my shoulders softened. “Because I love you,” he said.
I shook my head. “You don’t…”
“Willow, listen to me. I know his type. I’ve seen it before. I am sparing you a lifetime of pain. Alcoholism is genetic. It’s only a matter of time before failure will drag Isaac down, and he’ll drag you down with him.” He sniffed and hardened his voice. “And I’ll be goddamned if I stand by and let that happen. It’s for your own good. I have experience. I can see the big picture. You can’t, because you’re a seventeen-year-old girl who thinks she’s in love.”
He let go of my shoulders, dismissing me and everything I felt or wanted, as easily as blowing out a candle.
“What about the play?” I managed to say. “I wanted…one show.”
He shook his head. “Not with him in it.”
“Just one show?” I said. “Please? Then he…he’ll go and that will be…the end. And we’re moving.” A sob hiccupped out of me. “Dad, I promise, I’ll… be better.”
Mom finally spoke up, her voice a thread. “Dan, let her have one show. She’s worked so hard. For months.”
My father’s jaw shifted back and forth again. The anger was draining out of him, the intensity of the night giving way to exhaustion. And perhaps, pity.
“Opening night,” my father said. “You have opening night and no more. The next two days, you go to school and you come home. You go nowhere else.”
“Okay.”
“On Friday, we take you to the theater and we drive you home. That’s it. You don’t see Isaac Pearce after Friday. Or everything I told you will come to pass.”
I nodded, feeling something inside me blacken and curl, something my grandmother had been proud of.
I clung to the wick but there was hardly anything left.
Isaac
For three days, Willow wouldn’t answer any of my texts. When I called her number, it rang and rang. Thursday morning, I paced the Fords’ living room, thinking I could go by the high school on the way to the hospital. Marty advised against it.
“If you think her father is the reason for her radio silence,” he said, “stay far, far away from the school.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked. “I need to know she’s okay. If her dad found out about us, she’s taking the shit for it by herself.”