Swear (Landry Family 4)

I didn’t realize how lonely this house could be until recently. Sometimes now I sit here and wonder what it would be like to hear another person in another room, feel someone else’s presence. Know Ellie was in the kitchen or bedroom, waiting on me.

“So . . .” Sienna begins, breaking my trance.

“So . . .”

She looks at me with hesitation in her eyes. I can almost see the words sitting on the tip of her tongue, begging to come out. I wait for her to give in. She doesn’t.

“What’s up, Sienna?”

Sighing, she leans back on the sofa. “A part of me wants to go back to LA and a part of me doesn’t.”

“So don’t go until you’re ready.”

“But I just feel the need to . . . move. To go. To do. To experience,” she sighs again. “I feel like I was a nomad in a past life. A gypsy.”

“I think they make their living by fortune telling,” I note, taking a drink. “You got a crystal ball somewhere?”

“Very funny.” She crosses her arms over her chest and shoots me a look. It’s the one that I can’t just blow off.

“Okay, I’ll play. Why do you want to move or however you say it?”

“I don’t know,” she whines. “I feel like there’s so much out there that I don’t know and I’ll never see.”

“You’re in your early twenties. You have time,” I laugh.

She rises up. “I’m being serious. I feel like I’m the little sister of all the Landry boys. Like I’m the afterthought, the one no one expects anything of because you assholes have already conquered the world.”

“Lincoln had conquests, Sienna. It’s not the same thing.”

“Hardy, har, har.”

“Fine. You want to blaze your own path. You did go to fashion school, remember? You have an apartment in Los Angeles . . . I think? You’ve been in Savannah more or less for a few months now so I could be wrong about that.”

“My roommate there can handle the rent. She has a bigger allowance than I do,” she frowns. “Besides, her sister is staying with her now so it’s not like they miss me.”

“So what do you want to do? Travel? See the world? Get a job with that expensive degree you have?” I say, remember Graham’s outrage at how much a fashion design degree costs.

She laughs, thinking the same thing. “Graham about died.”

“If he had his way, we’d all be misers, pinching pennies and refilling ketchup bottles out of to-go packets,” I say, knocking the takeout bag in front of me.

“Do people really do that?”

I shrug. “I saw it on television once on one of those shows where people do crazy things to save a buck. Maybe you could try that out. I don’t think gypsies have a lot of money. Could work.”

“I’m being serious, Ford.”

“Fine,” I sigh. “What are you wanting to do? Answer that.”

She blushes and looks at the floor. Picking at the hem of her shirt, the sequins catch the light and bounce it around the room.

When she finally looks at me, I see the sincerity in her eyes. She twists in the seat and squares her shoulders with mine.

“I want to move to Illinois.”

“What in the hell is in Illinois?”

“I knew a girl in LA from there. She just moved back home and we’ve been texting a lot. She does some freelance design work for some of our friends in California, and it’s kind of growing really fast. She invited me to be a part of it.”