Coming Home to Greenleigh

Prequel

Surprise! This week I am uploading two segments! The first one is this prequel; the second is another chapter, and it will be uploaded Tuesday night. In case you are wondering if Shawn really loves Beth...I thought this might help all of us to figure this guy out. Thank you for reading!
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They were meeting at 10:45 pm.

It was going to take three and a half hours to get to New York City. Shawn was going to push the limits on the old Honda civic and try to get there in under three hours. If they got there before 2 am, they could crash on the couch of a law school friend. If they got there after 2 am, they would have to sleep in the car, because his friend was due in court bright and early the next morning and wouldn't be able to stay up any longer to wait for them.

He'd had to cajole his friend into staying up until 2, so he knew this was a firm deadline. If they weren't hightailing it out of Greenleigh at the stroke of 11 pm, they weren't getting to New York on time, and then their new life wasn't going to start out on the right foot.

But he didn't need to worry. Elisabeth was never late.

Not that sleeping in the car would be so terrible, but the Honda was stuffed to the gills with everything he owned. He had junked a lot of crap from law school, but he and Elisabeth would need a few things to start out. He didn't have a lot of money, and he'd saved the signing bonus from the new job to use as a security deposit on an apartment, plus as a cushion for starting the repayment on that disgusting amount of student debt he'd amassed.

So there was a rolled-up futon taking up much of the area in back, a couple of suitcases of clothes and books, and dishes and odd kitchen things that he thought would be nice to have. Like the espresso maker that his dad had scoffed at when he'd won it in a charity raffle.

Elisabeth was a tea drinker, Shawn reflected. But maybe she'd like the espresso maker. It could represent a new beginning! And the embroidered pillow he'd spirited out of his bedroom. It was his mom's, something she'd embroidered when he was a kid and she was sick with cancer and stuck in bed. Home Sweet Home, it said. Beth had never known his mom. He decided that this was the one thing from his mother that he wanted to show her.

Home Sweet Home. That's what he wanted for her, more than anything in the world.

I've been waiting for this, he thought. I'm going to get Beth out of that horrible place, away from her horrible mother, away from that horrible life.

He'd used the word horrible three times in a single thought. Not hard to do when he was reflecting on Elisabeth's sad life.

He wondered what she would do in New York. It was a big place, a lot bigger than Greenleigh. She wouldn't have to work at a dumb library clerk job anymore. She couldn't go to school, not right now—they couldn't afford it—but eventually, maybe she could finish her bachelor's degree. He'd never forgive her mother for making her quit school so that she could stay close to home, waiting on her hand and foot.

Right now, all he wanted was to take her away, and for her to love him as much as he loved her. Everything else would work out once they were out of this dumpy town.

He was going to make sure she got everything she needed, everything she wanted. She was a gem of a human being—always kind, always checking in on people, always feeding the stray cats. How had such a person escaped the notice of the Universe? How was she so unnoticed, unloved, unattended to? It was bizarre.

Sure, maybe hometown sweethearts weren't a thing anymore in this era of hookups and swipes. Beth didn't even have a cell phone. She was as real as you could get. She was there every Christmas, every summer when he got back from first college, then law school. He hadn't realized how much he loved her until he understood that success in life meant success somewhere not in Greenleigh, somewhere not with Beth. That was not negotiable, he'd decided. He was going to fix the wrong that the Universe had imposed on the finest person he knew, by taking her away from this place. That way he would get to keep what he'd worked for, and use it to right what was wrong with the world.