Excerpt of The Me I Used to Be by Jennifer Ryan

Evangeline stared through the sheriff department’s SUV window up at the two story house she grew up in. The sun dipped below the hills and cast the house and property in varying degrees of gray shadows. Nothing had changed and everything had changed.

Four years away had weathered the white paint along with her memories and battered heart.

So many happy memories. The slap of the screen door echoed through her ears as she remembered her brothers chasing her out of the house and down the five steps to the driveway as she laughed and raced to the fields to escape their torment. Tickle fights, being tossed over her brothers’ shoulders, pigtails dangling, they carried her like a sack of potatoes, the boys threatening to dump her in the water trough or a pile of horse dung.

A tear slipped over her lashes and down her cheek remembering the way her father used to carry her up the steps and to her bed where he tucked her in when they’d been out late at one of her brother’s baseball games. He’d held her close, then kissed her on the forehead and whispered, “Love you, pumpkin.”

Nostalgia, a thousand memories of this place, her family, a childhood filled with happiness bombarded her mind in stark contrast to today’s reality.

Her father died yesterday, prompting her immediate release from prison.

The cop who arrested her had taken her to the house she’d been raised in to a mother she hadn’t seen or spoken to in four long years.

When you’re a kid, you think your mother knows everything—it once  seemed that she did—but her mother didn’t know what really happened when Evangeline got arrested

Evangeline had swallowed that truth.

Her father’s death made everything more complicated and sad.

As much as she wanted to be here, she wanted to run away, because the home she remembered didn’t exist anymore. It disappeared the second Chris slapped the cuffs on her.

The illusion of the life she thought she’d had before disappeared and revealed all the flaws in the place she lived and the people she thought she knew.

Seeing things the way they are, the slap of reality hitting hard, made her finally grow up and let go of childish things.

Being an adult sucked. She wanted to go back to being a kid merrily living life, carefree and naïve.

But you can’t go back.

And so she had to find a way to move forward.