Here we go again, Rowan thought, back where I started. As the memories rolled back her palms started to sweat and she felt her breath hitch. Even after so many years Seb still instinctively assumed the worst-case scenario. As her parents would... And they wondered why she hadn’t wanted to come home.
‘It wasn’t anything illegal, Seb!’
‘I never said it was.’
‘I’m not an idiot or a criminal! And, while I might be unconventional, I’m not stupid. I do not traffic, carry or use drugs.’ Rowan raised her voice in an effort to get him to understand.
‘Calm down, Ro. For the record, back then I never believed you should have been arrested,’ Seb stated, and his words finally sank in.
Rowan frowned at him as his words tumbled around her brain. ‘You didn’t? Why not?’
‘Because while you were spoilt and vain and shallow—and you made some very bad decisions—you were never stupid.’
She couldn’t argue with that—and why did it feel so good that Seb believed she was better than the way she was portrayed? Just another thing that didn’t make any sense today.
But she knew that Seb’s opinion was one that her parents wouldn’t share.
‘But, Rowan, this lifestyle of yours is crazy. You’re an adult. You should not be getting kicked out of countries. You should have more than a backpack to your name. Most women your age have established a career, are considering marriage and babies...’
Shoot me now, Rowan thought. Or shove a hot stick in my eye. This was why she hadn’t wanted to come home, why she didn’t want to face the judgment of her family, friends and whatever Seb was. They’d always seen what they wanted to see and, like Seb, wouldn’t question the assumption that she was terminally broke and irreversibly irresponsible.
Rowan’s eyes sparked like lightning through a midnight sky. ‘What a stupid thing to say! You don’t know anything about me!’
‘And whose fault is that? You were the one who ran out of here like your head was on fire!’
‘I didn’t run!’ Okay, that lie sounded hollow even to her.
‘Within days of writing your finals you were on a plane out of the country. You didn’t discuss your plans with anybody. That’s running—fast and hard.’ Seb’s finger tapped the steering wheel as the car rolled forward. ‘What really happened that night?’
Rowan lifted her chin. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ He couldn’t know, could he? Callie might have told him... No, she’d sworn that she wouldn’t, and Callie would never, ever break her word. Seb had to be talking about her life in general and not that night she’d got arrested in particular.
That stupid, crazy, change-her-life evening, when she’d fallen from heaven to hell in a few short hours.
‘Sure you do.’ Seb scanned the road ahead, saw that the traffic wasn’t moving and sighed. ‘Something in you changed that night you were arrested... You were rebellious before, but you were never spiteful or malicious or super-sarcastic.’
Her attitude had been that of a rabid dog. In the space of one night she’d gone from being wildly in love and indescribably happy to being heartbroken, disparaged and disbelieved. That night had changed her life. After all, not everybody could say that they’d lost their virginity, got dumped and framed by their lover, then arrested all in the same night. And her weekend in jail had been a nightmare of epic proportions.
Was it any wonder that she equated love with the bars of a jail?
‘You were never that hard before, Rowan.’ Seb quietly interrupted her thoughts. ‘Those last six months you fought constantly with your parents, with me, with the world.’
Rowan clenched her jaw together. Every night she’d cried herself to sleep, sick, heartsore, humiliated, and every day she’d got up to fight—literally—another day.
‘Maybe I was crying because my parents, my sibling and everyone close to me left me to spend the weekend in jail when they could’ve bailed me out any time during the day on Friday. The party was on a Thursday night.’
‘Your parents wanted to teach you a lesson,’ Seb replied, his voice steady.
Rowan stared at the electronic boards above his head. ‘Yeah, well, I learnt it. I learnt that I can only rely on myself, trust myself.’
When she dared to look at him again she saw that his eyes were now glinting with suppressed sympathy. Then amusement crept across his face. ‘Yet here you are relying on me.’
‘Well, all good things have to come to an end,’ Rowan snapped back.
She was so done with being interrogated, and it had been a long time since she’d taken this amount of crap from anyone.