After I Dumped My Blind Ex

Oak Grove always smelled like manure.

Lucas and I grew up together out there, surrounded by farms and rusted fences.

Whenever my father flew into one of his rages and came at me with his belt, Lucas would climb in through the back window, take the blows for me, and then slip half a sandwich into my hands.

"Don't cry, Zoe." He'd wipe my tears away with the back of his hand. "One day, we're getting out of this hellhole."

Later, he really did get into MIT.

Me? I was just the weird girl who liked painting graffiti on the barn walls.

But a week before Lucas was supposed to leave for Boston, his father lost every last dollar at a casino—then stole Lucas's college money and vanished overnight to Nevada.

Lucas locked his acceptance letter in a drawer.

He never went to Boston. Instead, he stayed in town and took a welding job, carrying the weight of his sick mother and a mountain of debt on his back.

And that wasn't all. He paid for my tuition and living expenses too.

"Go to college, Zoe. Your art doesn't belong rotting away on some barn wall out here." At the bus station, he pulled me into a hug and shoved a stack of cash into my hand. "Don't worry about me. I'll handle everything."

It wasn't until my sophomore year of college that I came back home with an award-winning painting, planning to surprise him.

Instead, I saw a homeless man on the street. He was curled up on a snow-covered set of steps with a battered paper cup in front of him. It was Lucas.

Standing over him, his mother was screaming like a lunatic. Then she slapped him hard across the face.

"You useless blind idiot! Worthless!" she shrieked. "Your father abandoned us, and now you're nothing but a beggar and a burden! And on top of that, you're still paying for some other freeloader to go to college!"

I stood ten steps away, every drop of blood in my body turning to ice. I was the "other freeloader."

That was when I learned the truth. He'd burned out his retinas in a welding accident. The little shop he worked for had no insurance, and once Lucas went blind, they threw him out without a second thought.

My legs nearly gave out beneath me, and I almost dropped to my knees in the snow. Just then, another girl hurried over to him.

She crouched beside Lucas gently, wiping the dirt and frostbite from his face with a wet wipe before holding a piece of bread to his mouth.

But Lucas groped for her hand and pushed the bread away. Then he held out an envelope.

"Kate, help me mail this... to Zoe. It's for her art supplies this month..."

"She's talented. She can't end up like me... stuck in this rusted-out town."

My heart felt like it was being torn apart.

I looked at the boy who used to be so full of life, the one who had sworn he would take me away from this place one day. Now he was curled up in the snow like a stray dog, beaten by his insane mother and pitied by another girl.

I bit down so hard on my lip I tasted blood, but I still couldn't find the courage to walk over and say his name.

And then, finally, I understood the truth with unbearable clarity—

The one who had dragged him into this bottomless pit, the one who had crushed him down into the dirt, wasn't fate.

It was me.