Chapter 1

Walk.

Walk as far away from here as possible.

Run.

Once you realize that walking isn't fast enough.

Hide.

Hide from every vehicle you see.

Blend.

Blend into the background.

Disappear.

Disappear into thin air.

Those were the rules that Callie kept repeating to herself as she made her way out of the Fosters' household. It doesn't matter how much she wanted to stay, or that she didn't want to leave everyone she ever cared for behind.

What's done is done and there's no going back now.

Forget... the most important rule of them all.

Forget all that she had,

All that she wanted,

All that she was graciously given and now taking away from herself, before someone else would do the taking for her.

Because that's what would happen.

It was what always happened.

Those chapters have passed already and have thus come to an end.

Forcing herself to remember was no use now. She had no control of changing the past, even though it was what she wanted more than ever right now. If she could go back, she would've never kissed Brandon, or maybe she would've never allowed herself to get so close to any of these people in the first place. Either one would've sufficed for an alteration of her story.

But she was starting a new chapter.

An easier and shorter chapter with fewer characters, than the first few had started with.

The story is always much easier to understand, when there aren't so many names filling up the pages.

"You aren't disposable, Callie." -Stef

"You only care about yourself! You're selfish! - Jude

"I'm not going to let them split you two up again." -Lena

"We are not in a position to offer Callie and Jude a home forever." -Lena

"It's kind of your tree too…" -Mariana

"You know, you might be a little too screwed up." –Wyatt

"Whatever you decide, you know we've got you." –Mariana

"Why do you have to ruin everything?" –Jude.

"You do deserve to be happy." –Brandon

With so many characters, it gets harder and harder to separate the truth from the lies. But with only one, the confusion dissipates and everything becomes cut-and-dry.

Wyatt was the page break into the next and final chapter for Callie.

Or maybe she was leaving the story before ever getting a chance to complete it.

The reason didn't matter to her. She knew that everything would get easier from here on out.

Yes, she felt bad for using him to escape her temporary home.

Wyatt was someone she had once considered her friend.

Friend. What did that word even mean to her anyway? Did it carry the same weight as the definition she had for family?

If so, she could learn to forget about him too.

She would have to cut the rope that bounded her to all of them.

Trust. Just another word that was involuntarily repeating in her mind. Though she couldn't understand why... It didn't fit in with any of the other words at all. Come to think of it, Callie wasn't even sure she could provide herself with a precise definition of the five-letter word.

She had broken every character's trust in her in every single one of the chapters before, so why was the term placed in bold-lettering as the title of the epilogue?

"Are you going to tell me what happened?" Wyatt asked in the background, bringing Callie back into reality.

Reality. Now, that would be something to escape from.

"What do you mean?" she asked, in hopes that he would forget his own question.

"Callie?" he asked worriedly. She hated his tone. She hated people being worried for her when they had no reason to be. How could they be worried about her, if she couldn't even be worried for herself?

"Things weren't working out. I needed to get out of there," she told him casually. She would have to remain collective during the last chapter. Becoming emotional about any of this would be a huge step backwards. Why couldn't he just understand?

SCRATCH THAT.

He didn't need to understand. He just needed to stop talking about it. The epilogue didn't always have to contain a life lesson, least of all in her story.

"I need to know why you ran away, Callie?" he asked in an assertive tone.

"Does it really matter? I can't go back now," Callie tells him.

"Did they say something to you or—"

"No!" she snaps. Couldn't he just move on already? Wherever this conversation led to, wouldn't make her change her mind about leaving. There was no going back once the end of that chapter was already written.

Re-thinking what would've happened, if, would just cause for a distortion of the entire story.

"Then what happened?" he asked relentlessly. It was like the screen on her computer was frozen, and she wasn't able to unfreeze it to continue typing the rest of the words. And his constant questioning her was just forcing her to want to shut the computer down completely for a while.

"I just needed to get away from everything, okay? I didn't like what they were doing to me."

"Callie…did someone hurt you?" he asked with sudden worry in his tone.

I wish they had, she thinks to herself. Then, she would feel more justified about leaving and she wouldn't be having such writer's block.

"No one hurt me. I just… I needed to get out of there. Are you going to help me or not?" Callie asked him harshly. She would have to remain cold in order to do this. She couldn't allow anyone to think that she would back out.

Not even herself.

And besides… isn't the story always at it's best, when you don't second-guess yourself?