“There’s nothing about him that seems...bad to me.”
Rough, yes. Wounded, yes. Stabbed through the rib cage because of his own wife, sure. But not bad.
“Be careful,” her mother said gently. “You’ve seen more of the world than I ever will, sweetheart. You’ve done more, achieved more, than I could have ever hoped to. But there are some things you don’t have experience with... And I fear that, to a degree, your advancement in other areas is the reason why. And it makes me worry for you.”
“You don’t have to worry for me.”
“So your interest in him is entirely professional?”
Faith took a dish out of the soapy water and began to scrub it. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
“But I do,” her mother said. “Just like I worry about your brothers sometimes. It’s what parents do.”
“Well, I’m fine,” Faith said.
“It’s okay to make mistakes,” her mother said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just forget about Levi Tucker for a second. It’s okay for you to make mistakes, Faith. You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to be everything to everyone. You don’t have to make Isaiah happy. You don’t have to make Joshua happy. You certainly don’t have to make your father and I happy.”
Faith shifted uncomfortably. “It’s not a hardship to care about whether or not my family is happy. You did so much for me...”
“Look at everything you’ve done forus. Just having you as my daughter would have been enough, Faith. It would have always been enough.”
Faith didn’t know why that sat so uncomfortably with her. “I would rather not make mistakes.”
“We would all rather not make them,” her mother said. “But sometimes they’re unavoidable. Sometimes you need to make them in order to grow into the person you were always supposed to be.”
Faith wondered if Levi could be classified as a mistake. She was going into this—whatever it was—knowing exactly what kind of man he was and exactly when and how things were going to end. She wondered if that made her somehow more prepared. If that meant it was a calculated maneuver, rather than a mistake.
“I can see you, figuring out if you’re still perfect.”
Her mother’s words were not spoken with any sort of unkindness, but they played at Faith’s insides all the same. “I don’t think I’m perfect,” Faith mumbled, scrubbing more ferociously at the dish.
“You would like to be.”
She made a sound that landed somewhere between a scoff and a laugh, aiming for cool and collected and achieving neither. “Who doesn’t want to be?”
“I would venture to say your brothers don’t worry very much about being perfect.”
Sure. Because they operated in the background and worried about things likeheroptics, not their own. Isaiah somehow managed to go through life operating as if everything was a series of numbers and spreadsheets. Joshua treated everything like a PR opportunity. And Devlin... Well, Devlin was the one who had never cared what anyone thought. The one who hadn’t gone into business with the rest of them. The one who had done absolutely everything on his own terms and somehow come out of it with Faith’s best friend as a bonus.
“I like my life,” Faith insisted. “Don’t think that I don’t.”
“I don’t think that,” her mother said. “I just think you put an awful lot of pressure on yourself.”
For the rest of the evening, Faith tried not to ruminate on that too much, but the words kept turning over and over in her head on the drive back to Levi’s. She swung by her house and put together a toiletries bag, throwing in some pajamas and an outfit for the next day. And all the while she kept thinking...
You’re too hard on yourself. You can make mistakes.
And her resistance to those words worried her more than she would like to admit.
Logically, she was completely all right with this thing with Levi being temporary. With it being a mistake, in many ways. But she was concerned that there was something deep inside her that believed it would become something different. That believed it might work out.
Beneath her practicality she was more of a dreamer than she wanted to acknowledge.
But how could she be anything but a dreamer? It was her job. To create things out of thin air. Even though another part of her always had to make those dreams a practical reality. It wasn’t any good to be an architect if you couldn’t figure out how to make your creations stand, make them structurally sound.
