Jules scrambled off the desk. She grabbed the highlighter, then plopped it back in its place.
Not just in the highlighter container, but between the yellow and pink highlighters, so it was as close to rainbow order as possible.
Anna put a hand to her throat. “Ohmigod, Jules, I think I might cry.”
Jules smacked her shoulder again, but she was smiling when she left Anna’s cube.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
She’d learned the ways of her new home, but she had yet to master them. And that was the critical difference.
—The Temptress of Pecan Lane, by Mae Daniels
The day after Thanksgiving, Anna’s phone woke her at o-dark-early. She fumbled for it, heart clenching in her chest, and had a double-panic when she saw her sister’s cell number. She answered it in a rush. “Beth?”
“Hey, Anna-banana.”
Anna heard bells and a mass of voices in the background. She blew out a breath and draped a hand over her chest while her pulse fluttered back to normal.
“Mom and I are in Nordstrom, and we saw thecutestreindeer sweatshirt,” Beth said. “What size are you wearing these days?”
“Happy Black Friday, sweetheart,” her mom called through the phone.
The thundering in her heart slowed to a trot. “I don’t need a reindeer sweatshirt.”
“But you know how much the boys love to give you sweatshirts for Christmas!”
She didn’t have to be there to know Beth was muffling hersnickers in the sleeve of whatever gaudy sweatshirt their mother had picked.
Anna sighed. “My blender broke last week. Maybe they could get me a new one instead. I could tell them I was gonna make me up some squirrel soup with it.”
The silence stretched between them, broken only by the bells and the crush of other shopping noises.
“Mom says you sound Southern,” Beth said.
“I—crap.”
“Somebody’s been spending too much time with her boyfriend,” Beth said in the singsong voice she used on her younger patients.
It would’ve been in her family’s best interest for her to deny the boyfriend part. To let them think this was a crazy post-divorce fling. To prepare them for when she and Jackson split ways.
Because it would happen.
Eventually. When he got orders.
Even though it’d hurt like tearing off a Band-Aid.
Or maybe like being run over by a herd of rabid elephants on steroids. But she’d survive. Because that was what she did. She survived.
“How’s work?” Beth asked.
Okay, she eeked by. But she did it on her own, and that was what counted. “Busy. Haven’t seen much of anyone between getting ready for finals and working some overtime. But Kaci and Lance put on a nice Thanksgiving dinner yesterday. How was the Vaughns’ annual snow-blow extravaganza?”
While Anna considered getting out of bed, Beth launched into a story about her in-laws’ traditional Thanksgiving snowmobile run, and the danger in which they put her poor fourteen-year-old baby boy by letting him ride along.
Jackson wouldn’t be here for several hours—heaven forbid she be allowed to drive two hours to his family’s house by herself—and she’d stayed up studying after getting homefrom Kaci and Lance’s.
For her first post-divorce holiday, it hadn’t been bad. Kaci could, in fact, cook a decent turkey, and the homemade macaroni and cheese had been unbelievable.
