Chapter Twenty-Two
Bachelors, Bachelorettes and Breakdowns
Naomi had spenta lot of her life helping someone else pull themselves back together after a breakdown.She’d also had breakdowns of her own.
None of them felt like this.
Sitting in the lobby of the office building where she’d been with Jason moments before, she thought her insides were leaving her body, shards of glass replacing what had been her heart.She didn’t know what to do.
Or who to call.
Jason had been the number she’d call in situations like this, his voice the most comforting she’d ever heard.
Now he wasn’t.
There was only one number she could call and hope to find someone sympathetic at the other end.
Leah.
Her fingers practically trembled with each number she dialed.The tears that threatened to erupt were acid in her throat.
“Hello?”
Without even giving a pause, Naomi said the two most important words she could think of.“I’m sorry.”
“Why do I get the feeling something’s happened?Probably because you sound horrible.”
Her pragmatic cousin forced her back to reality for a time.“I feel horrible,” she managed as the scratch in her throat made speaking hard.“I feel absolutely horrible.”
“Where are you?”
Not trusting her voice, she sent Leah a screenshot of her location.
Within seconds, she got a text, confirming a car had been ordered from a rideshare, sent to her location to bring her to Leah.
And then she told her cousin the second most important set of words she could think of.“I love you,” she said.
The first time she’d said that phrase since she told Jason how she’d felt.And then she burst into tears, all over again.
*
The idea oftelling Ash or Samuel or Artur any of what had happened made his stomach turn to the River Styx inside of him.
But he had to tell someone, so it was his brother who got the story, in Briarwood at the kitchen table.
“You…I don’t even know what to tell you now,” his brother said.“I’m not going to tell you that you were a complete jerk to the one person who stood by you when they didn’t have to.”
“Stood by me?”he said.Apparently his brother wasn’t going to be a sympathetic ear.“She completely screwed up everything I’ve been working toward with three words.Everything.”
“You really screwed up everything?”his brother asked.“Sy, who hated you, now absolutely adores you.Worships the ground you walk on.Which is the kind of security that I couldn’t buy before.That whole ‘honor to my name’ speech was fricking brilliant.”
“I said it from the heart,” Jason replied, once again thinking that he’d moved into an entirely different set of stories than the knish family drama he was living in.“But she said I needed a care-keeper.”
“Those words don’t mean what you think they do,” his brother said.“You think Sy was going to listen to a word she said other than ‘yes, sir; thank you, sir?”
“She did the research.She should have said something like: ‘My guy is brilliant and doesn’t need a keeper.’”
“What, and have him look at you like: dude, you need to control your woman?”There was a pause.“And you know I’m right with this one.”
