I turned to face Mom, pleading silently for help. She reached out and squeezed my hand.
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to take care of them right now,” I said to Brianna. “Mom’s place isn’t bigenough and my apartment definitely isn’t, even if Brooklyn was okay with it.” I doubted she would be. Brooklyn didn’t like kids. I wasn’t sure she’d ever have any of her own. I shoved a hand into my hair. “You’d seriously have us move them this late in the school year?” There were less than three months left.
“C’mon, Tal, even you have to agree that if I get this job, I need to take it. Would you really want me to pass up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity like this?”
I don’t know that I’d call “household chef for a family of four” —which was just a trumped up title for a glorified nanny—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but it was her dream. “No, you need to do it. I get that.”
Mom squeezed my hand again. “We’ll figure it out,” she whispered. “Just let her do this.” I was pretty sure from the determination in Brianna’s voice that I couldn’t stop her if I tried.
Brianna let out an ear-splitting whistle making me flinch. Looked like she’d already mastered hailing a cab. “Then we agree,” she said. “If I get the job, you and Mom will take the kids.”
I sighed as I watched Theo and Charlie sleeping in the rearview mirror. “Yeah.” I ached for them. First, they’d lost their dad who just took off one day without so much as a goodbye. Now they were going to lose their mom too. Brianna would get this job. If she was nothing else, she was a phenomenal chef. She deserved this. Who was I to hold her back? “Go live your dreams, Bri. We’re cheering for you from Seddledowne.”
“Thank you, sis.”
We hung up and I leaned my cheek against the cool glass of the passenger side window. Mom let go of my hand and returned to the business of driving.
When we turned onto the back road where Ford’s ranchwas located, my stomach clenched. “I wish you hadn’t agreed for us to eat over here,” I said.
Seeing Ashton in class three times a week, while Ashley sat next to me, posting her TikTok’s about his bedroom eyes, had frazzled my nerves. And now, she’d moved on to his lips and his butt. His very fine butt. So whenever my brain decided to take a moment of downtime from replaying our kiss—which had seared itself into my long-term—it was now bombarding me with visuals of Ashton’s various toned body parts. Just awesome.
I’d already turned down an invite from Anna. Things between Ash and I were tense enough. We didn’t need an audience. But Mom had run into Anna’s grandma, Jenny, when she was getting her car inspected two hours ago. So now we were eating dinner with the Duprees. All of them. If I’d had more notice I would’ve done my hair and washed my clothes. As it was, I was down to my last too-tight T-shirt and my hair had been in a braid for two days.
“I told you, you don’t have to come if you don’t want to.” Mom smiled at the rearview. They were conked out. Theo on the bottom, with Charlie lying across his back.
“I don’t really have a choice.” I exhaled the stress out through my nose. Sending Mom to eat with the Duprees without me would make me look even more selfish and bratty than kissing Ashton and breaking Madden’s heart. They already probably thought I was a terrible person. I didn’t need to add to that.
Mom sighed. “The Duprees have been very good to us. And I thought you might like to celebrate your friend’s birthday.”
My friend? I hadn’t spoken to Ashton in months. Her tone hinted that she did not approve of how I’d handled the fallout from The Kiss. And by handled, I mean, not handling it at all.
I grabbed the end of my hair, working through a tangle. “Just because they let us live in Sophie’s old place for a couple of months once doesn’t mean we have to be best friends with them for the rest of our lives. Even if it is Ash’s birthday. I doubt he even wants me there.” We’d lived at Sophie’s my junior year of high school when we were between houses. And yes, I normally loved the Duprees. That wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that maybe I loved one of them too much.
I’d had a lot of time to think on it over the past couple of months, and the longer I had, the more the feelings had settled in. I was hoping the opposite would be true and that I could just move on. But no.
“Take a deep breath, honey,” Mom said. “It’s just a meal with some friends. I think this is a metaphorical smoking of the peace pipe.” She squeezed my hand. “They love you, Tal. They just want you to know it.”
Those words made my chest tighten. They shouldn’t love me. “What kind of terrible person kisses one guy when she’s engaged to another?”
Mom rubbed circles over my knuckles. “The kind who’s confused and trying to figure out if she’s doing the right thing. It doesn’t make you a bad person, sweetie. Better to know before you said I do.”
But she was wrong. Iwasa bad person. Good people didn’t do the things I’d done.
The words of my therapist slammed into my mind the way they did every time I had that thought.You didn’t do something bad. Something bad happened to you. Big difference.
Mom gave me a soft smile. “It’s hard when you’re in love with a guy who terrifies you.” Her hand fell away as she hit the blinker to turn into the entrance of Ford’s compound.
She braked at the gate and typed in the code Jenny had given her.
My hands fell still in my lap. “Are we talking about Madden or Ash?”
“You tell me.”
I leaned my head against the glass. “Ash.”
The gate began to open.
