The truth was, Sam had never felt like a brother to her. Possibly because she didn’t know what it felt like to have a brother, or any sort of intact family.
“Okay.” Daisy clapped her hands like a punctuation mark. “We can’t stand in here chatting aboutboysforever. Boys are what got us into this mess in the first place. We have moving to do.”
Soraya nodded. “I don’t feel like I can take anything that he could accuse me of stealing. But then ... I didn’t buy any of these things for myself. He made all the money. Everything is his.”
Daisy gripped Soraya’s shoulders and turned her to face her. “You had his kids. You raised his kids. You did that as a full-time job.”
“Not really. I love my kids. They aren’t a job, they’re ...”
“But you didn’t work so he could. You kept his house and cooked his dinners and created this sanctuary. These things are yours too.”
Soraya nodded slowly and took a long breath. “I have everything boxed up. It’s just ... It’s been hard.”
So they helped. They shared the burden. Lifted the boxes and brought them out to the truck. With Nora’s insistence, they took the living room furniture. Took the table out of the breakfast nook, because they wouldn’t need a whole dining table, and one wouldn’t fit anyway. Took the pillows that Soraya liked best, her favorite blankets. Candles and pictures, clothes. All her kitchen supplies.
It fit into a pretty small corner of the moving truck.
Soraya wrinkled her nose. “Okay. Let’s go.”
Chapter Sixteen
Soraya
Life will be hard whether you dance or not. So dance anyway.
—Rules for Witches
As they brought the last of the boxes into her apartment, Soraya was overwhelmed by gratitude. She’d been overwhelmed by the feeling that she had lost her entire safety net, her whole network, in one fell swoop, and here other people had rallied to help her.
It was humbling, honestly. Particularly because she had spent so many years being insular and not reaching out to anyone outside of the church.
Not that Nora had been nice to her back then, it was just ... it was just she hadn’t been any better.
Daisy was always nice to everybody. If anybody deserved to hook up with Zach Woods, it was Daisy.
For some reason, that thought made Soraya’s heart beat faster.
Daisy was free to do what she wanted.
Soraya had never been free in that same way.
It’s wrong anyway.
That thought, desperate and coming from deep within her, was the old version of herself clawing its way into her consciousness to try to find a foothold.
But it didn’t have the impact it used to.
Well, life was complicated, which was something she had never given much credit to before, and people made the best choices they could in the middle of all of it. Maybe she would hook up with somebody. Maybe.
What would that be like? It was a weird thought to have, standing in this new apartment that had some of the pieces from her old life but also felt entirely new.
Much like her.
There were still a lot of old pieces inside her. Old feelings, old fears.
Yet there was this desperate need for something new. For something that felt good. Better. At least this felt powerful.
She’d been sad earlier, packing up all her things, but now that she thought about David coming into the house and finding half the stuff gone, she felt empowered.
