“I just broke up with Andrew. Again.” I paused. “And he was, like, super pissed.” My heart was still racing from our exchange—and also with the fear that maybe I had done the wrong thing.
“Yikes,” Marcy said. “The good news is, you’ll be bringing Price home tonight to ease your pain.”
“I will not,” I protested.
“Will not what?” The back door slammed. Ah, Quinn. My pretty-much-back-to-normal sister.
I’d never seen anything quite like it, the way she bounced back. I mean, she didn’t bounce all the way back. She was like a normal human now. She wasn’t snorting lines off my bathroom counter, but she also wasn’t pushing pamphlets. She seemed to have found some middle ground.
“So,” Diana said. “I hear you’ve crossed back over from the dark side.”
“Ha-ha,” Quinn said, opening the fridge. She grabbed a can of whipped cream and sprayed it into her mouth.
“Quinn, honestly.”
“What do you have all that whipped cream for anyway?” she asked.
Marcy laughed, and Diana looked at me pointedly. Simultaneously, they said, “Andrew.”
I felt my face redden. “Marcy, I shared that with you in the confidence of best friends.”
“Oh, puhleeze,” Diana said, “do you think I was born yesterday?” She sashayed across the room, wiggled her eyebrows at me, and said, “Do you think I haven’t had my share of whipped cream?”
“Ooh la la,” Marcy said. “Pregnant lady’s a little saucy.”
“So,” Diana said as Quinn hoisted herself onto the counter, firmly planting her rear end on my marble, “do we need to get you in the witness protection program or something?”
I was going to miss that wit of hers. Frank had been by and asked me to let her go. I liked Frank, I did, and I wanted the best for Diana. But if she wasn’t ready to let go of her job, I sure wasn’t going to push her out. Plus, I couldn’t even think about not seeing her every day. I never would have imagined it from that day we met at Meds and More, but I felt like, in some weird way, we were always meant to find each other.
Quinn shrugged. “Nah. I think stabbing Elijah scared him pretty good.” She sprayed her whipped cream can again. “Imean, I know the Bible says women should be subservient to their husbands, but, damn. I have limits, you know?”
She still hadn’t told me exactly what happened that night, and I wasn’t totally sure I wanted to know.
Marcy opened the fridge and popped the top on a can of sparkling water. She leaned over the counter, her impossibly long, tan legs peeking out of her frayed jean shorts. “So how, pray tell, did you decult?” She took a sip. “I mean, purely for therapy research purposes, of course.” She winked at me.
“It’s so weird. It’s like, all of a sudden, I realized that this man was a nutjob. Like, I don’t doubt he loved me or anything, but I just saw him really clearly for who he was. And he wasn’t good.” She shrugged. “I’m still glad he got me in church and everything. But I realized that the Jesus I was getting to know would have wanted more for me than a man trying to tell me what to do every second.”
“And the stabbing was because…?” Marcy prodded.
“I came home from the store and was getting ready to cook the spatchcock chicken Elijah had requested for dinner that night, and I walked in the bathroom and all my makeup was gone.”
She had all of our attention. “Just as I was cutting the whole chicken apart, Elijah came in, and I asked him where all my stuff was, and he said he threw it out, and he was super pissed because he found birth control pills in my makeup bag. Of course, I got pissed because he’d thrown out about five hundred dollars’ worth of Trish McEvoy and three months of birth control. And then he started getting all mad and crazy-eyed, so Istabbed him in the arm with a pair of scissors to keep him from getting closer.” I’m pretty sure my mouth was hanging open. “In fairness, I warned him that I would.”
She told the story in a tone that would lead you to believe she was saying,One day I was walking to the mailbox, and I saw a butterfly.
Marcy twirled her finger by her head, signifying that my sister was cra-zy. Diana cocked her head, peered at Quinn, and said, “Remind me never to ask you to babysit.”
“Quinn,” I said. “For goodness’ sake. You stabbed the man with scissors?”
She rolled her eyes and hopped down off the counter. “It was three stitches, Gray, and it was self-defense. He’s fine.”
“Anyway…” Diana said, “maybe instead of talking aboutBreaking Amishover here, we could talk a little bit about my wedding plans.”
And we did. All afternoon long. We talked about music and flowers and tents, and Diana hadn’t thought she wanted a wedding, but you could tell by the flash in her eyes that the more we planned and the more ideas we had, the more she was in love with the thought of celebrating in this very magical way.
And, as excited as I was about my date that night, I couldn’t lie to myself about the fact that when I pictured myself in Diana’s shoes, I couldn’t really see Price standing at the other end of the aisle.
When Pinterest was first introduced and Greg and I were trying to grow our platform for ClickMarket, we used to have a weekly competition. We’d each pick five pins and bet which one would get the most likes and re-pins that week. Loser had to buy the entire staff drinks on Friday night.
