It wasn’t fine. All these years later, I could hear in her voice that it was not fine.
“Sarah, I’m telling you this because while your mom was eviscerating me on the welcome mat, I looked over her shoulder and saw your sister, Sue, crossing the hall with your journal in her hands.” She tapped the table. “Remember the one you always used to carry in high school? The one—”
“—that had all my embarrassing, blubbering essays on my feelings for Micah, Rhodes, and Alex,” I choked out. “Along with the business card Rhodes gave me when we promised to make a date for my eighteenth birthday.
“She took my journal.” My voice was flat. Dead. “My private thoughts and feelings. She stole it and weaponized it—doing everything she could to hurt me even after I was gone.”
A cold hand slipped into mine, squeezing tightly. “How did she even get it?”
“Omma didn’t let me pack my things before she threw me out,” I said to a pink-and-green-painted wall. “She didn’t let me take anything but the car, and that was only because the car would get me the fuck out of her face quicker.
“The journal was still upstairs in my bedroom, but I had it hidden in the air vent to keep it from Sue’s grubby, nosy hands. With me not there to stop her, she must’ve snooped around until she found it.”
“I’m so sorry, babe.”
I groaned, sinking down in the chair. “I don’t want to talk about that monster anymore. I came because I needed to tell someone the truth... and because I need someone to tell me the truth.” I leaned over, grasping both her hands. “Is what I’m doing insane? Should I just come clean to everyone and hope they’ll understand?”
She was shaking her head before I finished. “No, Sarah. That is exactly what the fuck you don’t do. If you come clean now, it’ll spectacularly blow up in your face, and I’m not sitting on my ass without a clue while my best friend gets chased out of my life for the second time.”
I blinked at her. Courtney was the wilder one of the two of us, but she was also the voice of reason. If anyone was going to give me the push to stop the lies, I thought it would be her. “But, how can you be sure telling the truth will blow up in my face?”
“Because you just told me that Sue’s husbands hate her,” she dropped. “They hate her for being the lying, scheming, manipulative bitch that we know she’s been for the last ten years. So what happens when the sister that Sue and Omma hid pulls asurprise, sucker!on them?
“They’re not going to give you the benefit of the doubt. They’re just going to think Omma gave birth to two lying, scheming bitches, and how will you convince them they’re wrong?” She gave me a wry look. “Upon meeting them again for the second time in ten years, the first thing you did... was lie. Not a ringing endorsement of your character.”
“But I had to!” I threw out my hands. “I didn’t want to lie to them, but Davis was standing right there. The fucker just wouldn’t leave! How could I tell them the truth in front of a cop?”
“Sarah, I know that,” she soothed. “I know you had good reason to lie, and I know that you’re the best person ever, butthey don’t. You’re nothingbut a stranger to them. A stranger who threw their dead wife off a cliff, then moved into her bedroom.”
I winced.
“How would you react if you were them?”
The words were pulled out of me. “I’d chase me out of town.”
She dipped her head, nodding to the right answer. “And you know I’d want to move you in with me if they did, but your girl lives in a little shoebox apartment above this café with her kid, so there’s no room.”
I gasped, jumping up. “Kid?! Courtney Rose Thorne, have you been out here having babies that I don’t know about?”
She grinned from ear to ear. “Yes, ma’am, I have, and that’s because I was having all kinds of unprotected sex you didn’t know about.” She fished her phone out of her apron, and showed me the sweet, smiling kid waving on her home screen. “I caught this little munchkin from a one-night stand who blew through town one weekend and never came back.
“That’s why I named her Chlamydia.”
“What!”
She burst out laughing, falling off her chair. “I’m kidding,” she shrieked. “Her name is Taylor, you freak.”
I busted up so hard, I cried. Gods, did I need this. I couldn’t remember the last time I full-blown belly-laughed. But Courtney was always the best person for that. Her wicked sense of humor would have me struggling to breathe in the back of class while the teacher shouted at us to be quiet or get out.
“Tell me everything about her.”
Courtney beamed like the proud mama she was. “My Tay-Tay is five. She loves puppies, horses, and her kindergarten teacher. Loves him so much in fact, she’s ordered me to marry him.”
Courtney rolled her eyes, but I knew her too well too.
“And you want to,” I said, blunt as a truck.
Her blush came on hot and fast. “I didn’t say that. I mean, sure, Mr. Stevens is sweet, and kind, and amazing with children—especially Taylor—but I’m just starting to get back on my feet. The last thing I need right now is a messy relationship with my daughter’s teacher.”
