“No, girl. You should see yourself when you’re pulling something out of the oven. You look almost peaceful.”
Has anyone ever described me as peaceful?
Sharp? Sure. Opinionated? Definitely. Intimidating hits pretty close to home. I’ve been called bitch more times than I can count, starting with my father.
But peaceful? That feels like a dream for someone with a future that isn’t buried under the rubble of her own shit choices.
“We should start discussing that book I haven’t read before it gets too late.” My tone edges toward snark, which might not be joyous, but it’s familiar. “You all are sitting on my bed.” And this conversation has gotten too close to the tender places I’m not ready to examine.
The women exchange glances, but let me redirect. We talk about impossible odds and the courage it takes to fly into danger when the world demands that you stay grounded. Taylor gets emotional about a particular scene, and Iris rolls her eyes but hands her a tissue, then dabs at her own cheeks.
Sadie reaches for another cookie, her wedding band catching the light from the rustic fixture overhead. Ian Barlowe, retired NFL star, fell hard for our resident dog trainer, and watching them together felt like watching a romance novel unfold in real time. Every woman in this room, other than Sloane and me, has found her person. Sadie and Ian. Iris and Jake. Taylor and Eric. Molly and Chase. Now Piper and Felix, with a sweet toddler to raise and their baby growing bigger every day.
I watch these women who’ve become my found family and think about joy. What would it mean to actually find it instead of ignoring its absence and pretending I don’t want something more? Sure, I might fail spectacularly at my bucket list challenge, but I think I’m ready to try.
13
AVAH
The early morningair holds a crispness that makes a six a.m. run the only sensible option. I need to be out and back before the August sun turns Skylark into a high-altitude tanning bed, but my real motivation has nothing to do with cardiovascular health or endorphins.
Not many people are out and about on Main Street at this time of day, which means fewer curious gazes to mark my fall from polished marketing executive to couch-surfing cautionary tale.
I’m not hiding, though.
Who am I kidding? Sloane’s apartment has become my command center for complete reality avoidance. I’ve picked up a boatload of buzzwords from the self-help podcasts I listen to while stress-baking most of the day. I can tell myself I’m regrouping and giving myself space to process.
But my refusal to face the world is less Insta-inspirational.
The story Jon spun when he got back to town without me has taken root. I can feel it in the way people I’ve known for years suddenly become very interested in their phones when they spot me on the sidewalk. It doesn’t help that I won’t let my book club friends tell my side of the story. But as willing as I am to defend thepeople I care about, I’m not at all comfortable being on the receiving end of that same support. What if I’m not worth the effort?
My running shoes hit the sidewalk in a rhythm that matches my racing thoughts. I need to focus on a job, apartment, and future—the holy trinity of problems I’ve been ignoring while pouring all my anxious energy into baked goods nobody asked for.
The marketing career I worked so hard to cultivate is dead in the water. Jon and his father have connections everywhere, and Edward Clark is the kind of man who’d salt the earth before he gave a pass to someone who embarrassed his family. Every networking contact I’ve cultivated over the years has gone suspiciously silent, with emails unanswered and LinkedIn messages ignored. The professional reputation I spent a decade building, wrecked in a matter of weeks.
The storage room in the back of the bookstore is loaded with the personal belongings Sloane collected from Jon’s house because I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) face him. Did I send my friend, who’s still recovering from cancer treatments, to do my dirty work? Yes. Yes, I did.
Sloane offered, and I accepted so fast the words tripped over themselves leaving my mouth. I hate to admit it, but I’m a coward at my core. It’s why I stayed after the first time he grabbed my wrist so hard it bruised skin. And the second and third and all the times after, each one followed by apologies that got less convincing.
Even though the physical marks have healed, I’ll carry what he did to me forever. More importantly, what I let him do. A deep, shameful part of me believed that behavior was acceptable because it’s what my father did to my mom for years. Verbal and physical abuse followed by make-up gifts or cold silences that lasted for days.
You can know with your brain that certain things are wrong and that love isn’t supposed to hurt. But chaotic cruelty was the water I swam in my whole life, so I’m not sure my body knowshow to recognize safety. It mistakes calm for boring or waits for the other shoe to drop. Because the other shoe always drops.
So why do I think of Jeremy every time the wordsafesurfaces?
It feels like another form of dysfunction because he’s dangerous in ways I can’t articulate, even to myself. I know with the same certainty I know my own name that Jeremy would never raise a hand to me. But he’s a threat all the same—to both the walls I’ve spent years constructing, and the parts of me I’ve buried so deep it’s easy to forget they exist.
His eyes held a mixture of hurt and hunger that made goosebumps flare along my spine when he confronted me about ghosting him after our night together. But in the next breath, he demanded that I go to dinner with him and the Johnsons, as if what happened between us in Bora Bora entitles him to my cooperation.
I’m done feeling entitled to anyone.
But God, the longing in his voice when he saidI need you. Like I’m the only person in the world who could give him what he wanted.
No man has ever looked at me the way Jeremy does. It’s nowhere near the ruthless control Jon masked as desire or the calculating assessment my father deployed when evaluating people’s usefulness. Jeremy looks at me like my sharp edges don’t scare him, and maybe he wants to get close enough to be cut.
I know he’s still in town. Sloane invited me to join them for dinner at his house outside of town. He told me a little more about it when we were walking on the beach, and it sounded like it might be the place that most felt like home to him.
But I don’t necessarily want to sit across a table and pretend the memory of the way he held me when I came apart isn’t seared into my brain, not to mention my heart.
