She closed her eyes and wished she could teleport back to when she’d originally signed the deal with Jack’s company, before Kent left. When she’d still had hope. Still felt a sense of calm in her life.
Rachel poured another stream of wine into April’s glass. “Everything will blow over. This really could happen to anybody. A lot of the comments say so.”
That was very much not true. April’s crumbs of hope were disappearing. She shook her head.
“This wouldn’t happen to you,” she said, sipping the liquid balm in her wineglass.
Nuh-uh. This would never have happened toRachel, because Rachel wouldn’t have allowed it. Rachel had systems. She did her job with precision. Even now, when her blond hair fell over her shoulders in messy waves, it might have officially been messy, but it looked like it was supposed to be exactly as it fell. Messy chic. Even her creamy skin had just enough makeup to look like she tried without screamingI tried!
Yes, April wanted to believe her. Really, she did. But the bottom just kept dropping out of her world. Look, April wasn’t one to wallow, but enough was e-freaking-nough.
She needed to take her own advice and think of something good that had happened in her life. Just one thing. One little thing.
The kitchen door opened and she glanced up.
Her best friend and neighbor, Simone, peeked inside. “Is it safe to come in?”
“Did you bring doughnuts?” April asked.
“It’s like you don’t even know me.” Simone sauntered through the door, her hips swishing, dropping a box of doughnuts on the table. “Of course I brought doughnuts. Pink sprinkles and all. Has Kitty shown up with the rum yet?”
Kitty, her other neighbor, was surprisingly absent. April sort of figured she’d be on the front porch waiting for her after the implosion. Because even with a serious aversion to boundaries, Kitty was always very neighborly when life rained lemons. In truth, she was always neighborly. Sometimes she took her responsibilities as the neighborhood busybody a bit too seriously.
April eyed Simone. Simone and her wife, Yelena, moving in next door was definitely a good thing. They’d scooted right into her life and became family. Their friendship was a very good thing.
Some might even call it a calming thing.
Case in point? Simone had doughnuts and a soft smile that made April believe, for a moment, that it’d all be okay.
Simone was an artist—she weaved baskets and sold them for obnoxious amounts of cash. Yelena was a pediatrician. They had two kids who spent as much time at April’s as they did at home, which was fine because April’s kids were becoming free-rangers, too, spending an abundance of time next door.
“Did you see it?” April asked, already knowing the answer.
Of course Simone had watched. She gave a subtle head nod. “But you looked beautiful, and notallthe comments were bad…”
Damn. Even Simone thought it was a lost cause.
“Simone,” April said, pinning her friend with her name. She didn’t want to ask, but she had to. “Am I going to come back from this?”
Simone wouldn’t sugarcoat things. She was a pull-the-bandage-off kind of friend. She was that kind of mom, too.
She didn’t meet April’s eyes, though, just looked everywhere but at April. Shealwaysmet April’s eyes. That was her thing. Perhaps she was a nonconformist with her free-range parenting choices, but she was a straight shooter with everything else.
“You can move past anything,” Simone dodged. “Hard things happen, but they don’t have to break us.” Okay, so apparently she was ready to go into the greeting-card-writing business. “Though sometimes things aren’t salvageable.”
Right. So, uh, yeah.Thatwas not going on a greeting card.
“It doesn’t mean that you’re not The Calm Mom,” Simone continued. “It just means that, perhaps, you need to rethink what your brand means.”
Um. No.
April and Jack’s team had spent an obscene amount of time working out her angle. Who she was. Her mission.
She couldn’t just rethink what that meant because of one stumbling block.
No, she had to figure out a way to get back on track. Preferably before she talked to Jack. See? Not reaching out to him was a good thing. It gave her time to regroup.
She let her eyelids fall closed, pulled a bucketful of oxygen into her lungs. Held it. Then released.
