Time to stop hiding.
I climb out of the car and make my way around to the trunk, only to see Gavin has beaten me to it and has all the luggage in his hands.
Following him to the front door, where Larkin is waiting, she yanks the door open and wraps me in a warm, comforting hug. I embrace her, breathing her in and feeling a sense of calm I haven’t since my phone call with Craig Sutter.
“Come in. I have a feeling we have a lot to talk about.”
Following Larkin in, I see Theo cooking dinner in their kitchen. I throw him a wave as I walk into the living room and collapse on the couch. I watch Gavin climb the stairs with my luggage, taking it to the guest room.
“Okay, spill.” Larkin sits next to me, handing me a glass of wine.
I chug half of it before word-vomiting everything that’s happened in the last couple of days.
“Well, shit,” Larkin says, then takes a sip of her wine.
“Yep. Too much is happening, and I feel like I’m drowning.”
“Okay, let’s start with something easy. Your old job and this ‘investigation’ they’re doing. How do you feelabout it?”
“I feel conflicted,” I say honestly. “I mean, I’m glad karma is getting Lance, but why now? Why ruin my entire career before it’s taken seriously?”
“I get that, and it is really shitty that they just now realize what a dick head he is.”
“But then I think if all that wouldn’t have had happened, I wouldn’t have gone back to Bluebell Falls…” I trail off.
“And if you hadn’t moved back, you wouldn’t have met Ledger,” she fills in.
“Exactly, and Ledger is … everything,” I sigh out. “But I fucked that up too.”
“Okay, number one, you did not fuck up anything. Get over this pity party, thinking you fucked up all the things. Number two, how do you know you fucked things up with Ledger? Did you handle things well? I don’t think so, but you’re stressed and your knee-jerk reaction to finding out the gossip club figured you out was to lash out. Not the best approach, but from the little I know about that man, I don’t think you fucked anything up.”
“But I was so mean to him,” I whisper.
“Yes, you were. And you’ll probably need to grovel because he didn’t deserve that. He wasn’t responsible for any of it.”
“I know.”
“And why are you wanting to hide things, anyway? It’s not like you can get in trouble for dating the boss. The rules are different for you than it was for Theo and me.”
“I …”Why did I want to hide things so badly?
It’s only now that I’m truly thinking about it that I realize every decision I’ve made about my relationship with Ledger was made of fear.
And it makes me angry at myself.
Angry that “getting my life together” now feels like it was only on the surface level. Angry that the first thing I did when things didn’t go the way I wanted them to was run.
This isn’t who I want to be. This isn’t who IthoughtI was. The burst of clarity is like a sunrise over the ocean. And I see my whole path clearly for the first time in far too long.
“Okay, I need to figure this out. I don’t know why I wanted to hide things with Ledger, but I think I just realized everything I’ve done in the last six months is because of fear, and I don’t want to live like that anymore.”
Hello, third-life crisis, my name’s Ainsley.
“Okay, that’s good. Not the fear part but the realization part,” Larkin says, taking another sip of wine.
“Since I moved home, my goal has been to figure out where I go from here, right?” She nods. “Okay, so the only thing I’ve figured out is that I don’t want to be back in corporate America, and I don’t want to go back to a financial firm. I want to pave my own way.” The more I talk, the stronger I feel.
“That’s good. So, let’s start with the job. Any thoughts on what youwantto do?” Larkin asks.
