“How do you know it’s about me?”
“One…duh,” Avah says. “And two, Cody told me when they came into The Sugar Shack the morning you left town. Jensen tried to shut him up, but Cody doesn’t take direction well.”
“Play the rest,” I command, my voice hoarse.
I listen to the chorus cycle back around, and this time every word registers differently.
Down some road I haven’t driven.
In some life I haven’t lived.
When the song ends, my apartment is quiet except for the ambient noise of Main Street through the old windows—a car passing, someone laughing on the sidewalk… The ordinary sounds of a town that doesn’t know how a song just unraveled every truth I thought I knew.
Taylor wraps her hand around mine more tightly. “He wrote it for you, Sloane. And he did find you again. He saw all the things you’re afraid make you too much to love, and he kept showing up anyway. Because of who you are.”
The tears I’ve been holding back spill over, and I don’t wipe them away. There’s no need to pretend for people who’ve seen me at my worst and love me anyway.
“I don’t know if I’m brave enough,” I admit. “To let him in.”
“You hiked into grizzly country alone,” Piper says. “You’re brave enough.”
“That was different. It was physical. This is?—”
“Harder,” Taylor finishes.
She would know. Taylor understands that sometimes being loved well can feel more frightening than being alone. All of them do.
I look at these women who have been here any time I need them. Piper, who had to be brave enough to let herself be happy. Iris, with her love language that is part brutal honesty and part unwavering loyalty. Molly lost her husband and rebuilt her life without losing the softness that makes her Molly. Sadie let herself be loved by a man she never expected. Taylor stopped hiding. Avah found her joy.
Every one of them chose the scary thing. They let someone see the parts they’d been protecting.
“You have the map to him now,” Avah says, raising a brow. “It might be time to use it.”
I want that down to my bones. I want to show up at his door and tell him I’m not a project and he’s not a caretaker. I want to tell him his value isn’t in what he provides, but in who he is. But wanting a person and being brave enough to reach for them are two different things.
“I’ll think about it,” I say, like my heart hasn’t already locked in.
“Liar,” Avah says, but she’s smiling.
After they leave, with promises to check in tomorrow and threats to drag me to brunch if I try to isolate, I stand at the window and look down at Main Street. Skylark is quiet at thishour, the shops dark, the hanging baskets of flowers just shadows in the streetlights. It looks the same as it did before I left.
But I’m not the same.
I stepped onto that trail needing to prove I’m not fragile. And I did. But I’ve also spent way too much energy trying to decide which parts of me deserved love. Jensen was there for all of them.
Until I told him to go.
I press my forehead against the glass.
Am I brave enough to step up with everything I am and say, choose me? Claim me.
I’m not sure, but tonight the wanting is louder than the fear. Not by much. Not enough to pick up the phone or buy a plane ticket or do anything reckless and grand. Yet.
But I know for certain that safety isn’t what I’m after. I want more.
30
JENSEN
