She put the last bit of her sandwich down on the plate. “Yeah. A lot. It’s just me now in this house, and every little part of it reminds me of her. Of my family. All the things are like echoes of them, but the sources are gone. It gives me chills sometimes,” she said with a shudder.
“Sell it,” I suggested. “Environment matters a lot. If you don’t feel good in your space, it will suck the creativity right out of you.”
“I think I will. I just haven’t had the time to figure it all out with what’s been going on.”
I shifted on the stool. “Molly is lucky to have you. I wish there’d been someone willing to take care of me when my mom passed.”
It hurt to talk about my past, but a part of me craved to open up to her. To make her see that I had reasons for how I behaved toward others. For how I behaved to her.
“You didn’t have any family besides her?” she asked in a quiet voice.
“None who wanted that kind of a responsibility. Some of them were more than twice your age when you decided to stay by Molly’s side. You had a hell of a lot more courage than them.”
She paled and fell silent for a moment. Then she began to speak.
“When our parents died, I was scared as hell. I was nineteen with an underage sister to take care of, and I’d never admit it to Molly, but there were nights early on when I considered running away. My aunt and her husband would have probably stepped in if I left. We aren’t close to them, but they seem like decent enough people. I loved my sister so goddamn much, but I felt like a kid left in charge of another kid, and in my worst moments, I dreamed about the freedom of being on my own. How awful was I for even having those kinds of thoughts?”
Her hand was on the counter, and I covered it with mine. “You weren’t being awful. You were rightfully scared.”
She nodded, and tears glistened in her eyes. “One afternoon, Molly came home from school all smiles. I remember it clearly, because she didn’t smile a lot in the aftermath. She told me she’d won Most Courageous in the yearbook, and that over one hundred students at the school had voted for her. I congratulated her, and while she was eating her dinner in her room, I went to sit in the car in the garage to cry. In the yearbook, it said the definition of courage is ‘the ability to do something that frightens one.’ If my fifteen-year-old sister could be courageous, then what kind of a shit stain was I if I let my fear win?”
I squeezed her hand. “What did you do then?”
She wiped at her eyes. “Once I was done crying, I put the keys in the ignition and drove straight to the tattoo parlor. I got that definition inked down the inside of my biceps, so that I’d never forget.”
Her basic, small-town-girl tattoo. God, how I’d misjudged her.
I rose from the chair and wrapped my arms around her. She hugged me back, her body trembling with silent sobs that told me she didn’t share this story often.
“I’m so sorry, Adeline,” I murmured as her hair tickled at my chin. “I was so preoccupied with my own fear that I never took the time to appreciate how much there was for me to learn from you. You’re amazing, you know that? I wish I had your strength.”
She sobbed louder this time, and we stood in her kitchen wrapped together for what may have been minutes or hours, the clock ticking in the background as I tried to swallow up her pain.
* * *
The guys accosted me as soon as I got home on Wednesday. We had planned to have dinner together, and it looked like Ezra had taken the liberty of bringing takeout with him before I arrived home.
I walked into my kitchen, and all three of them turned their heads to watch me shrug my hoodie off and approach the island.
“Status report, please.”
I reached for a takeout box only to have Cole swipe it away from me.
“Talk first, eat second.”
Fucking bossy bastard.“I think it’s going well.”
“You think?” Ezra asked, his voice careful. “You have two more days left. I think we were all hoping for a bit more than that.”
I rubbed my neck, ignoring the rumbling in my stomach. What had passed between Adeline and I earlier today felt too intimate to share. “We’ve been working most of the time, and it’s been freakishly productive. So that’s going well. When we write, everything is smooth sailing, but as soon as we take a break, the temperature is hard to read.”
“Are we talking Antarctica or New York in the late winter?”
“Both of those are pretty cold,” Silas noted, his expression glum.
“You haven’t freaked out or said anything stupid, have you?” Cole asked, earning a glare from me.
“No,” I told him firmly. “I’ve been letting her drive the process and contributing when I think it will help. You guys have been texting her. Hasn’t she said anything?”
