“What’re you scared of, Cleo?” she asked, gently prodding me. “Talk to me. That’s the point of these sessions.”
I rubbed my temple. “I don’t want to break something.”
Laura nodded, urging me to get to the point. “And why is that?”
I grabbed the daisy, staring at it in the palm of my hand. There’d be no fixing it. No amount of cleaning could undo the damage I’d done to it. It’d be easier to get a new one. Maybe I should. Maybe it didn’t work anymore because it was broken and?—
“Cleo.”
I forced myself to meet Laura’s gaze through the screen. “Sometimes broken things can’t be fixed,” I admitted quietly, looking back down at the stress ball. “Sometimes they stay broken.”
That was how I’d felt lately.
Broken.
I loved being home, but sometimes it brought out a side of me I didn’t care for. The moment I crossed the property line of Black Springs Ranch, my dad’s pride and joy, I reverted to my role as the eldest daughter just as I’d always done.
It scared me how easily I fell into the swing of things again. Even though I’d been gone for years, it was almost like I’d never left. I loved spending time with my family, especially my sisters. There’d been too much of an age gap between us to bond when we were growing up, but it’d been different as adults.
Watching Josie and Lennox grow into themselves was strangely rewarding. I wasn’t their parent, but the seven and nine-year age gaps between us meant I sometimes struggled to balance the relationship between sister and caregiver. We’d fought about it so many times. It was always the same. I tried, in my own way, to make them understand things about life I wished I’d known when I was their age, but it always turned into someone screaming at me that I wasn’t their mother and couldn’t tell them what to do.
I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t feel a little pride at the strong young women they turned into, even if it meant I wasn’t as close to them as they were to each other.
Knowing we were going to be together again as adults had been a bright spot in my otherwise gloomy life, but the one thing I wasn’t prepared for was the reality that their lives were now more on track than my own.
Josie had recently fallen back in step with her five-night summer fling from last year. They were inseparable. Where one went, the other followed. Before they’d gotten together a few months ago, Josie had been dating the king of douchebags. No one liked Ellis, and for good reason, but Lincoln Carter was different.
Even though it hadn’t been long, anyone with eyes could tellthe man was helplessly in love with her. It bordered on obsessive, but Josie had deserved someone who would put her first every single time.
And Lennox? Oh, my baby sister hadn’t so much as uttered a word about her love life, but I had a sneaking suspicion she and our ranch foreman weren’t too far behind. Lennox and Bishop were always fighting and bickering, but there was this electrifying tension, too. They were probably the only two people who didn’t clock it, choosing instead to live in oblivion.
Then there was me. Going through a messy divorce at thirty-five and living in my childhood bedroom. Clearly, I was thriving.
No matter where I looked, I was surrounded by people maddeningly in love, chasing the rush of euphoria they all seemed to be consumed by. When it was only my mom and dad’s over-the-top public displays of affection, it was easy to shrug off. They were my parents; in a perfect world, that was how it was supposed to be, wasn’t it?
They were the best role models I could’ve asked for—kind, patient, and loving. More importantly, though, they showed us what a healthy relationship looked like. And not just the good parts, either.
As we grew up, they made sure we knew life and love wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes, it was going to be hard to put one foot in front of the other. Relationships of any kind were hard without proper nurturing, but it didn’t matter because at the end of the day, the thought of living without your person was too much to bear.
Seeing my parents’ devotion to one another filled me with the hope that maybe I could have that one day, too, but it wasn’t their fault I let myself be duped by love.
I wanted to be blind with passion. I wanted to feel free, to soar through the sky like a bluebird spreading its wings. I wanted to know if I fell, someone would be there to help me back up again.
Honestly, I wanted a lot of things I knew weren’t in the cards for me anymore.
I’d been close to having it all. Twice, actually—though I tried not to think about the first. Thomas and I met my freshman year of college. We shared a class together. After years of keeping my nose in textbooks instead of putting myself out there, he finally won out.
He’d been cute. Stupidly, so. I was charmed by his boyish good looks and those green eyes that promised mischief. The rest of our story? Well, it was much more complicated than I ever let anyone know.
When things were good between us, they weregood. Great, even. The first six years were some of the happiest of my life. When things started going south, I told myself it was just a part of life we needed to get through. A storm to weather. I was more than willing to step up and be whoever he needed me to be if it took some of his stress away.
But Thomas saw my generosity as my being a doormat. It didn’t take him long to wipe his dirty boots against my dignity, to dig in his heels and grind me down just to free himself of whatever debris clung to his soul.
It would’ve been easy to blame my parents for why I stayed in my marriage for so long—clinging to the hope I might someday have what they did. Or I could’ve looked at the men who still haunted me, laying the blame at their feet instead of my own. But pointing fingers at others never did any good. Especially considering I was the common denominator.
There were parts of me missing. Parts I still didn’t know how to get back, even after intensive and continuous therapy. Some mornings, I didn’t recognize who I was. The woman in the mirror was an empty shell of someone I once knew.
I normally kept it to myself. The only person I’d ever openly admitted everything to was Rachel, but that’d been after many tears and just as many vodka tonics. She encouraged me to talkto Laura, which I begrudgingly did. To this day, they were the only two people who knew every part of my story, even those secrets I’d kept close to my chest.
