“You believe me?”
“I wouldn’t go that far.” Eve slanted a look in my direction. “Honestly, Lolly, I don’t know what to believe, but you know what? I don’t care it if was a miracle or a dream or a result of LSD-laced gumdrops.”
“Lemon drops,” I corrected her.
“Whatever. I’m in favor of anything that gets you unstuck in your life. If this lets you move on, I’m all for it. Far-fetched as it sounds.”
I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. “You don’t think I’m crazy?”
“Oh, I think you’re completely crazy.” Eve slapped dust and bits of chaff from the knees of her Carhartts. “But that doesn’t mean this isn’t a good thing.”
I was quiet for a minute. “Remember Perth? That phone call?”
She laughed low in her throat. “Yeah, I remember. The night I finally lost it. A ‘complete emotional breakdown’ I think is how my therapist later described it. What about it?”
“I think this is my Perth.”
She crossed her arms and tilted her head, reminiscing. “Two in the morning and I was jet-lagged and up with stomach pains from that baby ulcer I was busy developing. I was so stressed out. I’d been sent to bag that huge Australian corporate account, and it was such a big responsibility and such a good opportunity for me. And yet all I could think, sitting there in that soulless hotel room, was that I couldn’t do it anymore. Contemplating the next fifteen or twenty years of my lifefelt like looking down the barrel of a gun pointed straight at me. And I knew if I got up and left the hotel, if I went to that meeting, I was pulling the trigger on my own happiness.”
“You FaceTimed me at the Eatery. You were hyperventilating. I’d never seen you lose it before.”
She’d been wearing a plush white robe, her sleekly highlighted blond hair wrapped up in a bath towel. And she’d been crying. Barefaced and ugly sobbing. I’d never seen her such a wreck.
“Worst night of my life. And the best one. It was the beginning of the end of everything I’d been aiming for. I’d spent years striving to get somewhere only to realize I didn’t want to be there after all.”
“And it was the beginning of all of this.” I swept my arm around—the cute barn and herd of goats, the modest A-frame wooden cottage with a riotous patch of wildflowers by the front door.
“Yep, I skipped that meeting and gave my notice the same day. I walked out of the hotel and just... left. It wasn’t responsible or professional, but it saved my life,” Eve murmured, looking past me, lost in the memory.
She hadn’t gone home. She’d bummed around Australia for three months, chopped her hair off, got a wicked sunburn, drank a lot of Victoria Bitter, and figured out what she really wanted from her life.
“And you ended up here.”
“As a single goat farmer with pink hair and a really skinny bank account.” She laughed. “Living the dream.”
“I want that,” I said wistfully. “Not goats. But my own version of living the dream. And I know now it’s not Toast and England, but I also know I can’t keep on with things as they are now. I don’t want my life to just be Dad and Daphne and the Eatery anymore. I need more. I just have to figure out what it is. Aunt Gert keeps telling me to follow my bliss and also to think about what my regrets are. I have no idea what my bliss is yet, but I have plenty of regrets.”
Eve returned to my side of the barn. “You have two lemon drops left?”
I nodded, feeling for them instinctively in my pocket. Their hard grittiness was reassuring in my hand.
“Are you going to take another one?”
I nodded. “I think so.”
“What are you going to choose?”
“I don’t know yet.” I dropped my gaze. “I’ve been thinking a lot about my mom. What it would be like to see her again, even if just for a day.”
Eve’s face softened in understanding. “That would be a gift. If you see her, give her a hug for me.”
“I will.”
A long pause.
“And the other one?” Eve asked. “The last drop?”
I cleared my throat. “I’ll give you three guesses but you’ll only need one.” I said it lightly, jokingly, but Eve understood immediately.
