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If her mother could put her heart out there, be in a committed relationship, find happiness, why couldn’t McKenzie?
Maybe she wasn’t like her father. Maybe she wasn’t like her mother either.
Maybe she was tiny pieces of both, could learn from their mistakes, learn from their successes and be a better person.
Right now, she wasn’t a better person. Right now, she didn’t even feel like a whole person. She felt like only half a person, with the other half of her missing.
Lance.
“I want him back,” she admitted, causing Cecilia’s eyes to widen with satisfaction.
“Good. Now, how are you going to make it happen?”
“He didn’t want more than our two months, Cecilia. He was as insistent on our ending point as I was,” she mused. “I wasn’t the only one who let us end at two months. He didn’t fight to hang on to me.” He hadn’t. He’d walked away without a backward glance. “His heart belongs to another woman.”
“Another woman who can’t have him,” Cecilia reminded her. “If you want Lance back, then you don’t worry about whether or not he’s fighting for you. You fight for him. You show him you want him in your life. Show him how much he means to you.”
She did want Lance back and, Lord help her, she wanted to fight for him, to show him she missed him and wanted him in her life.
“How am I supposed to do that?”
Cecilia’s gaze shifted to the back of a flyer posted on the salon’s front door. A flyer someone from Celebration Graduation had dropped by a week or so ago, advertising a St. Patrick’s Day show at the Senior Citizen Center.
“I have the perfect idea.”
McKenzie could see her friend mentally rubbing her hands together in glee. “Why do I get the feeling I’m not going to like this?”
* * *
Lance shoved the giant four-leaf clover to the middle of the stage, trying to decide if the light was going to reflect off the glittery surface correctly or if he should reposition the stage prop.
“That looks great there,” one of the other volunteers called out, answering his silent question.
He finished arranging props on the stage, then went to the room they were using as a dressing room to get ready for the actual show. He was emceeing.
The event hadn’t been a planned Celebration Graduation fund-raiser, but the Senior Citizen Center had approached him with the idea and the earnest desire to help with the project. How could he say no?
Besides, he’d needed something to focus on besides the gaping hole in his chest.
He should be used to having a gaping hole in his chest.
Hadn’t he had one since he’d been a seventeen-year-old kid and the love of his life had been killed in a car accident?
Only had Shelby really been the love of his life? Or had she just been his first love and their relationship had never been able to run its natural course to its inevitable conclusion?
Which was his fault.
He winced at his thoughts. Why was he allowing such negativity into his head?
It had been his fault Shelby was no longer alive. He’d promised her that her death wouldn’t be in vain, that her life wouldn’t be forgotten. He’d vowed to keep her alive in his heart and mind. Wasn’t that why he did the volunteer work?
Wasn’t that why he headed up Celebration Graduation?
So that no other teen had to go through what he and Shelby had gone through?
So that there were other options in teens’ lives besides making bad choices on graduation night?
If only their school had offered a Celebration Graduation program. If only he and Shelby had gone to the event rather than the party they’d been at. If only he hadn’t given in to peer pressure and drunk. If only he’d not let her drink, not let her get into that car for him to drive them home that night.
