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Every bridge I've ever had is burned now.
And I was the one who lit the match.
Now, I have nothing more than surface-deep relationships with people who would sell me out tomorrow if they were offered a book deal or a couple thousand dollars.
I'm alone.
But that's the bed I made for myself six years ago. Now, I guess I have to lie in it.
“Thea?” Leighton's voice is a hesitant murmur through the timber of the red front door. “You still there?”
I swing the door open again and blink at my old friend through blurry eyes. Wiping the moisture from my cheeks, I hit her with another show-stopping smile in the hopes that it will distract from the tears still burning my retinas.
“You okay?” She frowns.
I sniff. “Hay fever.”
She sees straight through me but doesn't call me out on the lie. “Right, well, look, um…I don't even know why I'm telling you this, but it was Cole who sent you the flowers, okay? It was Cole.”
My heart stutters. “Cole?”
“Yeah, you know, Cole Mesaric. The boy whose heart you broke when you abandoned him, remember?”
Her words release a fresh wave of tears that no smile is shiny enough to hide.
“Shitting hell. Sorry. I’m fucking this all up.” She flounders, looking around her at the suburban street as if the sweet gum trees hold all the answers she needs. “But you just can't expect to come back into town and people not be mad at you, ya know? Doesn't mean it's okay for me to make you cry, though. I might never know when to shut up, but I'm not a total bitch.”
That makes me chuckle lightly and I wipe my nose with the back of my hand. “I know you're not a bitch, Leigh,” I tell her, using the nickname I used to call her back when we were once friends.
She looks awkwardly down at the ground, and the sight of her shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, as if she'd rather be anywhere else right now, makes me even sadder. I don't show it, though. Not this time.
Instead, I thank her and watch as she turns to walk back to her business van that's parked a little ways down the street.
“Oh,” she calls back to me over her shoulder. “Make sure you thank Cole good and well, okay? Idiot spent more money than he should’ve.”
And then she's climbing into the driver's side door of her van and speeding off, leaving me staring after her with stinging eyes, an aching heart and a torn-up soul.
Cole bought me flowers.
What the hell am I supposed to do with that?
Stanley Garrison's2001 Ford Fiesta is suspended above me as I wrench at an especially tight bolt in the skid plate. When the car first came in for a faulty gearbox, I knew it would cost a few hundred bucks to fix, but that was before I found the snapped crankshaft and the endless problems with the engine.
Now, Stan's looking at a bill north of a thousand dollars that I know he can't afford to pay. And that's without me charging labor costs.
Poor guy is working double shifts at the age of seventy-five to pay for his daughter's breast cancer treatment. Shifts that he'll now be forced to commute to on foot if I don't figure out how to fix this shit and get it back on the road.
I'd pay out of pocket for it myself if I could, but my pockets just aren't deep enough right now. Not after my parents' tractor broke on the farm and I insisted on buying them a new one, despite their reluctance and worry that I can't afford it.
I can't. They were right.
But I'm already harboring enough guilt over starting my own business when I knew they were relying on me to take over theirs. So, I couldn't look the other way when I knew they needed help.
Pine Ridge Farm has been in our family for three generations and there's always been an expectation that one of us will take it over someday. And for a long time, it was assumed that Conan would be the one to step up, for no other reason than that he's the oldest. But he went and joined the military. As the second oldest, I guess the responsibility then fell to me. Then, I ended up disappointing them too.
Guess I thought buying them a tractor, as trivial as it may seem, might make up for it—or at least make me hate myself less for letting them down.
It didn't.
