Love In Moments (Love Distilled #2) - Scarlett Cole Page 0,28

in knots.

Pressing a hand to her forehead, she forced herself to breathe. Slow and steady breaths that somehow seemed to calm her. When the nausea began to fade, she stood and leaned back against the cool stall.

Guilt.

Somehow, she needed to make her peace with it, but she wasn’t sure how. When she’d first started on her meds, she’d felt numb. Too numb to process all the emotions that were now rattling around in her head. And if she was honest, she wasn’t being truthful with her therapist, or her family, with how she was handling it.

How could she explain that this was almost the opposite of how she’d felt on meds? Emotions exploded through her like fireworks on the Fourth of July. Fast, vibrant, loud. It was almost too much to take in. It was as if she’d gotten out of the habit of letting herself feel anything at all, and this was feeling overload.

Those emotions were gusting back in like the storm that had ripped off the roof.

The door to the restroom opened and Olivia stepped out of the stall.

“Liv.” Emerson peeked her head in. “Are you okay?”

Olivia nodded, then shook her head. “What if the roof had fallen in on guests?”

Emerson rested her hip on the counter. “But it didn’t, Liv. It was an empty building.”

“It would have ruined everything,” Olivia whispered, looking at her pale face in the bathroom mirror. “There would have been no insurance, we would have lost—”

“Come here,” Emerson said, pulling her into a tight hug. “What happened was in the past. And nobody was hurt. And we aren’t ruined. And the three of us are figuring this out. Together.” She gripped Olivia’s upper arms and stepped back. “Resilience, Liv. It’s all we’ve got. Life will continue to toss challenges at us. Some of them are big, some are small. But there hasn’t been a challenge thrown at this family that we haven’t found our way through.”

Olivia sighed, letting her sister’s words in. She wanted to fight back against Emerson’s overly simplified view of the world, but she didn’t have the energy. Em dipped her head to make sure Olivia looked straight at her.

“Mom died. We got through it. Dad died. We got through it. The distillery is a mess. We’re getting through it. You got sick and look at you now. Pulling yourself up by the tips of your fingers and fighting back. The key is that we’ve done it together.”

Olivia wanted to feel peace from Emerson’s words. She listened to each one, trying to let the words bounce around in her brain so she could make sense of the jumble of feelings. There was good intention in them, and she could see from Em’s face that she meant each word.

She wanted to believe every single one of them, but no matter how she tried, she couldn’t quite internalize them. It was as if they were meant for someone else. Someone other than herself.

And she couldn’t quite figure out why.

Anders flew off the ice and through the gate to the bench. He sucked in gulps of air. The coach had left his line on for what felt like three times longer than the forty-five seconds it likely was. Winnipeg was not for laying down in the Rush’s barn. He looked across at Wyatt Lewis and found his right-wing man gulping down a sport’s drink like he’d been stuck in the desert for hours. The American had a decade on Anders but was just as fast on the ice. His Finnish left wing, Theo Valkama, watched the play on the ice.

Winnipeg’s defense was on fire.

He listened as the coach yelled instructions. Jean Paul Fleury had played for Montreal his entire career and was one of the few who had parlayed his skills into coaching. The challenge was his calls occasionally veered to those of a frustrated captain, yelling at those around him about how he would have made a play, rather than how the individual player should have.

But that made it easy for Anders to sift through to the essence of what exactly was expected of him, even if the comments were deeply personal.

He watched as team captain Ryan Hall skated up the ice, only to be slammed against the boards.

Another call to change the line. Canadian Jacob Miller led the charge for the new line, making sure to not skate out too early and draw a penalty. The need to get on the ice and do more crawled over Anders’s skin. He had