Open Your Heart (Kings Grove #4) - Delancey Stewart Page 0,3
But I missed the possibility . . . the feeling that life wasn’t always predictable, wasn’t always dark and sad.
But I knew it was pointless. The work I should be doing was to forget. I needed to forget her completely, but no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t seem to let go of her or of the guilt that plagued me whenever I thought of my dead wife.
Chapter 2
HARPER
The pine trees got bigger the higher up the side of the mountain I drove, and memories came rushing back like embarrassing one-night stands showing up at your favorite bar. I hadn’t planned to come back here. Like, ever. But a lot of things in my life turned out to be completely different from what I’d planned.
At the top of the winding, hours-long road, my head had started to pound to match my heart, and when the first sign for Kings Grove appeared at the side of the two-lane highway, I pulled over just past it into a dusty half-moon turnout. My hands gripped the steering wheel, white-knuckled and desperate, and I forced them to relax, forced my body to unclench. Deep breaths. Yoga breaths.
I used to pay a lot of money to learn to relax—now was the time to figure out if it had all been a waste. In truth, the only yoga pose I ever really mastered was corpse pose at the end of class. The rest of it just felt like awkward scrabbling and uncoordinated half-balancing in hopes I looked a little bit like the lithe strong teacher at the front of my class. “Accept,” she always said. “Acknowledge and accept. Be curious, but don’t judge.”
If only.
My life wasn’t about acceptance. Maybe some of us just weren’t built that way.
My parents hadn’t accepted each other, neither had really ever accepted me. It probably wasn’t a surprise that acceptance wasn’t really my thing.
Now I was having trouble accepting that I was back in Kings Grove, aka the middle of literally nowhere. The only reason I’d come back to the place I was born was absolute, pure desperation. And my dad essentially blackmailing me into it. Maybe “blackmail” was a strong word. But Dad was not a guy I was used to turning to for help, and the only reason I found myself driving toward the little town he’d never left was because he’d made it so easy.
When I’d called him, needing help and hoping for assistance of the financial variety, things had gone a slightly different direction than I’d wanted. I’d laid out my woes in an email, and he’d called not two hours later with a plan and a set of demands.
“I’ve got a job for you,” was his opening gambit.
“I don’t think waitressing in a diner is going to cover my debt.”
“Probably not. So I found you an event management position at the new Inn. Michaela—Mike—is the manager there and she needs help from someone smart who knows how to manage details.”
I was silent a moment, pondering whether my current situation indicated a clear lack of an ability to manage anything. “Oh. Okay . . .”
“And I’ll cover your rent for the first six months.”
I sucked in a breath at that. “Dad, I’m not staying six months. I need to get to Austin. Chelle’s cousin is building an event management firm, and I told him I’d take a minority stake. It’s a chance to build something of my own, to finally get out from under the management thumb.”
“But that takes cash.” His simple statement of fact had me immediately fuming.
“Yeah.”
“And I can help with that, but I want some time with you. We have fences to mend, Harper.”
I didn’t want to mend fences. I wanted to move forward, not backward. Life, so far, had not gone the way I would have written it, and the chance to start something on my own, to be on the ground floor of something—it felt like the break I needed. And I didn’t need to have a rebuilt relationship with my absentee father to get it. Except that I did need cash, and Mom had basically shrugged her shoulders and cozied up to her newest boyfriend when I’d asked.
Mom’s strategy for covering her finances wasn’t one I wanted to mimic. And her boyfriends might have been generous with her, but that generosity did not extend to her outspoken daughter who was old enough that she shouldn’t have been coming to either of her parents for money.