Good Enough (Meet Me in Montana #3) - Kelly Elliott Page 0,8

dreams…had something to do with me leaning more toward starting my new career in Montana instead of Utah.

I couldn’t help but smile at the memory of Tanner Shaw. He was handsome, with those pale blue eyes and dimples when he smiled.

“Timber?” Candace, my roommate and best friend, called out my name as she walked into the apartment.

“I’m in the living room,” I answered.

“Hey, sorry I’m late. How was your day at the hospital?”

I sighed and turned back to face her. “Awful.”

She frowned. “That bad, huh?”

With a nod, I walked over and dropped onto the sofa. “I simply wasn’t made to be a nurse.”

Candace smiled. “It’s okay if you don’t like it. But you are a damn good nurse.”

I shrugged. “I had to be.”

She gave me a confused look. “Why?”

With a roll of my eyes, I chuckled, not wanting to get into the details. “No reason.”

“You could always go back to school. Learn something new and then you’d have two degrees!”

I scrunched up my nose. Candace was always the optimistic one of our little group of two. I, on the other hand, always waited for the floor to fall out. In my almost twenty-four years of living, nothing had ever seemed to go right for me. I didn’t even get to pick what I wanted to do for a career. That decision was left up to my mother. My mother had put a letter in her will, telling me what career to choose in case she died before I started college. My father kept it until my senior year of high school and then gave it to me. He sat there while I read it, that same neutral look on his face he had perfected not long after my mother passed. It was the kind that showed zero emotion, so I never truly knew how he felt. About anything, including me. Before my mother died, my father made me feel like I was his everything. After she died, he slowly drifted away, leaving me to constantly wonder what had happened to his love. Did he resent the fact that I lived and she died? I knew my father loved me, but he had never showed it since that fateful day.

When I opened that letter and read it, I wasn’t even shocked. My mother asked for me to follow a career in nursing like she did, and like her mother before her. I knew I had to do it, not only for her, but for my father. I wanted to please him. Maybe this could be the one thing I got right, and he’d finally be proud of me. Maybe even make him want to spend more time with me. It had been years since my father had really paid me any sort of attention, other than the occasional moments he told me he was proud of me. The first few weeks after my mother died, he had clung to me as if he were afraid I would slip away from him like she did. We did everything together. He was the one who first introduced me to horseback riding at the suggestion of the therapists I talked to each week. After that day, I spent a few months hardly speaking at all. There was safety in my silence. I knew my father was worried. Once I sat on my first horse, though, it all came back to me. I remembered all the times my mother had talked about the horse she had when she was little. She was there with me. From that point on, horses were my life. Once I resumed talking and acting like a six-year-old, I noticed my father spending less time with me and more time at work. He also spent more time in our home office where he drank a lot. One night when I walked into his office he was crying. I quickly ran to him, and he held onto me so tightly, I thought I wouldn’t be able to breathe. He kept whispering that he was sorry. What had he been sorry for? That memory flooded my mind at random moments.

It wasn’t long after that that he met his first of many girlfriends. Women who were more interested in his money than him…or his young daughter. Daddy hired Rachel, my nanny, and from that point on she did everything with me and for me until I was able to do things on my own. I hadn’t realized until I was older how unavailable my