point where now I wouldn’t change it, but I’d been miserable at the time. That was the main reason I’d pulled all those stupid stunts with Holden when we were kids. We both felt trapped here and it was our way of rebelling.
“Or maybe not.” Josie commented, picking up on my non-answer.
“It wasn’t bad. I just felt…claustrophobic.” It wasn’t the most articulate way to express what I’d experienced, but in fairness, I didn’t talk about my childhood much. And I sure as hell never complained about it. I would feel like an asshole doing that.
“Really?!” Josie looked out over the vast landscape. “Claustrophobic? Here?”
“Yeah. I knew there was more to the world and I wanted to see it. I wanted to know what the Sistine Chapel smelled like, not just what the ceiling looked like. I wanted to float in the Dead Sea and touch the grass of the Serengeti. Wishing Well is great, but I’ve always had a restlessness inside of me. I felt like I was suffocating here. I know it sounds crazy but…”
She listened, really listened, to my explanation. I could see the thoughtfulness in her eyes. “No, that makes sense.”
“It also didn’t help that I’m a night owl, always have been. I come alive after the sun goes down, and work here started before the sun rose. The schedule didn’t exactly fit with my natural circadian rhythm.”
“Yeah, that would suck,” she chuckled.
I’d never met anyone that I felt so seen by. I’d also never met anyone that I felt like I could say anything to without any judgment. It was just one more thing that drew me into her and made me want to discover more about her.
“What about you? What was your childhood like?”
“It was good.” She continued on, heading back toward the house.
The answer was vague, with absolutely no vocal intonation to give me a clue as to what “good” meant. Was it good? Or was that just what she told people? My gut told me that it was the latter.
I wanted to find out more. I needed to find out more. I had to know everything about this woman. Just like I needed to take that picture of her.
Josie had woken something up in me that had been dormant for so long. Inspiration. Passion. Desire. I felt more alive walking along the fence line of the farm than I had bungee jumping off Switzerland’s Verzasca Dam. And that scared me a hell of a lot more than diving 700 feet along a concrete wall had.
Chapter 8
Josie
“The only thing better than everything going as planned, is nothing going as planned.”
~ Josephine Grace Clarke
The Greasy Spoon.
I stared up at the aging neon sign and couldn’t resist taking out my phone and snapping a pic of it. The last twenty shots in my camera roll were ones I’d taken of Wishing Well on my walk to the diner. Everywhere I turned, there was something worthy of a postcard.
The rolling green fields dotted with cows lined with a weather-worn wood fence. The broke down pickup truck with peeling paint in the middle of stacks of hay. The crystal blue pond that sat in the center of mature oak trees.
As a girl, I’d spent time between Manhattan and Los Angeles. I’d never lived in a small town. Maybe that was the reason that I’d always been so fascinated by them. Growing up, my favorite books were the Anne of Green Gables series. And it wasn’t just because Anne also suffered from the affliction of having red hair that she hated. It was because she was an orphan. And although both of my parents were alive, I related to her. I have no memory of my mother and my father wasn’t the most emotionally available person. And as much as I loved my grandmother, neither was she.
I knew that in his own way, my father loved me, but sometimes I did have doubts. I never doubted that my grandmother loved me, it was just that she didn’t express it in a very maternal way. And in fairness to her, she hadn’t ever wanted children in the first place. She’d only had my father to make husband number two happy. And she was working so much at the time that he’d basically been raised by nannies, and then was shipped off to boarding school at age ten.
Which most likely explained why he was the sort of father he was.
Since I hadn’t had a typical family dynamic, I’d spent every free