one of you people tried to get me out. Do you know how abandoned that makes me feel? If I tried to get attention, well, no wonder. Everyone thinks the sun shines out of Maddie’s butt because she’s so accomplished. And of course, the youngest, sweet one got all the petting from everyone. There was nothing left for me. So yeah, I took love where I could find it, in a damn cult. But neither one of you cared.”
“Oh, Shelley,” Gia said. “Maybe we could have tried harder to follow you, but Grammy knew where you were, and we thought if you wanted to be contacted, you would let us know. We didn’t realize you were in a cult! We thought you could come home whenever you wanted!”
“Easy to say now.” Shelley’s chin hardened.
“I don’t like the way this family communicates,” Gia said. “It’s gotten so toxic. Maybe we’re all better off apart than together.”
“You don’t really mean that.” Madison gasped.
Gia was breathing hard. Twenty-three years of walking the tightrope between these two and it had come to this. The truth will out. She’d let the chips fall. “Guess what? Mike and I aren’t really engaged. Yep, it’s a bald-faced lie. If you guys can have secrets, so can I.”
“What?” Shelley and Madison said in unison.
“The fake engagement was a ploy to get you two to stay here and talk to each other. Yes, I’m a big fat liar! I compromised my values for you two and you don’t appreciate what I’ve done. Grammy wrote that letter to me begging me to get you two back together and finish this stupid quilt and the only way I could think to make that happen was to come up with a fake engagement. That is the craziness I’ve sunk to and it’s not worth it. You know what? I’m done. D. O. N. E!”
Her sisters were standing side by side now. Finally, they were united by their stark disbelief. Too damn little, too damn late.
Gia was finished talking. She would show them exactly just how done she was. Gritting her teeth, she grabbed the cordless power scissors sitting next to the quilting frame and sliced the triple wedding ring quilt straight down the middle.
“Gia!” Madison cried. “What are you doing?”
“Putting an end to this nonsense! If you are done being sisters, that’s fine with me.”
Never in her life had Gia felt such anger. She didn’t stop with cutting the quilt in half; she attacked each square, hacking it into pieces. Cotton batting floated in the air.
“You’ve lost your mind.” Madison came toward her.
Gia spun, pulled the trigger on the scissors, and wielded them at Madison. They buzzed in the air, chewing nothing. “Back off!”
“This isn’t like you.” Madison cowered against the porch railing.
Shelley was already in the corner eyeing her as if she were a madwoman. Well, she was. Mad and crazy and fed up with their feuding. Gia tore into that quilt, butchering it until the only things that remained were the thin scraps of their lives.
Panting, she stopped, chest heaving as she stared daggers at her sisters.
Shelley and Maddie had their hands over their mouths, studying the cloth carnage with stunned silence.
“You can clean it up,” Gia announced, blood surging through her veins, the spent anger leaving her jittery and shell-shocked over what she’d done.
She looked around at the tufts of material blowing across the porch. What had she done? With the triple wedding ring quilt annihilated, there was no hope of keeping her promise to Grammy.
Hot tears pushed at the back of Gia’s eyes. She had to get out of there. The last thing she wanted was to let her sisters see her cry. Finished with her carnage, she dropped the scissors to the porch floor, pivoted on her heel, and stalked off.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Gia
STAB STITCHING: Process where the needle is pushed to back side of the quilt sandwich with one hand and returned to top side with the other hand, pushing needle from back to front.
GIA’S VISION WAS so blurry with unshed tears that she couldn’t see where she was going. She swiped at her eyes with the back of her hands. Remorse, guilt, and shame washed away the anger.
Oh damn, oh damn, oh damn. What had she done?
With nowhere else to go, and no one else to turn to, she fled the house, leaving the Moonglow Inn behind her as she padded over the wall, back to Mike’s place, barefoot and hotheaded. Was this what it felt like