front of the store, glared at Jake, mostly to keep from bursting into tears.
She couldn’t believe she had gone off on Olivia like that, in front of Cooper Vance. Her mother’s best friend.
She was such a child.
“I know. I shouldn’t have said that. I swore to myself I would be polite to her the next time I saw her. But then we walked in and she was laughing with him and hanging out at the cash register like she worked there and I just got so...pissed, you know?”
Jake raised an eyebrow and Caitlin fought the urge to kick him.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“I’m sorry, but I really don’t. Olivia’s always been cool to me. Remember that time in eighth grade when I had to do a report for computer tech about someone who worked in the industry and she let me interview her for like an hour and sent me all that swag from her start-up? She didn’t need to do that but she went out of her way to help me.”
She didn’t want to answer. All she could think about was the hurt she hadn’t been able to shake, even though weeks had passed since she found out how her aunt really felt about her.
“Big deal,” she muttered.
“I don’t get all this antagonism. You used to think Olivia was totally chill. Now you can’t stand to be in the same room with her.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” she snapped again. Somehow it made everything worse that Jake wasn’t on her side on this.
“You’re still going on about the journal, aren’t you?”
“Maybe,” she admitted, hating that he made her feel like she was six years old, crying on the playground because another girl called her a name.
This was so much more than a playground squabble. She had always adored Olivia. For most of her life, she thought her aunt loved her, too. To read the truth felt like someone had tossed her over the cliffs above town, into the cold waters of the Pacific.
Worse had been reading Olivia’s feelings about Natalie. Her own sister. It had been more than clear that Olivia had despised her.
“You need to let that go,” Jake said, for about the hundredth time. “It’s totally unfair to blame Olivia for things she wrote years ago.”
“That’s easy for you to say. If somebody had called you an annoying, bawling little brat who was ruining your life, you might not be so quick to forgive.”
Okay, yeah. She shouldn’t have read the journal. Duh. Those had been Olivia’s private words, written when she was around Caitlin’s age.
She got that. She wasn’t stupid. She totally understood that Olivia hadn’t written those things to be hurtful and mean but to vent about her feelings, about her dad’s death and her sister’s drug addiction and the void her mother had left in her life by focusing so much time and attention on Natalie’s bratty daughter. The bratty daughter who should have been given up for adoption to a loving family so she could have a chance at a normal life instead of growing up with a junkie for a mom.
Those words Olivia had written seemed scarred on her subconscious.
It seemed so stupid to focus on them, to let them haunt and torment her, especially with all the other things she had to worry about.
She couldn’t seem to help it. Every time she looked at Olivia or saw Mimi talking to her on the phone or heard her grandmother mention her name, those words seemed to echo in her head like a fire alarm.
“You know you’re going to have to let it go, at least if you want to have a relationship with your aunt,” Jake said, his brown eyes soft and compassionate.
She frowned and tossed her soda in the recycling bin outside the greenhouse. “That’s kind of the point. I don’t want to have a relationship with her. I don’t want her anywhere around. She doesn’t belong here anymore. We’re doing fine without her. As far as I’m concerned, it would be better for me and Mimi and the garden center if Olivia would just pack up her weird dog and head back to Seattle, where she belongs.”
“Wow. Don’t hold back, Cait.”
At the words behind her, Caitlin’s insides seemed to shrivel. She turned around and found Olivia standing in the doorway to the main building, studying them both with an impassive expression.
How much had she heard? Did she know Caitlin had read her journal? Judging by the confused hurt in her aunt’s eyes, Caitlin doubted it.