of being lost in a sea of people, and the constant grind that never seemed to take a break all came back. She hadn’t been honest. She’d been a photo filter in human form, smoothing out the cracks and adding a fake layer of soft light that turned everything rosy.
“Adalyn, that’s not—”
“What you meant?” she interrupted. “I don’t care. Not all of us are perfect all the time. Some of us work hard for things, pouring our hearts and souls into it, and never get the results we want.” Adalyn’s cheeks were mottled with emotion, and a frustrated anger burned in her eyes. “So yeah, maybe I went a little overboard to make everything extra to impress the woman who everything always does go right for. And what has it gotten me? A fucking clusterfuck of a wedding and a groom who can’t seem to get here. I—” Adalyn’s voice broke as the tears started rolling down her cheeks.
“Adalyn,” Hadley said, her heart aching for her sister as she reached out to wrap her in a hug.
She avoided it with ease. “I gotta go.” Then she rushed out of the barn, waving off Hadley’s attempt to stop her.
Sinking down onto the cowhide-covered booth seat in a stall near the door and fighting to keep her own tears at bay, Hadley clenched her jaw tight enough to make her teeth ache. It was like all the lies she’d told her family about her life in Harbor City were piling up, one on top of the other, until they’d started tumbling down, landing not just on her but on those she loved, too. She hadn’t meant for it to be this way.
Will sat down across from her and she braced herself for the sneer, the cut down, the call out. It was coming. It always did. If anyone saw straight through the bullshit she’d been slinging, it was him.
Nothing in her life had gone right since she’d kissed the wrong man in a coat closet. The very same wrong man sitting across from her right now. That was it—she was leaving. She got up and started out of the stall, but the feel of his finger curling around her pinkie for a second before slipping away stopped her.
“Speaking from siblings-being-pissed-at-you experience, it’ll be okay,” he said. “She just needs a minute.”
Too shocked by his uncharacteristic kindness, she flopped back down into the seat, the words rushing out before she could stop them. “I never meant for things to turn out like this. I have fucked up everything.”
He got up and crossed over to her side of the wraparound booth seat and sat next to her before relaxing back against the seat as if he had nowhere to be anytime soon. “Vent away.”
She shouldn’t—especially not to him—and yet the words she’d never shared with anyone were bubbling up inside her, and she knew there was no stopping them.
“Adalyn was only five when our dad—” The rest of the words clogged her throat, fighting to stay silent, even now.
She bit the inside of her cheek and looked up at the ceiling, blinking fast. God, it wasn’t supposed to still hurt this much. But she didn’t even have to try to see the car in the closed garage, smell the fumes, feel the panic when she spotted her dad slumped over the steering wheel. Her mom had shoved her back into the kitchen, then rushed toward the car, yanking the door open as she cried.
She’d been faking it for so long that it didn’t still hurt that she couldn’t get any words out. It’s where she’d first learned. Denial. Push it away. Don’t talk about it. Make it look easy, better, perfect so her younger siblings wouldn’t be scared, they wouldn’t ask why Mom was crying all the time, and they’d stop asking when Daddy was coming home. Never didn’t seem fathomable to them. It seemed kinder to just pretend everything was fine, and so she did.
And she’d never stopped.
Not since that day.
Not since that moment.
She was so lost in that memory that she could still feel the wool thread of Weston’s sweater bunched in her fist when she held him back before he could run after their mom. It was the soft cotton of Will’s T-shirt against her cheek that pulled her back. How he’d made it around the semicircular booth and ended up with her in his arms, she had no clue. All she knew was that feeling the solid thump-thump of his