Page 23 of Holding On To Good

“You’re nobody’s pot. And don’t you ever let anyone tell you different.” Rose wrapped her arm around Willow’s waist. Squeezed her against her side. “You okay?”

A lump formed in Willow’s throat. As much as she would have loved to lay her head on her sister’s shoulder and have a good-old-fashioned sob-fest about the unfairness of love, she wouldn’t.

She managed a smile for Rose. “I’m fine.” And she would be. She always was. “Caleb and I broke up a long time ago. I’m glad he’s moving on.”

“Four months isn’t, in any scenario, considered a long time ago. It’s practically yesterday. And he and Jessa have only been together a couple of weeks.”

“Three months,” Willow corrected, then shrugged when Rose gave her a raised-eyebrow look. “Or something like that,” she mumbled.

Okay, so she knew it’d been three months and two days since things between Caleb and Jessa had gotten serious. But only because up until that point, Willow and Caleb had still spoken several times a week.

Until that evening—three months and two days ago—when he’d told her that, out of respect for his new girlfriend, they probably shouldn’t talk anymore.

That had been that. The end of their relationship.

She needed another drink.

She was refilling her glass when Lily arrived and nudged Willow aside to grab a clean plate.

Willow frowned at her younger sister. “What are you doing off your throne?”

“Fueling up,” Lily said, scooping healthy portions of each of the three salads onto a clean plate. “I’m only through half the presents. I need sustenance to make it to the end.”

Willow’s fingers tightened on her glass. “Can’t you unwrap any faster?”

Lily added a slice of quiche to her plate. “I don’t see what you’re complaining about. I’m the one who keeps having her stomach rubbed by every woman here. Every. Single. One. What do they think is going to happen? The baby’s going to pop out and grant them three wishes?”

She glanced around, took a quick, discreet sip of Willow’s champagne then headed back to the seat of honor.

“I’ll never make it,” Willow said.

Rose hummed “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” under her breath.

Just what the world needed: a comedic psychiatrist.

“Think I can sneak off without anyone noticing?” she continued.

“And miss seeing your baby sister being gifted with small appliances and onesies saying Future STEMinist and Move Over Patriarchy, a New Girl’s in Town? Do you want our mother to murder you?”

“Fine,” Willow grumbled. “I’ll stay. But only if we have a shot of tequila every time someone brings up my unmarried state, Caleb’s engagement, or your sexual identity.”

Rose clinked her glass to Willow’s. “Deal.”

Chapter Four

After the longest four and a half hours of her life, Willow stood in front of the Lindstrom house, a cottage on Old Lake Road overlooking the water. The breeze ruffled the ends of her hair and the hem of her dress as she carefully picked her way across the gravel driveway in her high heels, a plastic container with a huge slice of that fabulous cake in one hand and the full bottle of champagne she’d snagged before leaving her parents’ house in the other.

She deserved a treat for enduring that pink-tinted torture. And she’d done it without any tequila.

Before Willow could retrieve the bottle from her parents’ liquor cabinet—shades of her teenage years right there—her six-month-old nephew Nathan had woken from his nap. Rose had gone in to get him and change his diaper and Willow had somehow gotten stuck taking their mother’s place at Lily’s side, listing each gift she’d opened and who it’d been from.

It was as if her mom had known about Willow’s drinking game plans and deliberately sabotaged them.

Willow wouldn’t put it past her. Dr. Nadine Kincaid had scary intuition when it came to her daughters.

Tucking the champagne under her arm, she climbed the front steps to the wide porch, then set her items on the wooden floor so she could dig the key she’d picked up at the Realtor’s this morning from the outer pocket of her messenger bag. She unlocked the front door and picked up the cake and bottle before going inside. She’d share the cake with Urban, her contribution to dinner since he was bringing burgers.

But the champagne was all hers. It was her reward for sitting through all those many, many comments—some well-intentioned, others not so much—about how to stop being so damned single already.

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