Page 3 of Broken Heart

Change was never easy. Loss was even harder.

But some things were necessary.

On the bright side, I’d done it.

It was, by far, the most difficult thing I’d ever done, but I was beyond proud of myself for doing it.

I moved on, and I never put up a big fight.

But it wasn’t a walk in the park. I’d been struggling for months to get a full night of sleep. Unfortunately, I hadn’t been successful in that area of my life.

As sad, angry, and hurt as I had been, I picked up the pieces of my broken heart and walked away, never once looking back. Sure, I thought about all the things I could have done or should have said to both Simon and Maria in the situation—most of which came to me when I was awake in my bed at night—but the truth was, I thought taking action to confront them with any of it would have been a waste of my time.

Why should I have approached either one of them to tell them how I felt, to ask them why they did it, when it was clear they didn’t care about me at all? Simon had emailed me to break up with me, for crying out loud. He didn’t even have the guts to tell me the truth to my face.

If he believed I was only worth an email that likely took him a matter of minutes to write, he didn’t deserve another second of my time.

Yes, I was typically a timid person, but in a situation like this, it had nothing to do with being shy or introverted. I knew I deserved better than I’d gotten from him, so he’d get nothing else from me. Neither would Maria.

As far as I was concerned, Simon and Maria could have each other.

It hurt.

God, it hurt, but I knew I was better off without them.

And now I was here, focusing time, effort, and energy I forced myself to muster up on the only thing left that mattered to me.

The Next Chapter.

The Next Chapter was the used and indie bookstore my grandmother had opened forty-three years ago and ultimately passed down to me.

This store was the place I’d spent so many hours as a kid, getting lost in the pages of hundreds of books.

It had become like a second home to me. I was, for lack of a better word, a book addict. Maybe that was who I was always meant to be, or perhaps it was the result of falling in love with so many fictional worlds over the years. Reading gave me a place to escape to when dealing with the reality of my personal situation became too much to bear.

I’d needed to go to that place when I was a little girl who’d just lost her parents, a lonely teenager in high school, a young adult who lost the last of her family, and a woman who’d been betrayed by her boyfriend and best friend.

Between the pages of a book was the one place I could go for comfort. And there was nothing quite like having a physical book to hold in my hands when I needed that.

But since I couldn’t just curl up in a ball and read all the time, I thought I was rather fortunate to be able to work in the best place in the world. Every day I walked into my store, I inhaled the scent of books and smiled.

And while I smiled because it made me happy simply to be here, that wasn’t the only reason. I smiled when I thought about my grandmother and how she would have reacted to some of the changes I’d made. If she’d still been alive when I created what I believed was a better experience for my patrons, I was certain she would have thought I was crazy.

I’d invested in carts for my customers to wheel around behind them while they were shopping. They weren’t traditional shopping carts one would find at a grocery store—that would have been a logistical nightmare—but they were much better than a dinky basket that would hang off someone’s arm and never fit enough books.

That was the one thing I never understood about bookstores. I had yet to visit one that provided an easy way to carry books. Either you were expected to lug them around in your hands or a tiny basket slung over your arm.

Call me crazy, but I had yet to meet a reader that was ever satisfied with just one book. As a result, wheeled carts were part of the experience at The Next Chapter, and it had been a huge hit with nearly everyone who walked through the front door of the store.

My grandmother had built what I believed would be a legacy I could pass down to my own child one day. I’d have been lying if I said the thought hadn’t crossed my mind on more than one occasion. It saddened me now to think all the work she’d put in to build the place and the work I’d done to make changes to it would all be for naught.

Because after learning what I did five months ago and going through the painstaking process of attempting to heal my heart from a betrayal and loss of two people I’d held dear to me, I didn’t intend to put myself in a position to be hurt again.

My store was my life now. It was all I had left.

And maybe there was a part of me that was saddened by what I’d lost, but I was better off this way. Well, except for the lack of sleep.

That was a whole other mystery I couldn’t seem to solve.

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