Page 82 of Can't Fight the Moonlight

His gaze narrowed as he took in her troubled expression. He pulled a chair around the corner of her desk and sat down next to her. "Let me help."

"You just got done working. You don't need to do this."

"I want to do it." His gaze moved to the open brochure on the desk. "Is that the offer from the company that wants to buy your inn?"

"Yes. I started reading it, but I haven't gotten through it. Some of it is confusing. And there's still a part of me that doesn't even want to consider it, but maybe I should. I'm not just going to take myself down; I'm going to take everyone down. I have really tried so hard not to fail, but maybe I'm just not up to this."

"Whoa. Where is this defeatist attitude coming from?" he asked in surprise. "What happened to my cheerleader?"

"Reality happened. I've been running away from the truth. I've worked really hard to overcome my weaknesses, to play to my strengths, but this inn, this hundred-year-old building, keeps falling apart. And the choices I've been making are probably wrong. You said yourself I give too much stuff away."

"That's true, but you're just having a bad day."

"A lot of bad days."

"And you're tired, which is partly my fault. But you can do this. You're smart. If the ship is going in the wrong direction, you can turn it around."

"Or it might just go down."

"Lizzie. What aren't you telling me?"

She gave him a weak, emotional look. "I'm not that smart, Justin. I have some issues…"

Her words surprised him once more. "What kind of issues?"

"I don't like to talk about them."

"Well, tough. I told you all my secrets. Let's hear something from you."

She hesitated, then said, "I have dyslexia, which means I sometimes have trouble reading or comprehending things without spending a lot of time on them. I can mix up numbers if I'm not careful. I can usually work around it, but sometimes I still make a mistake. And when I'm tired, it gets more difficult."

"I'm sure it does, which means you should not be working on any of this now."

"I can't avoid my problems. I've been putting bills aside for a while, and they're all due or past due."

"You can take a few more hours, maybe a day or two?" he suggested, growing more concerned at the weary look in her eyes. She wasn't just exhausted from their night together. This weariness came from a much deeper place.

"Maybe," she said. "I just feel so stupid sometimes, and I hate that feeling."

He was beginning to understand that Lizzie's relentless optimism was a cover for insecurities she'd very cleverly hidden away. "When did you find out you had issues with learning?"

"Middle school. I faked my way through elementary school, but when I got into sixth grade, I started falling behind. It was awful. I'm the youngest of five kids, who are all super smart, and almost every teacher I had compared me to one of my siblings who had gone before me. They always thought I wasn't applying myself, because clearly I should be as smart as they were."

"How did your parents react?"

"They were disappointed with my grades, but they didn't understand the severity of my issues for a long time. I would just pretend that I was distracted or that I didn't do my homework. I thought it was better if they thought I was lazy or impulsive. My siblings would call me Dizzy Lizzie, because I was always spinning around, going from one thing to the next."

"You were trying to outrun your problems."

"Both literally and figuratively. Running helped me calm down so I could think. But all I could think about was that I was stupid. Finally, a teacher figured it out and called my parents in, and I had some testing, and then we all got on the same page. I received a lot of help after that, but it's not something you can fix, and it doesn't just go away." She paused. "My parents blamed themselves for not realizing I wasn't just being lazy, and they have done everything they could since then to get me whatever help I need. When they decided to invest in the inn…when my siblings did as well…it felt like everyone really believed in me. There are so many reasons why I can't fail." She tapped her finger against the Falcon Properties folder. "And I can't help thinking that maybe I should take this offer, because then everyone will get their money back and then some. I'll have achieved something."

Now he understood where she was coming from. "I get it. If you quit now, you don't fail. But you also don't win. You're not a quitter; you're a fighter, Lizzie. You've fought to get this far."

"Maybe this is as far as I can go. This morning when I took a shower, I heard a banging in the pipes, and I've had a plumber tell me that I might need to replace a lot of the pipes. I can't afford that. And if one breaks before I do the repairs, I could have a disaster on my hands."

"You could," he agreed. "But maybe you need to narrow down which pipes have to be replaced now and which ones can wait. Let me take a look at your books. Let me help."

"You don't need to do that. You should spend the afternoon with your grandparents."

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