Page 77 of Mad Love

I hear Rhodes in the background yelling, “You miss us, Sadie?”

I laugh. “Yes, I do actually.”

“I’m not telling them that,” Weston says, laughing. “They don’t need their egos inflated any larger than they already are.”

When I get off the phone, my mom’s look has me shaking my head. “What?”

“I’d ask you the same question.” She laughs. “How are things going with Weston?”

“They’re…good. Really good.”

Her eyebrows lift and I shake my head again.

“Not like that.”

“Are you sure?” she asks.

I hesitate and her smile grows.

“Something did happen a few weeks ago. We kissed.”

I’ll spare my mom the details about what else we did.

“I’ve felt bad about it ever since.” I bite the inside of my cheek. “He said he’d never felt like that from a kiss, and I shut him down.”

“Why, honey?” My mom pulls me closer and tucks back a stray hair. “You deserve happiness, you know.”

“I know. Just not with him.” My lips tremble and I sigh, looking down.

My mom tilts my chin up to meet her eyes.

“Why not with him? Honey, as hard as it is to say out loud, Sasha isn’t here. But you know what? If she was, do you think she would’ve been ready to settle down? I don’t. I don’t even know if she was going to be up to the full-time mom gig. When you weren’t working and helping with Caleb, she’d drop Caleb off for me to watch him so she could go out shopping or see her friends or…I don’t even know half the time what she was doing.”

“I didn’t know that.” I stare at her, trying to process this new information.

“We all caved too easily with her. I’m not sure if it was because she’d been sick or if her personality was just always more forceful than the rest of ours, but if I could do things over again with her, I would. Maybe she wouldn’t have been in the car that day if I had, driving when she shouldn’t have been.” Her voice breaks and I put my hand on her shoulder.

“Mom, you can’t blame yourself for what happened. Sasha always did exactly what she wanted to do.”

She nods. “You’re right about that. She didn’t want me and Dad to go on that trip because she didn’t think she could take care of Caleb for that long without us, and we almost listened to her. I wish we had, but?—”

“It wouldn’t have mattered, Mom. I’ve blamed myself for not waking up before she left that morning, but it’s…I don’t know, it doesn’t bring her back.”

“No, it doesn’t.” We both wipe our tears away and she leans in to hug me. When we pull apart, she puts her hands on my cheeks. “I want you to be happy, Sadie. If Weston makes you happy, you should give him a chance. If it didn’t work out, I trust that your love for Caleb would outweigh any of the possible negatives.”

My dad comes in with the food then and I’m glad to set the subject aside.

When Caleb and I get back to the house, Weston still isn’t home. Caleb wakes up from snoozing in the car just long enough for me to give him a bottle and change his diaper. I put him to bed and take a long shower, feeling grimy after the long day. When I get in bed, my hair still wet, I pull the box onto the bed that has Sasha’s journals. I’m torn about reading them. I wouldn’t want my journals read after I’m gone. I stopped writing in one because I caught Sasha reading all of mine. She wasn’t ever apologetic when she got caught either.

She’d laughed and shrugged, saying, “Things written down are meant to be read.”

“Not ifPrivate Property, DO NOT READis written in the front,” I’d said.

“It’s a book,” she’d waved my journal around, “and you know how much I love to read. It’s torture for you to write in a pretty book like that and not let me read it.”

I think I threw something at her and she laughed. The next time I caught her, I yelled at her and she laughed, and the last time, I didn’t speak to her for a day and then decided it was my own fault for continuing to write in one.

I never knew she even kept a journal because I didn’t go digging through her things the way she dug through mine. Being two years younger than me, Sasha thought what was mine was hers, and for the most part, I was okay with that…except with my journals.

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