Page 96 of The Problem with Dating

“Shut up, Yara,” I told her with a huff and puff.

“Never.” She kept smiling, and I kept falling. She had to stop that at some point. Being so…perfect. “What were you going to call Milly? When she mentioned me being stood up? A butthead?”

“I was actually thinking of a stronger B word.”

CHAPTER26

Yara

The rumors of Alex spread just as quickly as I’d hoped.

Unfortunately, individuals from my past also heard said rumors, which meant I had to face a few shadows from my previous life.

The hardest part about being a people pleaser was that you oftentimes forgot to please yourself. You placed every person in front of you. If someone had a cart filled with groceries, you let them skip you in line, even though you only had bananas to purchase. You scrunched yourself into a ball to take up as little space as possible because you didn’t want others to feel your presence too much.

You spread yourself so thin, trying to make space for everyone around you, trying to feed their spirits, that you forget to nourish your own. Then, if you did do something for yourself, you’d drop the ball with someone else and that was when good ole guilt would taunt you.

Guilt was an odd sensation. It appeared when you least expected it, too. On my afternoon shopping trip at the grocery store, I heard my name called out, and I turned to find Lindsay Parker standing there with a bag full of goodies.

I pushed out a smile and walked over to hug her. “Hi, Lindsay. How are you?”

Her eyes glassed over as she wrapped her arms around me. “Oh, sweetheart. I haven’t seen you in so long.”

There it was—the punch to my heart. Guilt.

I shifted around in my shoes. “I know. Things have been busy with the shop. I meant to call but—”

She frowned as she pulled away, wiping away the falling tears. “But since you’ve divorced my son, the need isn’t there. I get it.”

“That’s not it, Lindsay,” I urged.

“You know, it broke my heart when I found out you and Cole were divorcing. I was sad for my son, but I also worried this would happen. That I’d lose my daughter, too. You’ve been in my life for decades, Yara, and now you can’t even call?”

“Lindsay, I—”

“I don’t want your excuses,” she warned. “I just want you to know that hurt me deeply. I always looked at you as family and thought you’d the same. But it’s clear that you didn’t feel the same for me as I did you. The same goes for how you felt about Cole. It was all fake.”

My chest felt as if it would explode from how hard my heart pounded. “That’s not fair, Lindsay.”

“Maybe it’s not, but is it really fair that you won’t give him another try?”

“I gave that man more tries than I should’ve ever given him.”

She nodded in agreement. “Yes, you did. I know this well. I know my son, Yara. I know how hard he can be. He’s like his father. Hard and complicated. But I know he’d never physically hurt you. Doesn’t that count for something?”

My eyes narrowed. “That shouldn’t be the reason I stayed, Lindsay, because he didn’t hurt me physically. He hurt me in every other possible way.” Lindsay stared at me as if I were insane. I knew exactly why, too. Because she was right about her husband—he was just like Cole. Cold. Distant. Mean. Yet unlike me, Lindsay stayed.

I’d heard her cry to me over the years about how hard things were at home. I’d watched her suffer at the hands of a man who didn’t love her right. I’d witnessed her light begin to diminish after he crushed her spirit time and time again. She became a shell of the vibrant woman she’d once been.

She didn’t know it, but she was one of the true reasons why I found the courage to walk away. When I saw Cole growing more and more like his father, I took that as a warning sign. I saw the warning that was right before me. I didn’t want to become like Lindsay Parker. I didn’t want my next thirty years to become like hers. I didn’t want to fall so deeply into the belief that a man was good for you as long as he didn’t strike you.

No.

I wanted love.

I wanted warmth.

I wanted not to walk on eggshells when I came home because I didn’t know which version of my husband would come through the front door that night.

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