Page 82 of The Bookbinder's Guide to Love

It hurt because in the back room today she’d thought they’d made promises to each other. The kind their souls could understand, and she felt stupid realizing she might have been feeling something that wasn’t there.

She wasn’t a trust-her-gut kind of person. Her gut had never told her to do anything but stick to herself as a way to stay safe.

“What happened?” Poppy asked as she came out the door with Liberty behind her. They both had on their coats and Liberty handed Sera a mug of tea.

Sera opened her mouth to tell them, but instead of words, her voice did this crack that sounded horrible, and she started crying. Dammit, she never cried.

“What did he do?” Liberty asked, her voice loud and angry. “This time I’m cursing him.”

But Sera didn’t want that. There was no curse to make Wes love her or make him want to stay. God, now she could admit that was what she wanted. Now, when he’d accused her of stealing from him in front of his father. Now, when he was gone.

“No,” she said to Liberty. “I don’t want that.”

Poppy moved closer, wrapping one arm around Sera’s shoulders. “What do you want?”

“To be trusted. To be enough that he’d want to stay,” she said, and the words sounded even more pitiful out loud than they did in her head. She understood that he had his own baggage and the way she’d taken the book was triggering for him. But she wished...that he’d trusted her.

“You are enough. He’s the one who is lacking,” Liberty said. “What happened?”

Sera smelled the tea Poppy had brought her. Rose hips and lemongrass, one of Poppy’s mixes. Sera closed her eyes and took a sip, letting her sisterhood with these two women surround her.

“I, um, I took a book from Ford’s house and then sent it out to be repaired without saying anything to Wes. It’s a very valuable book, and more than that, it has a lot of sentimental meaning to Wes and his family.”

Wes had shared with her that he didn’t want to repair the book himself even though it was almost impossible to read because it was so worn down. He had been afraid to fix it in case he damaged it further.

She’d meant the gift to be a goodbye, for when he left. To say thank-you for his time in her life. But their time together had changed. Those late-night stories and book work had formed a bond between them, she’d thought. It was difficult now to accept that it hadn’t.

There was no way Wes could mistake her gesture for anything other than a kind one, if he truly knew her. And the fact that he didn’t left her spinning out of control.

“Well, I see why he’d be upset, but he knows you weren’t going to sell it or keep it,” Poppy said. “That’s totally not who you are.”

“Heshouldknow that,” Sera agreed. The Beatrix Potter book she’d given him at the estate sale was worth more than this copy ofRobinson Crusoe. “But he didn’t. I mean, I get it. He’s emotionally constipated—his entire family is. But I think I fooled myself into seeing something more in him.”

“Fooled yourself?”

“It’s something I used to do in foster care. Find someone who I thought would be my new sister or mom or dad, and then it turned out they were only doing their job or moved to another group home and we’d lose contact.”

Poppy shook her head. “You weren’t fooling yourself. He was into you. Is there a chance he’ll realize he was wrong?”

“If he does, would you take him back?” Liberty asked.

Maybe. She wasn’t sure. Trusting another person to be there for her had always been a big ask. His actions today made her doubt so much about herself.

Which pissed her off. Because the only thing she’d ever been able to count on was herself. She wasn’t going to let him steal that from her. If he came back, he would have to prove he was worthy of being in her life.

She was the leading lady, she reminded herself. She’d done a nice thing and he’d hurt her for it. She wasn’t going to just say it was okay and welcome him back into her life, her bed and her heart.

Wes knew he couldn’t just walk back into WiCKed Sisters. Not today, at least. He needed a plan. Except he straight up sucked at plans. What he was really good at was saying the wrong thing and then walking away. That was exactly what had caused his estrangement with Grandpa and exactly what he didn’t want to allow to happen now with Sera.

He needed help. Taking out his phone, he called Oz.

“Hey, bro,” Oz said.

Hey, bro?“Oz?”

“Yeah. Sorry Dad texted something was up with you and Sera and he might have played a part in it.”

Wes rubbed the back of his neck as he sat at the kitchen table at Grandpa’s house. The book he’d started working on six weeks ago was almost completely repaired; all he had left to do was reassemble it.

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