Page 31 of Lose You to Find Me

I can’t help but crack a smile despite how much energy it takes. Between the rising headache in my temples, the stomachache making me queasy, and the constant ache in my lower back, I’ve had a rough day. Elena has talked my ear off to the point that I haven’t had one second of peace since I arrived. And because I didn’t want to admit just how off I felt, her nonstop play-by-play on her day worsened the growing throbbing in my skull.

The teen huffs. “I thought we weren’t allowed to gossip about the customers.”

Sipping my tea to hide my trembling lips, I hear Bea reply with a tart “I own this place, child. I can do as I please.”

Her granddaughter grumbles under her breath before heading out to the main room to start to clean up.

I shift in my chair, trying to swallow down the threatening nausea. I’ve never been a huge fan of tea, and every sip makes me want to gag. But it has eased my stomach, so I power through until the cup is empty. “Is there anything you need help with back here before I go help her?”

Bea stares at me, her eyes narrowing a bit as she scans my face, then down the entirety of my body. She’s been eyeing me throughout the day without saying a word, and I haven’t asked what’s on her mind. “Might as well go out there or Elena will drag her feet to get extra hours. She thinks her first car will be brand new, so she wants to earn all the money she can. Don’t have it in me to tell her that her mom will never let her get one.”

“A car?”

“Anewone,” she corrects. Shaking her head, she glances toward the girl in question. “I know for a fact that she scratched her mother’s car while practicing three-point turns. Then dented her father’s trying to parallel park.”

I cringe. A new car definitely wouldn’t be ideal for her then. “I’ll go make sure everything is cleaned up.”

I set the cup in the sink and head back out to see Elena aggressively scrubbing the counter like she’s got a vendetta against it. I approach her, grabbing one of the coffeepots with barely half a cup left in it and dumping it into the sink. “You good over there?”

For once, the teen is uncharacteristically quiet. It makes me look over my shoulder at her to see if she’s okay. Her movement pauses before she sighs and keeps scrubbing. “Grandma doesn’t think I’m responsible enough to handle a new car. I thought if I worked hard, I could prove to her and my parents that I deserve one.”

I start washing out the pot. “I don’t think you have to worry about proving you deserve one, Lena. They just want to make sure whatever you get is…sturdy.” I can feel her rolling her eyes at my careful choice of words. “Plus, car insurance isn’t cheap for new drivers. They’re going to want to make sure you’re covered and safe.”

“You sound like them,” she mumbles.

I move from one machine to the next. “It isn’t a bad thing that they care about you. My parents were the same way when I started driving. The day after I got my license, I hit a deer and messed up the bumper so bad it cost almost a grand to fix.”

“A grand?Like, one thousand dollars?” she all but gasps.

It still makes me flinch to think about. “It was bad. I thought I was going to be grounded for months, but my parents were just glad I was okay and had insurance on the car.”

While I have my issues with my parents, they’ve never made me feel unloved. The few times I’ve messed up, like the deer incident, they didn’t make a huge deal out of it. They didn’t yell or fight or anything I was used to from them. They rushed to the scene of the accident and hugged me tighter than I’d ever been hugged by either of them because they were worried I’d gotten hurt and were grateful I wasn’t.

Elena is quiet again. Then, “You haven’t said much about them. I know people are talking about their…uh…”

“You can say divorce. It isn’t like it’s a secret. Trust me when I say that sometimes people are better off without each other. They’re healthier.”

“Is that why you broke up with Caleb?”

I freeze at the question, hands stilling on the pot handle my fingers are tightly wrapped around. There’s no easy way to explain why I did what I did without giving too much away.

It’s beyond fear. It’s reality.

“Sorry,” she says. “People say I’m too nosey for my own good. You guys were really cute is all. I was thinking you’d get married and make adorable little—”

“Elena,” Bea chides, cutting off her granddaughter. It’s nothing I haven’t heard before, but it doesn’t hurt any less to hear. “Read the room, child. Enough talking. More cleaning.”

My stomach hurts replaying all the times I thought I’d have that future too. That was when I was a teenager, expecting to be like everybody else who was young and in love.

Before the future becamereal. Plausible.

“I don’t think that future is very likely anymore” is what I tell Elena before tuning out everybody around me to finish my shift trapped in the depths of my own mind.

Chapter Thirteen

CALEB

Spending the betterpart of the last three and a half years living with a bunch of horned-up, cocky football players meant hearing and seeing it all. Whenever one of them would go through a breakup, there’d always be somebody telling them to get under somebody new to get over whoever they’re stuck on.

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