Page 54 of Skylar

“Skylar?”

She realized she’d missed something that Cole had said. “What?”

“Are you going to be okay?”

“Of course,” she said without hesitation. She’d survived plenty over the past several years, so she’d survive this too.

“I know you probably don’t want to hear this, but I think you should try for a friendship with Aiden.”

His suggestion didn’t surprise her. “I’ll take that under consideration.”

“Not going to argue with me about it?”

“Nope.”

“But you’re probably not going to do it, are you?”

“I don’t know. I’ll just have to see how things go and how I feel.”

“Fair enough.”

With that, their conversation died out, so Skylar told him she needed to go, and they said goodbye. She set her phone back on the table and picked up her glass of lemonade to take a drink.

Everyone seemed so willing to welcome Aiden back into the fold. Cole’s feelings about Aiden weren’t a surprise, but the rest of the family‘s were.

Perhaps she’d done herself a disservice by not telling people what had happened in the past. She’d kept her pain over the breakup to herself, and she’d been alone as she’d tried to heal her shattered heart.

Unfortunately, that hadn’t happened before she’d given birth to Shiloh, which had meant that her heart was broken even further as she handed her baby over to her sister and walked away. No one had been there as she’d wept over the loss of the man she loved and the baby they’d created.

So no one truly knew the depth of the hurt she’d experienced because of Aiden’s actions, and she wasn’t inclined to parade it out for them now.

When Skylar heard the back door open, she looked over to see her mom step out onto the deck with a glass in one hand and a bowl in the other. She wore a pair of dark blue shorts and a light green and white striped tank top in deference to the warmth of the day.

As she joined Skylar, she set the glass and bowl on the table, then settled into the Adirondack chair on the other side of it. Skylar saw that the bowl held a mixture of berries.

“Cole called me,” Skylar said after she’d eaten some of the fruit.

“Really?” Her mom turned toward her. “What did he want?”

“To check on me, I guess,” she said. “And to tell me I should become friends with Aiden.”

“That would be a good idea, I think,” her mom said.

Skylar stared at her for a long moment, then shifted her gaze to the yard once again. “Why?”

“It would make things easier for you and for everyone else too, especially Shiloh.”

Like with Cole, her mom’s words weren’t a surprise. “Can you explain to me why you and everyone else are so willing to accept Aiden after what he did?”

“I can only speak for myself,” her mom said. “I learned a hard lesson about how I treated people when Kelsey came into the family.”

“What do you mean?” Skylar hadn’t been around when Zane and Kelsey had come to live in Serenity. “What happened with Kelsey?”

“I wasn’t as welcoming to her as I should have been.”

“Why weren’t you? Was there something wrong with her?”

Her mom shook her head. “I had a hard time with her relationship with Zane, especially because he’d changed after things had ended with his previous girlfriend. We hardly knew Kelsey, and then they eloped, so we weren’t even included in the wedding. It was the first time someone had come into the familythat we didn’t know at all, and I didn’t handle it like I should have. I reacted badly, I know that. I didn’t show God’s love the way I should have. ”

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