Page 49 of Nothing Heals Me Like You Do

“I know and I’m sorry.”

“What excuse could you possibly have for not being there for Sienna at her father’s funeral?” Maxine hissed.

“An emergency at the shelter,” Justine said. Maxine was not the one she wanted to have this conversation with and she wasn’t going to give her any details about what had transpired with Ashleigh. “I’d like to speak to Sienna, please.”

As if she’d heard her name being spoken through the hubbub of the crowd, Sienna looked in Justine’s direction. Their gazes met, but it was impossible to read Sienna’s face—that lovely, warm, usually so expressive face.

“What you did was not okay,” Maxine said. “You sure picked a day to show your true colors.” With that, she turned around and walked off.

Justine tried to advance, to get closer to Sienna, who seemed to pretend Justine wasn’t even there, but it was as though everyone in the room knew what she had done and was trying to prevent her, just by standing in a certain way and blocking the path.

When Justine finally reached Sienna’s side, she was exhausted. It had been a day and a half already.

“Can we talk, please,” she said to Sienna’s back.

When Sienna turned around, her eyes were moist and her face a mask of raw pain.

“I needed you today,” Sienna whispered. “Fuck, how I needed you.”

“I know.” Saying sorry seemed so insignificant, but an apology was all Justine had. “I’m so sorry, babe. I would have been there if I could. Please, can we talk?” Justine urged again.

“I just can’t right now, Justine.” Sienna looked in such agony. Actually saying goodbye to her dad and the ritual of the funeral must have wrecked her. Justine completely understood. “I needed you today and you weren’t there.” Tears pearled in her eyes.

“I’m sorry.” The words sounded as inadequate as they felt to Justine as she uttered them. “I’m here now,” she said, hoping—in vain—that it was enough.

“As what?” Some of the pain on Sienna’s face had turned into hardness. “My girlfriend? My friend, even?” She gave a terse shake of the head. “Everyone else was there. Rochelle and Rita were there. Drew and Shanti from makeup? They were there. A whole bunch of people I don’t even know, they were there.” She pointed a finger at Justine. “And you? Where the fuck were you? I can’t do this right now. I’m sure you had what seemed like a huge emergency, although I only figured that out after I saw your text and I could finally be sure that you hadn’t been in an accident, the week after my father died in a motorcycle crash. So no, I don’t want to talk to you today. Not tomorrow, either. I never want to fucking see you again.”

“Hey, sis.” Taissa had made her way through the crowd, most of whom were staring at Sienna and Justine. “Why don’t you come with me? We’ll get something to drink in the kitchen.” Taissa put her arm around Sienna and, without even acknowledging Justine, ushered her sister away.

Justine had clearly incurred the wrath of all the Brewster-Brights—perhaps rightly so.

Sienna was also right about today not being the day for Justine to explain why she hadn’t been at Bobby’s funeral. Sienna was too wrung out by all the emotions of the day, and the past week.

There was no point in staying at this reception in Bobby Bright’s memory. Justine had hurt his daughter, possibly beyond repair, and she was damn sorry for it.

“This is what you always do,” Rochelle said. “You’re not there when it really matters.”

“Ashleigh tried to kill herself, Roche.” Justine had stopped by the hospital on her way to see Rochelle and Rita and, all things considered, Ashleigh was doing okay. “I’m not losing another kid. I can’t lose another one.” She shook her head.

“I feel for Ashleigh, you know that, but Sienna—the woman you are dating and are supposedly madly in love with—lost her dad.” Rochelle shook her head with even more force than Justine, as though they were in a contest. “The shelter has so many volunteers. You could have asked Darrel to go to the hospital to be with Ashleigh. They would have done it in a heartbeat, you know that.”

“I had to be there for Ashleigh myself. We have a connection.”

“If I have to convince you that you made the wrong choice today, there’s really no point,” Rochelle said. “In that case, Sienna being so angry with you might as well be the end of it. Then you shouldn’t even try to salvage whatever’s left of what you had.”

Justine closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I know that I made the wrong choice, but?—”

“As long as there’s a ‘but’, you shouldn’t even apologize to Sienna.” Rochelle wasn’t pulling any punches today. She never had, but it had also never had the power to change Justine’s behavior.

“I think,” Justine said, “in this particular situation, there’s simply no such thing as a wrong choice. It wasn’t even a choice, not a conscious one, anyway. I got the call and I drove to the hospital.” It’s who I am, Justine thought but, perhaps, only she would ever understand that.

“For a minute there”—Rochelle’s gaze softened—“I truly believed it would be different with Sienna. You were different with her. You sat in that same chair and told me how easy it was to be with her, to show up for her. And I know you showed up, that you were there for her every single day after her father died. I was so impressed by that. I really was. Ask Rita. I told her in those exact words. Rita and I even talked about how you and Sienna might actually work out somehow—we couldn’t put our finger on what was so different this time around. Maybe, first of all, that you let yourself really fall in love for once but also, more importantly, that you let Sienna do the same with you. That you let whatever chemistry you had organically grow into something potentially beautiful and—who knows?—lasting. But today showed us that you still think the shelter is more important than anything or anyone else.”

“Because it is,” Justine confirmed.

“More important than Sienna on the day of her father’s funeral?”

“No,” Justine contradicted herself, because that’s what this whole situation was. One big contradiction. Both Sienna and Ashleigh mattered a great deal, but in very different ways.

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