Page 1 of Someday You Learn

Prologue

Parker

Four Years Ago

“You can’t make me go!” Sasha screams at me as I pack her suitcase, warring with this decision but knowing it’s the right one.

Nothing has been the same these past two years. Ever since she followed me back home to Carrington Cove from UC Davis, I’ve noticed a change in her, but I didn’t want to admit it. I didn’t want to see it. But the phone call from the cops the other night was the last straw.

I can’t keep pretending she doesn’t have a problem.

“If you don’t go, we’re done,” I say, spinning around to face her now as my words hit her square in the chest.

Her chin wobbles as she speaks. “You…you don’t mean that.”

“I do.” I rake a hand through my hair, trying to stay strong. “I can’t keep living like this. I can’t keep worrying every time I leave the house, wondering if you’ll still be here when I get back, or if I’m going to get a call that you’ve wrapped your car around a telephone pole again.”

“It was one time. I haven’t done anything like thatsince—”

“What about the bottle I found under your bed?” I ask, cutting her off.

But instead of being remorseful, she scowls at me and clenches her teeth. “Why are you going through my stuff?”

Ignoring the deflection, I press on. “We don’t even sleep in the same bed anymore, Sasha. Is that the kind of relationship you want?” Sasha started coming home late at night from parties with her friends, and instead of stumbling into our bed, she started falling into the one in the guest room. Before I knew it, that’s where she was sleeping permanently.

Again, I can’t believe we’ve ended up here, yet here we are.

“You need help.”

“No one is going to help me because I don’t have a problem.”

“If you love me, Sasha, you will do this,” I plead, holding back tears as I stare at the woman that captivated me the moment that I met her.

It was the first day of our second year of college. I was technically a senior because of all the dual enrollment credits I earned in high school, but that didn’t matter to her. I sat down next to her in our advanced biochemistry class, she leaned in and asked to borrow a pen from me, and the rest was history.

Little did I know that we’d end up here someday, me begging her to get sober so we could spend the rest of our lives together like we planned.

With tears in her eyes, she steps toward me until there’s only an inch of space between us. “I’m…I’m scared, Parker.”

“Me too.”

“I don’t want to be away from you.”

I swallow down the sharp words on the tip of my tongue about how we’ve been drifting apart for years, and instead reply, “I’ll visit you the second I can. I promise.” And I will. I’d do anything for this woman,even sacrifice months of our life together if it means she can get healthy. I’ve failed her, ignoring what I knew was happening, but not anymore. It’s time I be the man I promised her I would be when I slipped that ring on her finger.

I need to give up this need to keep proving myself to everyone.

And what I need Sasha to give up is alcohol.

I might have been absent lately, trying like hell to prove myself at the animal hospital and telling myself it was a good sign that Sasha was making friends and spending more time with them. But the night she got into the accident, I had to snap myself out of my denial.

“You can do this, Sasha. I believe in you. Our future is on the line, and I don’t want a life without you in it.”

She nods as tears roll down her cheeks. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

She nods again. “I want that life and future too.”

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