Page 21 of Someday You Learn

“And if I decide not to go along with it? Then I’ve lied to my boss.” I bury my hands in my hair again. “Fuck, he’s never going to leave the practice to me after this.”

“Shit, I didn’t think about that,” Grady mutters. “I don’t know what’s worse—going along with the lie or admitting it was a lie to begin with.”

“I can’t win.” Groaning, I drop my head onto the bar. “Ow.”

“Let’s not do that then, yeah?” Dallas says, pushing my head up. “Just talk to her tonight and decide where to go from there.”

Something tells me I’m about to agree to being engaged, and I vowed I’d never do that again.

But apparently, life—or more accurately, my boss’s daughter—had other plans.

Chapter four

Cashlynn

“Dad?” Walking through the front door of my father’s house again makes this seem all the more real.

“In the kitchen, June Bug.” His voice echoes through the house, and I know there’s no turning back now.

I set my purse on the couch and make my way to the kitchen, preparing to face the music and start putting the pieces of the mess I’ve created back together.

This trip wasn’t supposed to be this complicated. Quitting my job and moving to Carrington Cove was definitely not on my bucket list. Then again, I hadn’t expected to feel trapped in Philadelphia, drowning in lawsuits over jargon I’d long stopped caring about.

This isn’t the life I’d envisioned for myself. And if I’m going to make a change, I need to do it now. The realization that I’m about to be thirty slammed into me like a freight train a few months ago. It’s time I started living my life for myself, but making my father understand that isn’t going to be easy.

“Glad to see you made your way back home,” I say as I enter the kitchen and find my father making a sandwich, his cane resting against the counter and Johnny Cash playing on the record player in the dining room. I guess some things never change—one of them being my father’s obsession with Johnny Cash.

He scoffs. “Well, there’s only so much I can do at the hospital with Beth hovering over me and everyone afraid to look at me.” Irritation laces his words, but he seems to be in better spirits than when I left him to chase after Parker.

“You’re never going to heal if you don’t rest.”

“I fell, June Bug…It’s not like I had my leg amputated.”

“I know, but you’re not getting any younger, Dad. Beth is worried sick about you, and I think it’s time you consider passing along the practice…”

He turns to face me, his eyes narrowing as he sets down his knife. “Is that why you came home? To tell your geriatric father to hang up his white coat for good? Or was it really to see that fiancé of yours?” His words are accusatory, and my stomach twists.

God, poor Parker.

I feel terrible for dragging him into this, but when I saw him, I panicked.

I knew we’d cross paths eventually, but it completely threw me off to see him in that moment—like all the decisions I’ve made over the past year collided at once.

“I know you have questions…”

“You bet your ass I do.” His neck and face begin to turn red—an unmistakable signal I learned early on meant he was about to blow up. “My daughter shows up out of the blue, tells me she’s engaged to a man I work with, and—”

I cut him off before he gets too far into that list of grievances. “I haven’t been happy in Philadelphia for a long time, Dad.”

Hereaches for his cane and walks over to the record player to stop the music, then to his recliner in the living room. As he sinks into his chair, he eyes me skeptically while I make my way to the couch across from him. The tense silence resting between us starts to make me squirm. “You’re throwing your life away, all of your hard work and a career you’ve always wanted, for a man?”

“That’s not it at all!”

“Then explain it to me,” he says, the volume of his voice rising. “Because I hoped you’d come to Carrington Cove eventually, but not like this.”

I shift uncomfortably on the couch. I’ve only been to this town one other time, right after my grandfather passed and Dad took over the practice. I was with my grandmother most of that visit while my dad dealt with the funeral arrangements and taking over a business overnight. Just a few weeks later, I was off to Cornell to study law just like I planned—well, likemy fatherplanned for me. After finishing law school, I moved to Philadelphia, claiming the decision was because I loved the city, though it wasn’t the work that drew me there. But my father has no idea about what really drew me there.

Over the years, he would either visit me in Pennsylvania, or we’d meet up in Raleigh when I traveled there for work—like the weekend I met Parker.

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