Page 44 of Friends Who Fake It

Willow’s throat felt like it was going to close over. She sipped her drink quickly.

“But she didn’t.”

“No.” Willow felt a wave of feeling roll through her – an acknowledgement of failing. Like there was probably something she could have, and should have, done to make this better. To make Meredith love her.

“Then seeing her with the twins must have been hard for you.”

Her stomach fluttered. He had an incredible ability to tap into exactly what she was thinking, to understand it. She lifted her shoulders. “I love my sisters.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“I know.” Her eyes held his and something surged inside of her.

“Is she the kind of mother to them that you wished she’d been to you?”

Willow sipped her drink, thinking that through, even when she knew the answer right away. “It’s complicated.”

“Is it?”

“Well, she’s still Meredith,” she pointed out, with a soft laugh. “I don’t know if that woman’s capable of happy, easy going, given-without-expectation love. But yes. With the twins, she was always…more. More engaged, more…proud. More of a mother.”

His eyes had a shining intensity when they latched to hers. “You must know that’s not your fault.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s nothing to do with you.”

“I know that, too. But when you’re just a little girl—or a teenage girl?—,”

“Or a woman of twenty-five,” he said, gruffly, interrupting.

She nodded slowly.

“It’s hard,” he finished.

“Very.” She looked down at her lap, her thoughts clogged by the strength of her feelings.

“I guess family is something a lot of people take for granted, but not me. I mean, I love my dad, and Meredith, and the twins, but…I don’t really belong with them. To them. I don’t belong anywhere.”

She stared at him for the strangest whisper of time, just a beat of her heart, nothing more, she felt like maybe he would contradict that. Maybe he would say that she belonged right here, in Italy, with him. That maybe he’d promise her the one thing she’d ever really craved, and never known she could reach for until recently: love.

But then, she remembered who he was, what they were, and why that was completely out of reach—and too dangerous to hope for, and it was like the soft rawness of that hope burst apart with all the force of a thousand metal pots being dropped to the sidewalk. There might as well have been a jarring, cacophony of sound, for how she startled.

“Anyway,” she sought for a conversation change. “That’s all very deep for this time of day.”

He wasn’t to be put off though. His hand on her knee squeezed, gently drawing her focus back, and he asked, “Do you think you’ll ever stop caring?”

“Probably not.” Across the street, as if the pain of her past had conjured the image, a mother and daughter walked, hand in hand, over the ancient cobblestones. The daughter was maybe twelve or thirteen, taking her first foray into looking like a ‘grown up’, with a sweet dress and sneakers, her hair styled in curls. She held a phone in one hand, but she was still young enough to hold her mother’s hand in the other. As for the mum, she was looking down with such pride and love that something inside of Willow burst. “It’s like there’s this huge hole inside of me, you know? Like I’ve spent most of my life being aware that I’m not good enough to love, will never be good enough to love. I don’t think it matters who tells me otherwise, I doubt that hole can ever be filled.”

“Willow—,” his voice was raw. Sympathetic. She walled off her heart, instinctively shying away from the idea of letting Francesco make her feel better.

“It’s okay,” she said, smiling weakly. “I’m not asking for you to make it better. I’m just being honest.”

At first, he seemed to fight against that, like he wanted to argue with her, but then, he nodded and reached for his own drink.

“I know a little about grief,” he said, after a long enough pause that she thought maybe he was going to let it go.

She glanced across at him slowly, a feeling in the pit of her stomach that he was talking almost against his will. Certainly, without forethought or planning. “When my mother died, we were just boys. But it changed our entire world.”

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