Page 24 of Love Letters to Christmas

“I do not want to wear a veil.” Her clicking fingers fly across her keyboard.

Sitting up, I lift the phone and scoot in—problem solver extraordinaire. “Have you communicated that to him?”

“Yes.”

I gasp, letting my eyes widen. “And he got upset? Is that why he’s not here today?”

Ceres arches a brow at me, then she says plainly, “No? He’s not here because it’s Tuesday.”

Tuesday? “Yes? And?”

“Tuesday is meeting day. He’s with Jove.”

Ah, yes, of course. How silly of me. Tuesday is always meeting day. I know this. Just like I know the third Saturday of every month is shopping day. Ceres spares very little information about herself, but what I have managed to glean during our beautiful three-year friendship, I cannot help but cling to.

As it stands, Ceres is the first person in my entire life who has both not grown to hate me and who I have been able to keep secret from my parents. She lets me beme. And now she has a problem…I think. I press, “So…he didn’t get upset when you told him you didn’t want to wear a veil for your wedding?”

“Mars only gets upset at baddies. There’s no reason for him to ever be upset with me.” She smiles. “I’m a good girl.”

Uh-huh. “So, what’s the problem?”

Her attention flicks off her computer screen and finds me. “Oh, there isn’t one. I just said the first thing I could think of that resembled the most dissonance I have experienced in roughly three years.”

I stare at the swirls of color in Ceres’s hazel eyes. “Can I say something mean and have you recognize that I love, love, love you and don’t mean it in any sort of way, really. I’m just quite literally in the middle of a character arc regression right now?”

“I cannot actually imagine a way you’d be able to offend me, Mellie.”

I nod. Very good. “You are ruining my life. I meanhowis someone actuallythiscontent and at peace with everything all the time?”

She stops working. “When you don’t really leave your house all that much, there’s very little that can bother you.”

“I know that isn’t true. I was basically imprisoned in my house my entire childhood.” Isolated from people and activities, kept solidly away from any would-be friends who might not have minded my boy-crazed tendencies. My parents’ personalities made existing tough from the very start.

“You went to school and worked at Walmart,” Ceres says.

“School and work don’t count.”

“They force you to be around people, so they actually do.”

I huff, puffing a breath out my nose. “Fine. But! You were like this as a kid, too, I bet. When you were in school, I bet you also presented zero problems. You are the least problematic person in the whole entire world, and—as stated previously—that’s a problem for me because it is ruining my life.”

Ceres lifts her attention toward the ceiling, blinks, and says, “Oh. Well.” She smiles. “Dark romance girlies are just builtdifferent. Have you considered falling for a raging red flag?”

“No.”

“Pity. You’ll never attain inner peace.”

I know she’s making jokes, but it so deeply feels like the truth. My eyes catch on the letter Brian gave me at the ren faire. It remains, unbothered, on my desk. A constant reminder that I’mwelcome.

Sometimes, it’s the only thing getting me through the anxiety that I’m a burden on everyone around me unless I’m giving up everything of myself. And, even then, it still never quite feels likeenough.

Shaking my head, I divert my focus off my thoughts and frown at Ceres. “Why can’t my external peace translate into internal peace?Nothingis wrong. Yet it feels like I keep getting electrocuted when I’m just wandering around.”

“Your nervous system is programmed for issues. Your parents created an environment that plateaued at anger. So when there’s nothing wrong, you keep thinking that something’s wrong. Because something must be wrong. But there’s nothing. Still, it feels like there’s something. Because there has to be. But there’s still nothing. And then you start thinking that you’re going to ruin the nothing. So, sooner or later, you realize that you’re what’s wrong. It’s justyou.”

I swallow hard as Ceres stops suddenly, and her rendition of my inner monologue ceases.

Softer and slower, she says, “This is very normal in the healing process. Lying on the floor in a bundle of dysregulation is an incredibly normal step.”

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