Page 18 of With All My Heart, Joy

She lowered her head. “I don’t know how to explain.”

“Try me. I’m pretty good at deciphering the clues.”

“The first thing will make me sound like a loser.”

“I highly doubt that.”

A smile began on her lips. Dark red lips. Isaac darted his eyes to the ceiling. Seriously, he needed to focus.

“Lucy asked me to be her maid of honor.”

Did she know she would be standing across fromhim?

“And it made me feel pathetic. Everyone in my family has found their life partner, and I’m not even remotely close to that.”

She would have no problem finding somebody if she wanted to. “Is that what you want?”

Her lips pursed in thought. Distracting, to say the least. “No. I need to figure out my own issues before I involve myself with someone else.”

He respected that, even if it wasn’t always true. “If I understand what you’re saying, you feel left behind, and you don’t like that feeling—although you have no intention of doing anything about it.”

Joy looked at him with a sad, half-pouting smile. “See? Pathetic.”

“Not at all.” He understood her better than he could rightly explain. Silas was making him feel much the same lately. The feeling wasn’t pleasant, even if there was nothing he could do about it. “Has this feeling triggered more depression?”

She seemed to weigh his question, her head wobbling from side to side. “More or less the same. What happened yesterday upset me more.”

“What happened yesterday?”

She launched into a story of some friends asking to hang out the day before. Because she mostly did content creation alone, she was lonely and overjoyed at the gesture. But it turned out they only wanted to be in a video with her, not spend time with her.

“It’s like I don’t personally matter to them at all. Only my platform does. They wanted to use me to get their faces in front of my viewers, and they even asked to link their own channels in my description. And I don’t mind doing that. I love helping new influencers grow—but not completely at my expense. They haven’t asked to hang out with me inweeks—and it was all with an agenda.” A plump tear plummeted from her eyes, landing on her clenched hands with a soft pat.

Isaac passed her a tissue. Her line of work was a nightmare. Why would anyone put themselves through that? “You felt used.”

“Yes!”

“Normal feeling. Because youwereused.” There was a lot more he could say on the subject, but she wasn’t ready to hear it. Besides, he needed to get to the root of the issue. And it wasn’t her friends or her social media work. “Joy, can you pinpoint when your depression began? You said freshman year of college, but was there a specific event that precipitated it?”

Her pretty eyes sparkled at him. “Good memory, Mr. Miller.”

Mr. Miller.Way to remind him of their vast age difference. “Memory of an elephant.” He tapped his temple, then immediately felt stupid. And old.

“So yes, I can tell you exactly when my depression started. It began after a breakup.” She slumped in her chair, peeking at him like a petulant child, much like Paisley did sometimes. “Again, that makes me sound pathetic.”

“Can you stop saying that? The things we feel are not pathetic. They are authentic and need to be handled with compassion.” His words had a magical effect on her. The smile she offered dazzled so brightly it seemed to illuminate his entire office. What had he said? Whatever it was, he wanted to say it over and over for the same result.

“If you say so. Long story short, I didn’t date much in high school. I was super awkward the first few years, and then I started my first channel and poured my energy into that. When I went to college, I met a guy the first week of school, and we just clicked. It was everything I had always dreamed it would be. It felt amazing to matter that much to someone, you know? I thought I’d found forever love. Three months later, he dumped me out of the blue, said he’d met someone else.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah… I know now I was maybe out of touch with reality. But it hurt so bad, and it shattered my expectations of love. I handled it really, really badly.”

“And you’ve been depressed ever since?”

She squirmed in her chair. “That makes it sound like I’m still hung up on the guy. I’m not. But depression has been a constant come-and-go force since then.”

“So tell me, when you’ve pulled out of depression and things are going well, what is something that triggers a relapse into a depressive state?”

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