Page 15 of All It Takes

“So what? Ilovelove. Bea is thrilled that you and Jonah are together. Even you have to admit, you two are working out just great. Your mood has been much better since you’ve been getting it on the regular.”

She snorted and took a swallow of water. Her assessing gaze coasted over my face, and I willed myself not to squirm.

She circled her hand in the air again. “Just tell me, Tiffany. It’s fine if you just want to be alone, but I feel like there’s more to the story.”

I wrinkled my nose and pressed my glasses up as I considered my friend. For as nice as Alice was, she had an implacable stubborn streak. It rarely showed itself. In fact, the only time I’d seen it surface was in relation to caring for animals and making sure the people she cared about were okay. While I appreciated being in the pool of people who Alice counted as a friend who mattered, just this second, I was annoyed. Because I knew she was going to patiently wait until I finally explained.

I let out of breath and took a quick sip of my water. “Fine. I have to give you credit for your patience anyway.” She cocked her head to the side, arching a brow. “So do you remember my mom?”

Alice looked a little confused but nodded. “Of course. You look a lot like her. You’re beautiful.”

“That was a sideways compliment,” I muttered, annoyance pricking me. Not annoyance with Alice, but the fact that I looked like my mother.

“Well, shewasbeautiful. So are you. I don’t even remember what she did.”

In the small world of Willow Brook and the locals born and raised here, it was rare not to know at least something about someone and what they did, even if you didn’t know them well. That was the thing about my mom. She’d never had a stable job. She was always coming and going.

“She was…” I paused, shrugging. “Restless, I suppose.”

“I know she passed away, and you almost never speak of her,” Alice said gently.

Alice’s parents had died in a boating accident. I remembered her parents. They’d always seemed, well, happy in a comfortable way. And stable, the opposite of my mother. I thanked the universe, the stars, and God many times that my father had been as solid as a rock, just a steady guy. He still was.

“How did she die?” she asked.

“Cancer. The sad thing is, after spending most of my childhood desperate to get my mother to love me, to stay in one place and be stable, I was kind of relieved when she passed away. Which sounds awful, I know. We had a complicated relationship, I guess you could say.”

Alice reached across the table, one of her hands curling over mine. She squeezed gently. I didn’t even realize how cold my hands were until I felt the contrast of her touch. She released her grip, dipping her chin. “It’s okay. We don’t get to choose our parents.”

“No, we certainly don’t.” I took a breath, steeling myself. “Anyway, aside from her not being the most stable person, Chase and I watched her treat my dad like shit. It took me a long time to realize that he ignored it. He’s never said it, but I think he basically made a deal with himself that he had committed to us, and that was all that mattered to him. At least as far as our family was concerned. And my mom? She was always chasing after something. She wanted to be a model, then an actress, then in a band, and she bounced around trying to find work. She had two affairs. One of them with…” I paused, unsure if I should even say the name, hesitating just long enough that all I offered was, “One of my high school teachers.”

My heart stung with the burn of it, remembering how desperately I craved my mother’s attention. Emotionally speaking, she’d never been an available parent for Chase or me. She had even viewed me as her competition somehow as I got older. I’d borne more of the brunt of her flashes of irritation and this rage that you felt more than you saw. She kept it bottled up tightly. It would flash like lightning in the darkness sometimes. I always felt like my relationship with my mother was like the surface of a lake. There was what was visible to the eye and what was hidden underneath, teeming with things I still didn’t understand.

Realizing Alice was waiting for me to continue, I sucked in a breath before explaining, “So yeah, I didn’t grow up with a great model for healthy relationships. As awesome as my dad has been, I guess it almost made me more cynical. I felt like it shouldn’t have turned out that way for him. He deserved better, and it didn’t matter anyway.”

I paused to take another bite of pizza, grateful for the ridiculous amount of cheese and pepperoni. The flavors soothed me. After I finished chewing, I cocked my head to the side, fiddling with my napkin and folding it into a tidy triangle again and again as I began to talk. “I dated here and there, but I never really trusted anyone enough to get serious.” I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t have a single serious relationship in college, and the sex was nothing to celebrate.”

Alice’s lips twitched at the corners. “Ah, well, it can be better,” she offered lightly.

I snorted, needing the humor to bolster me. “I had a good friend in college, Scott. We got close. Before I knew it, we kind of slid into this friends-with-benefits situation after we graduated.” I shrugged. “We started to have feelings for each other. He said something about it first, and we decided to be exclusive. I thought maybe I had found a way to avoid all the things I worried about.” I swept my hand in a small arc in the air. “Because I knew him. We’d been friends since freshman year. He was the reason I stayed down there. I also got a good job. The place where I worked in HR before I moved home.” I paused, hesitating to continue.

My friend nodded encouragingly, and I forced myself to keep talking. “Then I had a scare. I’m fine,” I said firmly. “But I had to have surgery to remove what turned out to be a benign nerve tumor. Scott didn’t even reply to my text.”

Alice’s eyes widened. “What do you mean? Did he not know what happened? Since you’re sitting in front of me and apparently okay, we won’t dwell on that now, but I want more info.”

I let out a bitter laugh. “I’ll fill you in. Yeah, he knew. I called him as soon as I was referred to oncology because they didn’t know if it was benign. He was all freaked out. I could tell. I’m not sure what he thought. They ran some tests, and I wanted him to go with me to the follow-up appointment. He dumped me instead. By text. Then he ghosted me completely.”

There was still a scorched burn on my heart. It felt as if my heart was a building, and a car had crashed into the corner, damaging it badly but leaving the rest standing. I’d walled off that corner.

“Oh my God,” Alice breathed. “What a fucking asshole.”

My friend’s gray eyes were dark and stormy looking. I knew she would go to battle for me. I didn’t need it anymore, but it still felt good.

I rolled my eyes, twisting my lips to the side. “Yeah, he’s a total fucking asshole. Anyway, to clarify what happened, it turned out to be benign, so I’m fine. The jerk had the nerve to call me to check in like a month later after completely ghosting me. When I told him everything would be fine, he tried to apologize. I told him to fuck off. When someone can’t be there when it matters, you know you don’t really matter. After the fact, I found out I wasn’t his only friend with benefits. Another mutual friend of ours from college reached out to me later. She knew the whole thing. She just wanted me to know he pulled the same kind of bullshit with her, acting like she was special and saying he wanted to be exclusive. He never was. She found out about meandsome other woman. I just decided romance wasn’t worth it. I have enough trust issues to begin with. I don’t really need it. You know, statistically speaking, the happiest people are older women who are single and don’t have kids.”

Alice had just taken a sip of her water. She sputtered, her eyes wide as she looked over at me.

I grinned. “True story. Look it up.”

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