Page 11 of Make Me Love You

Suzie nudged her in the ribs with her sandaled toe. “Stop being dramatic and get up.”

“No.” Emma closed her eyes and waited for them to give up.

No such luck.

“If she won’t come to us, we’ll just have to go to her,” Suzie said. “Oh my God, the ground is so far away. You’re going to help me back up, right?”

Emma’s eyes shot open in alarm as Suzie and Kate joined her on the floor, sandwiching her between them. Suzie grunted as she landed, and the hundred-year-old pine floorboards groaned, making Kate giggle.

“Shut up,” Suzie groused. “When you did this, you were seventeen. Pregnancy is different in your late twenties, let me tell you.”

Kate rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. You have a decade of baby-making years ahead of you. You’re not old.”

“I feel old. And large, in an unbalanced sort of way.”

“Well,” Kate said comfortingly, “that’s because you are large in an unbalanced sort of way.”

Emma cleared her throat. “Can we get back to the purpose of this ambush, which is that I am now mayor of Hart’s Ridge and we are all doomed?”

“We’re not doomed,” Suzie said. “At least, no more so than normal. Things aren’t great right now, but that’s not your fault. No one can blame you for the processing plant closing.”

Suzie steadfastly refused to call it the chicken plant, like everyone else did. This was because she kept hens in her backyard and loved every single one of them, so much so that she had named them after Jane Austen characters.

Emma couldn’t help smiling a little before remembering that there was nothing to smile about. She sighed. “No, it’s not my fault. But now it’s my responsibility.”

Emma squeezed her eyes shut again in a futile attempt to block out reality. She hated responsibility, mostly because her life had been far too full of it. Once upon a time she had been a normal middle-class kid. Her dad taught chemistry at the University of North Carolina, and her mom was a third-grade teacher at Hart’s Ridge Elementary. They weren’t rich, but they could afford to spend summer vacations driving around national parks in the Airstream. All that had changed when her mom got sick.

Stage II cervical cancer. At first they had thought she would be okay. Survival rates weren’t in the nineties like with Stage I, but the odds were better than a coin toss. But Emma had never won a coin toss in her life, and her mom didn’t win against cancer. It had taken five years of surgeries and chemotherapy before it killed her, during which Emma did her best to care for her. She raced home every day after school—and sometimes played hooky—to make sure her mom was comfortable. She washed her hair, made sure she took her meds, did all the cooking and cleaning. She helped her go to the bathroom, and when even that was too much, she changed the bedpan. Her dad couldn’t be there—losing his job would mean losing health insurance.

Even with health insurance, once the bills started coming, they didn’t stop. The stress affected everything. He wasn’t tenured, and then he was laid off. But the bills kept coming and they didn’t stop until she died.

But by then he had found a way to put that chemistry knowledge to use.

With her mom’s death and her dad’s arrest, Emma traded responsibility of one parent for another. She dropped out of school to work full time to cover the mortgage and the defense bills.

Being responsible for her parents was terrible, draining, stressful—and those were the people she loved most in the world. Now she was responsible for the whole damn town, and she wasn’t sure she loved more than a handful of them.

“I know it’s overwhelming,” Kate said. “We’re here to help.”

That made Emma feel marginally better, even if she suspected that their “help” would mostly consist of listening to her bitch and moan. They weren’t any more qualified to be mayor than she was. Suzie was a stay-at-home mom of two with a third baby on the way, and Kate ran a candy shop. Neither of them knew anything about being mayor.

They were screwed, all right. The whole town was screwed.

“You don’t have to do this alone,” Suzie said. “Of course we’ll help. Who is replacing Mrs. Whittaker as deputy mayor?”

Her stomach twisted. Other than shouting I’ll never forgive you, Eli Carter! his name hadn’t crossed her lips in eight years. The look on his face when she said it was the same as it had been all those years ago. Resignation, sadness, and something else that was neither of those things. Something she was afraid to give a name to, because it felt like a punch to the chest.

“Eli Carter,” she said. “Because the universe hates me.”

“No!” Suzie gasped. “Are you serious?”

“What’s wrong with Eli Carter?” Kate asked. “He seems like a solid choice. Maybe a little taciturn and serious, but he’s also, you know, hot. I guess that’s not a requirement for deputy mayor, but maybe it should be.”

In unison, Emma and Suzie turned to give her incredulous looks.

“What?” Kate asked defensively. “What’s with the looks? He is hot! All broody and those muscles.”

Emma covered her face and let out a muffled shriek.

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