Page 150 of My Lucky Charm

I close my eyes and let out another sob. I’m sure my sisters are both staring at me, wide-eyed and confused, but I don’t know how to make them understand my breakdown.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you cry,” Poppy says.

And at that, the sobbing becomes harder to control. “Because I hate crying,” I howl.

“Okay, but you need to cry sometimes,” Raya says.

“Oh, okay. You don’t cry,” I choke out.

“Not in front of people.” Raya holds a finger up as if she’s just made a point. “You don’t cry at all.”

This makes me cry harder. I honestly don’t know how many more tears I can produce here.

“Is this what twenty-nine years of not letting yourself feel the bad things does to a person?” Poppy frowns, and I respond with a helpless shrug.

Raya pulls her legs up underneath her and studies me. “Is this about yesterday?”

“What happened yesterday?” Poppy asks.

Raya gives her the abbreviated version of her conversation with Amber, and her conversation with me, and hearing it again makes everything worse. I reach for the tissue box on the little table next to the couch, and when Poppy hands it over, I pull out eight tissues in a wadded clump.

It’s what I need right now.

“So this is about Jay?” Poppy asks.

“No.” I shake my head. “Yes.” I cover my face with my hands. “Maybe.” I bury my face in my eight Kleenexes. “I don’t knooooow!”

“Okay,” Raya says. “Just breathe.”

I exhale a shaky breath, but it doesn’t calm me down. “It’s not just Jay,” I say, my voice shaky. “It’s everything.”

“Everything?” Raya asks.

“Everything,” I repeat, just hoping that they’ll understand it all from one word. I bury my face in Poppy’s throw pillow because I don’t know what else to say.

How do I explain that it’s literally everything? Every broken relationship in my entire adult life. It’s putting myself out there over and over and over again, only to have it not work out. It’s falling for the wrong guy, letting myself get played, falling for the wrong guy again, falling in absolute love with a child who is not mine and knowing that all I really want is to be someone’s person, and I’ve never been farther from that dream. It’s the fact that I’m twenty-nine and no closer to having the life I always thought I would have than I was when I was nineteen. It’s all of this. And yeah, it’s Gray. It’s the fact that even though I really do love my job, I would absolutely give it up tomorrow if it meant I got to be with Gray, and that would only start this cycle over again.

What am I supposed to do with that? What does that say about me if I’m willing to throw away my career for a man? And can what I do even be called a career? The fact is, I really love my job, and it just absolutely sucks that it’s standing in the way of something else I think I could love even more.

My sisters do their best to pull all of this out of me, and God bless them for being patient because it takes the entire night for me to explain it.

“Eloise, you’ve never processed any of this,” Poppy says, hours later, as she brings out a batch of brownies she just whipped up like they were as easy as a frozen pizza. “You can’t do that. Emotions like these don’t exactly like being contained. Your body held onto them, and now it’s trying to get them all out.”

“I don’t like these feelings,” I say. “I like to be happy. I like to have fun. I don’t want to be sad.”

“Nobody wants to be sad,” Raya says. “But life isn’t always going to be happy and fun.”

“And you have a habit of pretending that the bad things never really happened.” Poppy wraps her arm around me, and I fall onto her shoulder.

“Like with Jay,” Raya says.

“I feel like punching him was closure enough on that chapter.”

“It was . . . something,” Raya says. “But honestly, how much did you really process that relationship or any other failed relationship?”

“You let yourself feel lousy,” Poppy says. “But only to a point.”

“And then—” Raya motions my name sign. “The sunshine is back.”

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