I knew I had lost my damn mind when I asked him in a voice that wasn’t totally steady, “Give me a minute would you?”

He didn’t even think about it. “Sure.”

I licked my lips.

When I had been a teenager, I had wondered what things would have been like if my mom hadn’t died giving birth to me. If she would have been a better mother than the only one I had grown up knowing. I wondered if maybe our dad would have been different.

But as I got older, I realized that things might have been worse.

I had to accept I would never know how differently things might have been.

All I could do was stand there and slow my breathing, inhale and exhale.

“Just thirty more seconds,” I told him, quietly, trying to ignore the ache in my chest.

But he didn’t listen. He moved, and before I knew it, something warm and heavy fell over my shoulders and arms.

What had to be his hands draped themselves on my shoulders, over what had to be his jacket, and slid down over my arms, his hands molding themselves loosely over my muscles and bones. The skin on his palms and fingers eventually landed on my wrists. He was warm. Those palms kept moving downward until they were cupping my hands. His fingers lingered there. Holding them there.

Then they dropped away.

I always knew he was really a decent man.

That was when I forced myself to take a step back. To breathe. There at the cemetery, with Ripley’s jacket on my shoulders, I sniffled and wiped under my eyes with my finger one more time, looking at everything and nothing at the same time.

It wasn’t so hard to glance up at Rip as I wiped at my eyes again. His face was back to that cool, detached expression. Not mean. Not surprised. Just… cool.

“Thank you,” I told him in a voice I was honestly proud of. “Can we go now?”

It was only his nostrils flaring that said something was going through that brain of his because his features didn’t tell any other story.

The only words we shared over the next three hours were when he pulled up to a gas station and asked if I wanted to get something quick from the fast food inside, but that was it.

When he pulled up to my house after all that—my phone telling me I had an hour until Lily got home—I reached over and put my hand over his where it sat on the steering wheel. We hadn’t done more than accidentally brush fingers in years, and here, twice in a day, we had done more than that. Weird how things like that worked.

“Thank you, Rip.” I met those blue-green eyes and told him, “My sister is graduating on Saturday. If you’d like to come over after six, you’re more than welcome to. We’ll have food and drinks and stuff.”

I gave it a squeeze, just one, and then pulled away.

I opened the door and slid out. Then I closed the door, took a step onto the curb and lifted my hand.

He didn’t wave back.

But he waited until I’d opened my front door before he drove off.

I went to my room, changed out of my clothes and then, then, I cried.

For Grandma Genie.

For my sisters.

For the mom I had never met.

For the past, the present, and the future.

But mostly for myself.

Chapter 9

While I didn’t love Friday morning meetings, I didn’t hate them on the same level that I did cooked carrots.

But that Friday might have been the exception.

The day before had just been… not the best day of my life, but not the worst either. Even after getting dropped off at home, it hadn’t gotten much better. I’d cried for what I guessed was close to an hour before wiping my face off and reminding myself of how many wonderful things I had.

By the time Lily burst into the house screaming, “LUNA!” at the top of her lungs like she was expecting me not to have made it back home, my eyes had still been red and puffy.

She had run to my room and busted inside. My little sister had taken one look at me sitting on the edge of my bed and crawled onto it behind me, wrapping her arms around me.

“Did it go that bad?” she had asked.

“It was a C minus. It could have gone better, but it could have gone worse,” I admitted to her, sneaking my hands up to rest over the forearms covering my neck.

Lily had just hugged me tighter. “You want to tell me what happened?”

“They were there,” I told her vaguely. “Your mom is still on drugs. Dad looks like hell. Rudy grabbed my wrist, but I got him into an armbar, and Rip pretty much threatened to kick his ass, and then he left me alone.”

My beloved little sister kissed my head at least five times before saying, “You should’ve broken his arm.”

“I know.”

“Kicked him in the nuts.”

“Twice at least.”

“Spit in his eyes.”

“Vinegar would hurt more,” I tried to make her laugh, and I did it. It wasn’t a great, big laugh, but it was something.

“I’m glad Rip went with you,” she kept going, her voice lighter than it had been a minute before.

“Me too,” I told her forearm, resting my chin on it.

She hugged me even closer. “Tell me what your boss likes, and I’ll make it for him. He deserves it for threatening stupid Rudy.”

She didn’t know what I had done and had no idea that we had basically performed a business exchange. I wasn’t about to correct her. She had enough to worry about, so I had just nodded.

Her hand rubbed my back as she said, “Come on. Let’s go to Red Lobster and take advantage of my employee discount before it runs out. My treat.”

That was how we ended up going to Red Lobster for an early dinner and then going to the movies afterward. To keep my mind off things, Lily had claimed, and it had done the trick, at least until I tried going to sleep. Then it had all come back to me. The way my dad had ignored me, like I was dead to him. What my cousin had done. The hundred and one memories I didn’t let myself think about from years ago.

Nothing helped me wind down, and nothing had kept me asleep when I had managed to doze off. I tossed and turned the entire night, thinking about all the things I should have done differently and all the things I wouldn’t have done any differently.

I was healthy. I had somewhere to live. I had people who cared about me.

And I had found a brand-new lipstick in my underwear drawer that I’d forgotten all about.

Lily and I had had some good bonding time.

I managed to leave for work before my sister left her room. I had forgotten all about what day of the week it was and what it meant.

There were our weekly meetings, and then there were our monthly meetings. Our monthly meetings were that one time every four weeks where the employees got to vent, not just Mr. Cooper or Ripley. It was everyone else’s turn.

I hated them.

Maybe it was mostly because of the day before, or maybe it was because I would have rather been in the booth working instead of sitting in a chair in the break room, listening to the guys complain about each other.

Because that’s what the meetings were for: bitching. Lots and lots of bitching. I hated it.

The meetings were a necessary evil though. Over the years, I had seen things get so heated between the guys that fights would break out. I’d worked around this many men for so long that I got that they couldn’t just get over things eventually. The problem was, if anyone got into an altercation, they would get fired.

It had happened before, and I was sure it was going to happen again, monthly meetings or not.

So, for an hour, maybe an hour and a half depending how stressed out and pissed off the guys were, I mainly just sat there and stared off into space so I wouldn’t get called out for having my eyes closed. I’d spent most of my childhood zoning out people arguing; this was nothing.

Nothing but boring.

And annoying.

And honestly a little painful.

With the exception of Jason, I really liked everyone I worked with. I couldn’t get why they didn’t let the petty crap go.

“…and it’s bullshit that I’m stuck doing all the sanding while everybody else pretends they’re busy doin’ somethin’ so that they can jump in and do the filler. My fu—damn arm gets tired too,” Jason muttered from his spot on the opposite side of the table, elbows on his knees, his face looking as irritated as his voice sounded.