Total pages in book: 104
Estimated words: 99017 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 495(@200wpm)___ 396(@250wpm)___ 330(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99017 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 495(@200wpm)___ 396(@250wpm)___ 330(@300wpm)
Messy, yeah. Kind of. But I was coping. Healing. Working through my feelings while getting my shit together.
But ever since I moved into Dean’s garage, everything has changed. It hasn’t even been two weeks, but I feel like a completely different person. An unstable person. A person who can’t control the surges of emotion that rise inside me when I get a boots-on-the-ground window into how intense it is to be a parent who’s trying to help your kids heal from this kind of loss.
The biggest loss.
Every time I see one of the people, I’m coming to care for struggling, faltering, then rising to fight their way back to each other with such love, my lungs forget how to function. I can’t stop comparing their journey to my own. The girls’ dad to mine. The strained, sour quiet in my childhood home to the joy and tears and shouts and laughter and love in theirs.
I know comparison is the thief of joy, but it’s not that. After a lot of soul-searching, I realized that I’m not jealous or resentful. Not even a little bit.
I’ve actually come to feel more empathy for my dad than I did before. My father isn’t a Dean Kate kind of man. He’s not a guy who was ever comfortable with his emotions or physical affection or telling people how he feels. I honestly don’t think he knows how he feels most of the time. But he loves me. Deeply. In his own quiet, largely oblivious sort of way.
He isn’t a bad man; he just wasn’t built for fatherhood.
But Dean is, and the girls are so lucky to have him.
I’m so happy for them, it makes me want to cry. A lot. At least once or twice a day, I have to fight the urge to break down. To break down for them, and maybe for…me? And for Dean and my father and all the lost mothers, who never got to live their lives or their dreams. And all the people in the world who have no idea what it’s like to be held tight and safe in the circle of a healthy family.
To be loved by even one person with a heart as big as Dean’s.
“No,” I mutter aloud, shaking my head at myself in the mirror. “You can’t.”
I can’t fall in love with him. I can’t.
It would never work. Never. I’m not mother material. I’m the nanny! I’m the cool auntie, the kind who will take Beatrice’s baby, Charlie, to her first all-ages rock show when she’s fourteen, and make sure she knows how to make a boy put on a condom the right way when she’s a little older.
And maybe I can do the same for Ava and Bella someday, too. Maybe years from now, I can be an auntie figure in their lives—long after my paid caregiver days are over, and time has made the memory of the crush I had on their dad seem silly and quaint.
Maybe…
But right now, it doesn’t feel silly. Or quaint. And the thought of spending the night playing games and drinking beer and laughing with Dean and the girls while pretending I don’t want to kiss his fucking face off doesn’t sound fun. It sounds dangerous! I can’t be trusted around Dean with alcohol in my system. That’s why I haven’t bought a single six-pack or bottle of wine since moving into his place.
But fuck, I could use a beer. I really could.
“One beer,” I warn my reflection. “One beer, two slices of pizza, and then home in a cab before nine.”
Yes. I can do that, I decide as I duck into a stall to pee.
And if I feel too tempted by Dean, I can find someone else to hang out with. I won’t be on the clock, after all. Beatrice and Blue won’t be there—they’re still on baby leave—but I’m pretty close with Charlotte, and I’m sure she’s coming. And some of the new girls hanging around the waiting room looked nice enough, not to mention closer to my age.
Hell, maybe I can stop being a weirdo who only hangs out with people ten years her senior, make friends who are also in their twenties, and learn to live a little again!
Like I’ve summoned them with my thoughts—or perhaps, my urine stream—giddy laughter sounds from outside the door, followed by a whoosh as it opens and high heels clack across the tile. The laughter continues as three pairs of new-girlfriend-style stilettos line up at the mirror.
“I’m just saying, if I have to eat Packy’s Pizza for dinner instead of the steak I was promised, I expect to be compensated,” a breathy voice lisps. “You guys have to help me hook up with someone while we’re there. Anyone. As long as he’s hot. If I can’t have steak, I’m going to need dick. Like…ASAP.”