Daughters Of The Bride. Susan Mallery

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      “You’re the best,” Rachel told her. “Thanks for coming over tonight. I could use some girl time.”

      “Me, too. Tell me the wine is red.”

      “It’s red and there are two bottles.”

      “Perfect.”

      She and Lena had been friends since elementary school. They were physical opposites—Lena was petite and curvy, with brown hair and dark eyes. Rachel was taller and blonde.

      They’d played together, dreamed together, and when they’d grown up, they’d been each other’s maids of honor. They’d married young and then had sons within a few months of each other. But things were different now. Lena and Toby were still happily together.

      “What?” her friend asked. “You’re looking fierce.”

      “Nothing. I’m fine. Just the usual crap.”

      “Greg?”

      Rachel sighed. “Yes. Josh needs a new glove and his dad is going to buy it for him.”

      Her friend didn’t say anything.

      Rachel turned onto her street. “I know what you’re thinking. I should be grateful he’s an involved father. That the extra money he has could be spent on women and drinking, but he spends it on his kid.”

      “You’re doing all the talking.”

      Rachel pulled into her driveway. “I just wish...”

      “That a really big rock would fall on him?”

      She smiled. “Maybe not that, but something close.”

      Because it was Greg’s fault their marriage had failed. He’d chosen to have a one-night stand with a tourist. She’d known the second she’d seen him—had guessed what he’d done. He hadn’t tried to deny it, and that had been that. Her marriage had ended.

      When they got back to Rachel’s, they poured wine. Rachel eyed the beautiful wedge of Brie and knew there had to be maybe five thousand calories in that chunk of soft goodness, and she honestly couldn’t care. Had she put on weight lately? Probably, but so what? Her clothes still fit, at least the loose ones did. She worked hard and deserved to reward herself. It wasn’t as if she had anyone to look good for.

      She sipped her wine and knew that the right response was that she needed to look good for herself. That she was worth it and all those other stupid platitudes. That if she wanted to feel better, she had to take better care of herself. All of which didn’t get the laundry washed or the bathrooms cleaned.

      “You need to get over him.”

      Lena’s comment was so at odds with what Rachel had been thinking that it took her a second to figure out what her friend was saying.

      “Greg? I am. We’ve been divorced nearly two years.”

      “You might be legally divorced, but emotionally you’re still enmeshed.”

      Rachel rolled her eyes. “Did you have too much waiting time in a doctor’s office? Did you read some women’s magazine? Enmeshed? No one actually uses that word.”

      “You just did.”

      Rachel made a strangled noise in her throat. “I don’t want to think about him,” she admitted. “I want to move on with my life.”

      “Find a man? Fall in love?”

      “Sure.”

      A lie, she thought, but one her friend would want to hear. Fall in love? She couldn’t imagine going out with someone who wasn’t Greg. He’d been her first date, her first time, her first everything. The world still divided itself neatly into Greg and not Greg. How was she supposed to get over that?

      “You’re so lying,” Lena said cheerfully. “But I appreciate that you’re making the effort to humor me.”

      “I want to move on,” Rachel admitted. “I just don’t know how. Maybe if I could get away from him. But with us having Josh together, there’s no escape.”

      “You could move.”

      The suggestion was spoken in a soft voice, as if Lena knew what Rachel would think. Rachel did her best to remain calm when on the inside she wanted to start shrieking.

      Move? Move! No way. She couldn’t. She loved her house. She needed her house and all it represented. It was proof that she was okay. She would take a second job to pay for the house, if she had to.

      None of which made sense. She understood that. She also knew she was reacting to a traumatic event in her childhood—the death of her father and the fact that her family had been forced out of their house a few months later.

      Rachel remembered hating everything about living at the Los Lobos Hotel. Looking back, she knew she should be grateful that they’d been taken in, that they hadn’t had to live in a shelter. But she couldn’t get over the shock and pain the day she’d come home from school to find her mother sobbing that they’d lost everything and it was her father’s fault. She’d been so scared. Daddy was dead—how could he continue to be in trouble?

      When she’d been older, she’d realized their father hadn’t been a bad man—just financially careless. There hadn’t been any life insurance, no savings.

      When she and Greg had married, she’d been focused on buying a house. They’d been young and it had been a financial struggle, especially with a baby, but they’d made it. This was her home—she was never leaving.

      But the price of that was living with the ghosts of her lost marriage. Greg’s memory still lingered in every room.

      “Maybe I could get someone to do a spiritual cleansing of the house. With sage. And salt. Do you need salt?”

      Lena briefly closed her eyes. “I love you like my best friend.”

      “I am your best friend.”

      “I know, so please understand why I’m saying this. The problem isn’t the house, Rachel. It’s you. And there isn’t enough sage or salt in the world to get you over Greg. You’re going to have to decide once and for all to emotionally move on. Until you do, you’re trapped. Forever.”

      The truth, however lovingly delivered, could still hurt like a son of a bitch.

      Rachel blinked a couple of times, then reached for the wine. “We’re so going to need another bottle.”

4

      “YOU LIKE THIS, BABY? I picked the leather to match your beautiful curly hair.”

      Quinn Yates waited for his companion to say something, but Pearl only stared at the car as if expecting him to open the passenger door. Which he did. The large standard poodle jumped gracefully inside, then returned her attention to him as if ready for a compliment.

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