Chapter Thirty Emily
Chapter Thirty
Emily
I’m hiding in the kitchen like a coward.
More specifically I’m hiding in James’s walk-in pantry with the door shut like a coward. I’ve never hidden from anything. I’m the one who would jump in front of a moving car for a friend. I would climb to the top of the tallest tree in the town to get your cat down. If there’s a tornado, I’ll cover your body with mine. If someone is chewing out a waitress in a restaurant, step aside because they now have to deal with me. But when Jack said I want all of you, I’m suddenly runaway bride and hyperventilating in a pantry as a bag of potato chips pokes me in the shoulder.
The pantry door flies open. “What the hell are you doing in here?” asks Maddie.
I grab her wrist and tug her inside, shutting the door behind us. “Can you shhhhhh! Obviously I’m hiding.”
The pantry door opens again. “From who?” asks Annie.
Madison grabs the hem of Annie’s shirt and reels her inside. We close the door.
“From him! Jack.”
“Why would you be hiding from Jack?” Madison asks at full volume. “He’s so gone for you it’s almost painful to watch.”
“Can you keep your voice down?” I frantically whisper. “Jeez.”
The door opens again.
“Why are we keeping our voices down?” Amelia steps inside the pantry voluntarily and now me and all of my sisters are squished in here like sardines. A cereal box is pressing into my hip and someone’s bacon breath is wafting into the air like a poorly scented candle.
I wiggle for a little space but it’s no good. We’re all shoulder to shoulder. “I’m hiding from Jack,” I repeat for the hundredth time.
“I’m sorry,” Maddie says with regret in her tone. “This is my fault. I thought it was the right move to invite him.”
“Maybe you two should date instead. Clearly you’re two peas in a pod trying to force my hand on stuff.” Maddie has the audacity to look like she’s actually considering it. I level a finger to her chest. “Don’t you dare.”
“Why?” She grins and widens her eyes like a know-it-all. “I thought you said he didn’t steal your heart?”
“Yeah, well…” I toe a loose potato on the floor out of the way. “He might have borrowed it after all.”
They all three gasp.
“Do you want a relationship with him?” asks Annie, with enough tenderness it feels like a blanket wrapped around my shoulders. Bless her for not asking me outright if I love him.
“I don’t know what I want. I thought I was okay with giving up on having some big romance. I had my routine and my cat, and my career, and those things made me happy…” Yes, I was lonely too. But sometimes it’s easier to choose the pain you know than the pain you don’t. I can’t imagine how painful it would be to integrate my life with Jackson’s and then lose him. “But of course Jack had to be Jack and flip everything upside down because he delights in nothing more than ruining my perfect plans.”
“And now you’re thinking you might not want to give up on a big romance for yourself?” asks Amelia.
I scrub my hands over my face. “I’m thinking I wish someone would just tell me how to go back to normal.”
She shakes her head with a soft smile. “You know what I think? I think normal isn’t going to be enough for you anymore.”
“Same,” says Annie. “I’ve been in your shoes, Emily. And I know the look of a person who’s recognized that their needs have changed. And it’s scary as hell.”
My eyes prickle. “I don’t want to change.”
“It’s good to change. It hurts a little at first but then it starts to feel like stretching first thing in the morning. Like you don’t realize how badly your body needed the movement.”
Madison chimes in, talking in a robotic cadence, “And you know…just as iron rusts from disuse, and stagnant water putrefies, or when cold turns to ice, so our…intellect”—she pauses and then continues in a rush—“wastes unless it is kept in use.”
We all blink at her. She holds up her phone and the Google search engine. “I wanted to add something to the conversation, so I looked up quotes about change, but Leonardo da Vinci really let me down in the second half there.”
I pat her back. “It’s the thought that counts.”
Light floods the pantry again when the door yawns open. For half a second all I see is a male form and I’m terrified it belongs to Jack. I’m not ready to acknowledge his statement yet. And I don’t want him to know I’m hiding in a pantry to avoid my problems.
But it’s not Jack. It’s Noah.
“Okay,” he says in his gruff way. “Everyone except Emily, scram.”
Madison pouts. “What? Why? I want to hear what you are going to say.”
“Tough,” he says, crossing his arms in his trademarked Surly Pose as Amelia has always called it. “Out.”
Everyone goes, but Amelia is the last one to leave. He gives her a soft smile on her way out and pats her butt. Once they’re all gone, he closes the door behind us again. “It’s time we talked.”
“About the weather? It is unseasonably warm at the moment.”
He doesn’t acknowledge my quip. “Let’s talk about what happened with Liam all those years ago.”
The floor almost falls out from under me. Noah has never, not once, tried to press the topic of the breakup that changed the entire course of my life—and possibly even rewired my brain, even though he was witness to it. Everyone took my words at face value when I said it was a mutual breakup that hurt, but I’d get through it. Noah is the only one who knows the truth.
“I don’t want to talk about him.”
“We’re going to—because it’s important to this moment. Emily, you were always so tough and independent after Mom and Dad died, but never so closed off as you are now. It’s like that day froze a layer of ice over your heart so thick it stopped beating normally. And you know why I think it was? Because you’ve regretted not going with him.”
A record screeches in my mind. Because after Liam and I talked in my room, I had opened my bedroom door to find Noah standing there listening. I always assumed he knew exactly what was said. But it turns out he didn’t hear it all that well.
“You think….” I laugh like a gust of wind. “You think I regret not going with Liam?”
“Yes. I think you chose to stay home with your family because you would sacrifice every bit of your happiness to make your siblings happy. I think you were worried to leave the girls without someone to take care of them. Because let’s face it, Grandma was sweet and tender, but she didn’t have that motherly edge that youdo.”
“Well, you’re right about one thing—I was afraid to leave them. And you.” I pause and refuse to cry this time. “But the truth is, I would have. I loved him enough that I absolutely would have. But…he didn’t ask me to go.”
Noah is understandably speechless.
“Didn’t want me to go, I should say. He needed to experience life without me. Wanted to date other people.” And by other people he meant Brittney Daniels from our graduating class who did get into the same college with him. She was a lot like Annie. I doubt she’s ever sent back an incorrect meal in her life. “He was there to break up with me, Noah. It was never mutual. I was just too embarrassed to tell anyone that. To tell anyone that the boy I loved with all my heart didn’t really love me back.”
Noah wraps me in a bear hug. One so tight I can barely breathe. And guess what? I cry again, since it’s all I do these days. Because I’m a mess. Because all the darkness I’ve been experiencing on my own the last year is leaking out through my eyes on a continual basis for everyone to witness.
He sighs into my hair. “I’m sorry, Em. I didn’t know. I should have asked more questions back then instead of assuming you were okay because you said you were.”
Not that it’s his fault at all, because I played a very convincing part of Girl Who Is Just Fine, but I do wonder: If my family had made more of an effort to talk to me during that time about what happened with Liam instead of accepting my righteous independence, would I have healed faster? More wholly? Would I have been in a better place by the time I started college and not told Jack to piss right off?
Maybe there’s no real point in asking these questions, or maybe self-reflection is the key to a lifetime of healing. All I know is that despite everything, I still found my way into Jack’s heart. And now he wants me. Or he says he does. But Liam said that at one time too. So how do I trust it’s real this time?
“Listen,” Noah says, shifting the hug so he can look down at me. “I’m not…I’m not very good at all this. Pep talks and feelings aren’t really my thing.”
“No, really?” I ask sarcastically because it’s my sisterly duty.
“But when I was going through a hard time, you told me something that really helped me. So I’m going to say it back to you.” He pauses. “ Maybe not everything will end in hurt. But we’ll never know if we don’t try. ”
I laugh at hearing that bit of wisdom from my few sessions of therapy thrown back at me before I stopped going altogether because it was too damn painful week after week. I decided it was easier to shove it all in my Treasure Chest of Doom instead. “I meant that advice for you, not me.”
He smiles. “Let yourself have this one. Be open to seeing what happens. Don’t let him be the most wonderful thing that never happened to you because you were scared to give it a try. Besides, the Emily I know can handle just about anything. If it doesn’t work out in the end, you’ll get through it. It may not feel like it for a time, but it won’t break you. And no matter where we are in the world, us Walkers will always be there for you when you need us. You just have to say so.”
I swipe my hand across my wet cheeks. Noah’s words have swelled me up with so much encouragement and confidence I could hot-air-balloon this whole house to Paris.
“You’re better at pep talks than you think,” I tell him, patting the outside of his arm.
He smiles. “Amelia is rubbing off on me, I guess.”
“I’m glad you took a chance on her, Noah. I…I love seeing you happy.”
“And I loved seeing you happy Friday night at the bar with Jack.”
I nod. “I need to go talk to him.”
Noah stops me before I fully make it out of the pantry. “He’s not here anymore.”
“What?” Did he leave because of me? Is that it? He’s given up this quickly? I know I’m a pain in the ass but—
Noah gives me side-eye as he can apparently sense the direction of my thoughts and isn’t impressed I’ve regressed so quickly. “He told me to tell you that he’d find you later, but that something important came up with his mom and he needed to go out to Evansville.” He shakes his head with a laugh. “Poor guy even took a Tupperware full of Amelia’s damn Tabasco pancakes to go. It might have been a strategic move on his part to win me over, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t work perfectly.”