“But it doesn’t.” Liv ran her finger around the rim of her coffee cup. “I doubled down on the deal after the l-word. I was all I’m a badass woman who can totally handle this. It’s better to have loved and lost than blah-blah bullshit. What the hell was I thinking?”
Taryn gave her a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. “You were thinking, I’m in love, and we’ll figure something out.”
“Apparently figuring something out meant simultaneously asking me to marry him and announcing he was leaving.”
“Shit,” Kincaid said, forkful of cake stalling halfway to her mouth. “He asked you to marry him?”
Liv closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose, her headache turning into the icepick-to-the-temple variety. “Sort of. He said if he didn’t think it was selfish, he’d ask me to marry him and to wait for him to come home.”
“Damn.” Rebecca shook her head. “Maybe he was listening that night I talked to him.”
“That would be selfish, though,” Kincaid said. “That’s asking a lot.”
“But kind of crazy romantic, too,” Taryn said. Their attention all flicked her way, and she gave an apologetic shrug. “I mean, a little bit, right?”
“No.” Kincaid shook her head. “I’m all for romance, but waiting for a guy to come home from what’s basically war is only romantic in the movies. In real life, that has to be horrible. Always wondering if he’s okay, if he’s going to come back, never getting to talk to him the whole time he’s gone.”
“Yeah, that’s real stress,” Rebecca agreed.
“But what if someone’s worth the wait? What if that person is the person for you?” Taryn asked. “Like soul-mate stuff.”
Rebecca gave her a skeptical look. “Don’t tell me you believe there’s only one person out there for everyone.”
“I don’t know,” Taryn said, not backing down. “But what if there is? I mean, I can’t imagine how hard it would be to wait for someone you love in that situation, all that unknown, but I also get why Finn wished Liv would. He thinks Liv’s his one. He won’t ask her to make that sacrifice because he loves her so much. That is romantic.”
Liv’s muscles cinched tight and the words dug in, opening wounds.
For the first time, it hit her that Finn was going through this, too. She didn’t doubt he loved her. He was choosing work, but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel the loss of her. He was going into a dangerous situation one hundred percent alone again, with no one to come back to. Would he be reckless again? Go back to that angry, isolated man he’d been? Cut himself off from the world?
The loving, playful man who had emerged over the last two months would be lost, maybe for good. Images of Finn flickered through her mind. The two of them skipping rocks on the lake. Him tossing her over his shoulder and making her laugh. Finn smiling down at her in bed and telling her he loved her back.
A fist of anguish gripped her heart. She groaned and put her head in her hands, all out of tears but stocked to the rafters with self-pity. “Why couldn’t he just stay?”
Rebecca rubbed Liv’s back in gentle circles. “This part will get better. It’s fresh now, but I promise, it will get better.”
Liv shook her head, wishing she could believe it.
“She’s right,” Kincaid said, reaching out to take her hand across the table. “If nothing else, Long Acre taught us some things. We know we’ve survived worse. And we’re pros at saying goodbye.”
Liv lifted her gaze, finding Kincaid’s smile sad.
“That’s right,” Taryn said, adding her hand to the pile. “We are badass motherfucking survivors.”
Liv smiled at that.
“And you don’t have to go through this alone,” Rebecca added, placing her hand on top their stacked ones. “We’ve got this. Together.”
Liv glanced around the table, the determined and loving looks on her friends’ faces seeping into her like sunlight on her skin. These women were fierce and tough and brave. And for the first time in longer than she could remember, she realized she was one of them. Those words applied to her, too.
Finn had told her he hoped she got something out of this summer besides heartbreak. He meant the house. A new job.
But she’d gotten so much more than that.
She’d found these women.
Her tribe.
And maybe, just maybe, her way back home after all.