Taryn shook her head. “I can’t work out today. I won’t be able to concentrate on anything but figuring out how to get this program out of the trash can. This can’t be the end, right?”
Kincaid frowned. “Knowing you? No. You’re stubborn in the best way possible.” She sat next to Taryn on the bench. “But maybe give yourself a minute to process this loss. Last night…sucked.”
Taryn snorted. “Ya think?”
“I know, but honestly, I was thinking about th
is on the way home last night. Any school district you go to is probably going to bring up similar issues. Tight budgets. Politics. They’ll make knee-jerk decisions based on minimal information, and they want to give people something they can see. Having a guard at school is immediate gratification. Your program works in a behind-the-scenes, get-to-the-root kind of way. People aren’t patient, and they’re angry. They want something now.”
“So basically I’m screwed,” Taryn said flatly.
“I’m not saying that. All I’m saying is that I understand how it happened. You know how hot-button this issue is.” She glanced around the garden and then looked back to Taryn. “To us, this is our history. Our lives. We saw horrors those board members can never truly imagine or understand. I know it’s small in comparison, but it’s like when I’m trying to negotiate a deal on a house. I see a house with a set of features that is worth a certain amount. Cut and dried. But the owners of that house see the hallway where their kids took their first steps and the backyard where they had barbecues with their dad who’s now passed. I can’t feel the house like they do, and I never will.
“That’s how it is with this times a million,” she continued. “School violence is just another topic on a list of controversial issues the board has to make decisions on. It’s not something that has changed the course of their lives. It’s not this potent grief that lives inside them every day. So I think before you jump into the next phase, you need to take a step back and evaluate the game plan. Come up with a different strategy. I have no doubt you have brilliant ideas buried in there. But you can’t access them when you’re this stressed and upset. You’ll end up back in the hospital.”
Kincaid was so rarely serious that it took Taryn a few moments to process all she’d said, but she heard the truth in her friend’s words. This felt so big and monumental to Taryn and her friends. It was impossible to imagine how the fact that kids were regularly shooting up schools and killing other children didn’t keep every single person up every damn night. But Kincaid was right. Those board members had a hundred other issues to tackle, many that were equally important, and this was just another one. Something they cared about but didn’t feel down to their marrow. They thought they’d figured out a quicker, cheaper solution, and now “address school violence” was one more item they could check off their to-do list.
Taryn bowed her head and rubbed her eyes, emotionally exhausted. “I don’t know where to go from here.”
Kincaid wrapped her arm around Taryn’s shoulders. “I do. We go straight to the hot guys who are getting us in shape. Your beautiful, busy brain is in serious need of a break. If you spend the night at home, you’re just going to drive yourself up the wall. Let’s go find some distraction. And after the workout, we’ll go have cake.”
Taryn laughed and lifted her head. “Cake? Doesn’t that ruin the point of the workout?”
Kincaid scrunched her nose. “What is the point of working out if you can’t have cake for your efforts? I work out for dessert, sugar. Let’s go.”
Taryn allowed Kincaid to take her hand and pull her up from the bench. Kincaid’s gaze jumped to the wall behind her, and her smile faltered. Taryn squeezed her hand and turned to face the wall with her. “You okay?”
Kincaid’s attention hovered on the same spot—maybe a group of names or a particular one. A little breath escaped her, making her blond bangs flutter. “Yeah, I’m all right. I just hate coming here. I see the names, and I can’t help but hear roll call from grade school, all the names I knew for so long. And I just… I don’t know. I think my mind sometimes tricks me into thinking these people are just living somewhere else, grown-up now and doing whatever they were supposed to do in this world. Like we’re supposed to be distant Facebook friends with these people by now and rolling our eyes over their constant pictures of their kids or cyberstalking our former crushes to prove that we are way hotter than the person they married.”
Taryn smiled, the sadness familiar. “Guessing who got their boobs done.”
“Yes!” Kincaid said, pressing the corners of her eyes before tears escaped. “I’m pissed that they’re not here.”
Taryn bumped her shoulder into Kincaid’s. “Me too.”
Kincaid brushed her hair away from her face and rolled her shoulders, obviously trying to regain her bright attitude. “All right, enough of this. Let’s get going. We both need to empty our minds for a while.”
“With exercise and hot guys.”
“Obviously. That is clearly the best course of treatment.”
Taryn grabbed her purse off the bench. “You missed your calling as a therapist.”
Kincaid put her hand to her chest with an exaggerated expression. “I know, right? Girl, I would’ve nailed that job. I’ve got all the advice.”
Taryn laughed as they walked out, picturing Kincaid as a therapist—bossing clients around in sessions, hand on hip, finger wagging at them like a proper Southern momma. It was enough to get her mind focused on something else for at least a few minutes. That was the beauty of her wonderful friend.
Kincaid could make her smile, even with all this going on. Maybe the woman really had missed her calling in therapy.
Chapter
Twelve
“This does not look like an establishment that serves cake,” Kincaid said as Taryn stopped in front of the Tipsy Hound bar. “And if it did, I wouldn’t want to eat their cake.”
“After that workout, I need something stronger than cake,” Taryn said, feeling grumpy after the grueling session that Kaya, the perky female trainer who was definitely not Lucas, had put her through. Taryn had not been feeling in the mood for a workout already, but when she’d found out Lucas was no longer going to be her trainer because he’d decided to take some night classes, her attitude had plummeted further. Kaya’s unending enthusiasm had not helped. If she’d said You can do it! one more damn time, Taryn might’ve pushed her in the pool.
Kincaid glanced at the chipped paint on the sign by the door. “This place looks like a dive.”