Total pages in book: 123
Estimated words: 116708 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 584(@200wpm)___ 467(@250wpm)___ 389(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 116708 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 584(@200wpm)___ 467(@250wpm)___ 389(@300wpm)
“Pike, stay out of it,” Dylan scolded. Her back was to her son. Therefore, she never saw his eye roll. “Anyway,” she said, tossing her napkin on top of a barely touched patty melt that, by the looks of the pooling grease, had left a lot to be desired. “Ohhh-kay, before a riot breaks out back there. Any chance you’re going to tell us why you dragged us here? I know it wasn’t for the food. Spill it. What’s the big secret?”
Angela giggled musically beside me, her wilted chef’s salad equally as untouched.
Dylan’s eyes—which were Caribbean blue this week thanks to the miracle of colored contacts—narrowed. Leaning forward on her colorfully tattooed forearms, she hissed, “You hussy, you already know?”
“Of course I do.” Little Miss Prim and Proper dabbed the corner of her lips with a cheap paper napkin. True to its marketing, the red lip stain didn’t budge. “I actually send texts that contain more than just links to TikToks. It’s called a conversation.”
Dylan scoffed. “Oh, yes, the daily updates on your period and what you’re substituting for bread this week is far more riveting.”
How these two had been friends since kindergarten, I would never understand. There was a story about them becoming besties after someone had pushed someone off a slide, but if I’d learned anything by becoming best friends with a set of lifelong best friends, it was that I usually “had to have been there” to understand the hilarity of their youthful antics.
They still tried to fill me in every chance they got. I’d seen plenty of photos of them growing up. Angela had looked exactly like a Barbie brought to life, clutching her pearls after she was crowned homecoming queen. Meanwhile, Dylan had home-pierced her nose, daith, and belly button all by the time she was sixteen.
They’d adopted me about eight years earlier, after we’d met at a birthing class. Nate, Pike, and Daphne had all been born over the span of four weeks. After that, the three of us bonded over the ups, downs, and flat-out disgusting perils of motherhood. Sitting on your couch, trying to figure out how to make a fussy baby fart, was infinitely better when you had company cheering you on. We were vastly different people though.
Angela was a Stepford Wife, reserved and proper.
Dylan was a jaded single mom, sarcastic and protective.
And I was… God, what was I? Anxious. Bitter. Broken. Those had all been more recent developments. At one point, I’d been witty and bold. I think? It was hard to remember anymore.
Regardless, I was trying to get back to that woman. Stepping out on my own after ten years of marriage had been terrifying. My marriage had fallen apart long before I’d actually left, but checking out emotionally was something completely different than braving a world I’d been manipulated into believing I couldn’t make it in alone.
Not anymore. It was time for me to find strength where fear had once inhabited. To rediscover who I was when I wasn’t forced into existing in a constant state of fight or flight. The best part was that I got to reinvent myself on my own terms, with my own goals, and I didn’t have to ask permission from anyone.
Which led me right back to why I was sitting in a run-down diner with wobbly tables and peeling wallpaper, with my two best friends, our three kids, six plates of inedible food spread between two booths, and one dream to find myself again.
Smiling, I announced, “Welcome to The Rosewood Café. I’m Gwendolyn Weaver: owner, operator, and head chef.”
Dylan curled her lip. “First of all, you are not using”—she lowered her voice so the kids couldn’t hear her before finishing her sentence—“that asshole’s last name anymore. Pierce is a perfectly good maiden name, and if you are against going back to that, I will wife you up myself just to get rid of Weaver. Secondly, I’m sorry. Did you say owner?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Angela flashing her a scolding expression, which I’d learned translated to: Be nice. Gwen is clearly on the verge of a midlife crisis slash mental breakdown.
She was correct on both counts, but when starting over at forty-one, I assumed that was par for the course. I’d made that confirmation pretty clear when I’d chopped off eight inches of my hair, added blonde highlights to my natural mahogany, and pierced my nose with a tiny silver stud. (And no, I didn’t let Dylan do it at home. Despite her begging.)
After all of that, a restaurant shouldn’t be that shocking.
Dylan silently replied to Angela in yet another expression I was familiar with. This one read: Are you going to handle this? Or am I?
Neither of them needed to handle anything. I was perfectly capable of digging my own grave, lying in it for an extended period of time while brainwashing myself that it was a normal and brilliant phase in life, only to finally wake up, realize I’d gotten in way over my head, and then be forced to claw my way out fueled by nothing but regrets and tears. It was something of a pattern in my life, and I was nothing if not consistent.