Total pages in book: 66
Estimated words: 62783 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 314(@200wpm)___ 251(@250wpm)___ 209(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 62783 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 314(@200wpm)___ 251(@250wpm)___ 209(@300wpm)
And I really, really wanted to do better.
I didn’t like being a mess. It wasn’t like I thrived in the misery of a string of failed marriages that were more impulsive than one-clicking an online sale or the countless times I’d picked the wrong man and ended up on the wrong side of his hand.
It wasn’t like I enjoyed hurting my family, hurting my sister…
“You look so much like her tonight,” he said, backing me into a corner. “If I ask really nice, will you let me call you by her name?”
A wave of nausea crashed in my stomach, and I tried to breathe around it.
“What is it about them that makes them hard to trust?” she asked.
“I suppose you could trace it back to how we were raised. Being a VanDoren isn’t as easy as it likely seems to the public. Mistakes aren’t tolerated and if you did make them…if you ran into a situation where you needed help, you were better off pretending it never happened.”
Dr. Casson nodded while she twirled her pen in her hand. “So you felt like you couldn’t go to them for help.”
I nodded.
“And now?”
“Now…” I blew out a breath. “Persephone and I are getting reacquainted as sisters.” The notion brought a soft smile to my lips.
I loved my sister, but our past…well, my past was complicated. She was oblivious to the source of indifference that had festered between us for far too long. And yes, that was my fault. I never talked to her about what happened, never really dealt with what happened, instead choosing to try and drink the memory away or outrun it.
But I was here now. Trying.
“Is there anyone besides your sister that you’re reconnecting with? Any member of your family that makes you feel safe enough to trust them? Talk to them openly?”
“No,” I admitted. “I want to reach that place at some point with my parents, but they’ve never really understood me.”
“Can you elaborate on that a bit?”
I folded my hands in my lap to keep from gripping the armrest of the chair. “We’re only eighteen months apart,” I explained. “My sister and me. I don’t remember a time when my baby sister wasn’t the most important thing in the world to me. To my entire family, really. Growing up, everything came so effortlessly to her. She was elegant and poised in diapers, or so my mother tells me. But me? I was the tough one. The complicated one. Too emotional. Too impulsive. Too combative.” I shook my head. “Some of my earliest memories are of my parents begging me not to make a scene at some charity event while at the same time praising Persephone for being so delightfully quiet and polite. One of the times I remember was when I was seven. I hadn’t made a scene, I’d just asked when the food would be served.”
Tears pricked the back of my eyes, but I tipped my chin and forced them down. “I’m not saying instances like those excuse my recent behavior,” I hurried to add. “But you can only be told you’re the problem child so many times before you decide to live up to title.”
“That’s understandable,” she said. “And it must’ve made the relationship between you and your sister very strained growing up.”
I shrugged. “I adored her. She’s impossible not to love. And none of it was her fault. She didn’t ask to be perfect. She didn’t ask for our parents to constantly shame me and praise her. I never really started feeling the disdain for her until—” I stopped myself short, swallowing hard.
I was so not going there today.
A knowing look flashed in Dr. Casson’s rich brown eyes, but she must’ve seen my determination and pivoted. “Can you remember a time you did fully trust someone? In your family or outside of it. Can you remember the last time someone made you feel safe to just be you and not who your parents wanted you to be?”
“Do you think if we climbed on these tables and screamed at the top of our lungs that anyone in here would notice?” I asked, whispering in Jim’s ear as we sat in our designated spots in our high school’s cafeteria.
His light green eyes flashed as he looked at me before scanning the cafeteria. It was packed with the entire junior class, all stoically silent and listening aptly to a guest speaker from some corporation or another. There had been three of these this week already and I was so bored.
“Feeling a little restless?” he asked, and warmth shot through my veins.
Jim and I were only in the flirting stages of our relationship, but heaven help me I couldn’t get enough of this boy.
“That,” I said. “But also, I don’t think any of them would bat an eye. They’d never jeopardize their future by giving attention to an outburst.” I practically radiated my father when I spoke the words.