…
Achy but cried out, Clover cuddled deeper under her covers and pressed “Next Episode” on her tablet. So what if she was now three episodes deep in a superhero show about a woman who drank too much and did her best to act like she didn’t give a shit about anyone except her best friend. Perfect for someone who was in a fuck-the-world kind of mood. It wasn’t like Clover had anywhere to go or anything to do. She was unemployed. Australia was officially a pipe dream. And she had a hole in her chest where her heart used to be. Plus she couldn’t get Hudson’s words out of her head about how she’d been looking for her purpose. What was the point of it all? What good was having all of the adventures in the world and helping people if she didn’t have anyone to share those experiences with?
Take, for example, her mom. For most of Clover’s life, if she’d had to nail down a purpose and a point, it would be to make sure she didn’t turn out shackled to a white picket fence like her mom. But after what happened with her dad, she’d seen her parents’ life in a new light. They were happy together. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. But it was real, it was good, and—she suddenly realized—it was an experience, an adventure, she wanted to have, too.
The credits on her show had just started to run when her tablet screen froze and her mom’s face popped up as if she’d conjured her by thought alone, and Clover clicked accept. “Hi, Mom.”
“Are you sick honey?” her mom asked. “You don’t look so hot.”
Thanks for the confirmation, Mom. “No, just considering never getting out of bed again.”
Concern put a little V between her mom’s eyes. “What happened?”
Oh Dios mío, where did she start? Really, there was only one place she could. So, she told her mom about the weirdest temp job ad she’d ever read for a personal buffer then continued on to telling off Sawyer’s mom without realizing, landing the job, and then ending up with a fake fiancé. By then she was on a roll and naturally went on to explain how pineapple shakes led to flea market finds and then, finally, to a maybe baby and the world’s worst proposal from the man she loved who didn’t love her back.
And because the fates were bitches, she was crying again by the time she got to the end of it. “I couldn’t say yes.”
“Even though you love him,” her mom said, her voice soft with sympathy.
“Especially because of that.” She hiccupped and wiped her nose with one of the last tissues in the box by her bed.
Her mom sighed, her own bottom lip trembling. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s my fault.” She wiped a tear away with the back of her hand and took a deep breath. “I was just so worried about getting trapped in some kind of domestic prison that I never realized I was falling in love with Sawyer until it was too late.”
Her mom cocked her head. “Domestic prison?”
“Mom, I’ve been a complete ass to you.” A choked sob had her shoulders shaking as tears streamed unchecked down her face. “You gave up so much when you got pregnant with me and had to marry Dad—”
Clover’s voice broke, the need to finally tell her mom everything overweighing any hesitation to peel back the polite covering and finally say what had been eating away at her for all these years. “I never wanted to be like you, Mom. That’s why I kept leaving.” There. She’d finally said it, but she didn’t feel better. She felt worse. Worse than a complete ass, if that was possible. She swiped at her wet face, trying to clear her vision enough to gauge how much those words had hurt her mom.
“I know, honey,” her mom said. “It’s okay. I know to you I always seemed to have given up everything to be with your father.”
“But you did, Mom! No more trips for you. No more adventures. No more excitement. You sacrificed everything and still ended up eating apple pie, which you hate, on a weekly basis just because dad likes apple pie for Sunday brunch. I swore to myself that I’d never end up like that.” The tears started falling again in earnest as she realized how she’d short-changed her mom for her entire life. She was the worst daughter ever. “All I could see was all you’d given up, not what you gained, too.”
“Until Sawyer.”
She sniffled. “Yeah, until Sawyer.”
The smile on her mom’s face was the last thing Clover expected to see after laying everything out there like she had.
“It’s true,” her mom said with a gentle shake of her head. “I gave up a lot when I married your father, but I gained a lot more than I lost. Not to mention I didn’t have to marry your father. I chose to because I loved him, and I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him—I still do. You’re looking at marriage like it’s a zero sum game with only one winner and loser, but it’s not like that. There’s middle ground. There’s compromise. Your father and I have both made sacrifices, but it’s worth it because we have each other.”
The words hit home in a way Clover hadn’t expected. Middle ground. That’s what Helene had said Sawyer had trouble finding. Up until this moment, Clover hadn’t realized she’d been missing it, too, but her mom was right. She had been living her life on an all or nothing loop.
“Do you ever regret it?” She swallowed past the emotion making her throat tight and asked the question she’d been wanting to voice ever since that overheard conversation when she was eleven. “Do you ever regret having me?”
“Never,” her mom said, her voice firm. “I love your father. I love you and your brother. Would I have gone globetrotting if I hadn’t married your father? Maybe. But if you spend your life just looking for the next big thing because you’re so afraid of missing out, then you’re bound to miss out on what you already have.”
Is that what she’d been doing? Looking so far off into the horizon that she was as guilty of missing the details as Sawyer was? “So you think I should have said yes?”
“Do you love him?” her mom asked.
For all the good it did her. “Yes.”
“Does he love you?”
“No,” she managed to get out without crying despite the bone-deep pain ripping her up. “He said I’d be a good teammate.”
Her mom gasped. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry, but you’ll get through this. You always do.”
Yeah, but before she’d never realized she was running blindly. Everything had made so much more sense before Sawyer. “I should have stuck to my original plan and found a regular temp job to pay for my Australian adventure. Then, none of this would have happened.”
“You can’t say that. Life has a way of working out how it wants to, not necessarily how you imagined it would,” her mom said. “And anyway, not all adventures are of the saving the rainforest variety, some of them involve risking your heart—and that kind are just as important.”