I tip my face toward the sound of their voices, pausing to right a potato slice that’s slipping. “This is quite possibly the weirdest therapy session I’ve been part of,” I tell them. “And that’s saying something.”
Leonard seizes the moment to step in. “Love you!” he shouts. “Griffin Walsh! Love you!”
My sisters snort. “Even the bird knew before we did,” Lauren grumbles.
“Which could be on us a little bit.” Lana leans closer, which I know from the hair tickling my arm. “We should have tried harder to include you. To connect with you.”
“You’re not taking the blame for that one.” I peel off the potato slices and sit up, blinking wet lashes as I look from one sister to the other. “I walled myself off. That’s on me.”
Lana sighs. “I looked up to you so much. You and Lauren both, I mean. But you—you’ve got this perfect blend of beauty and brains and creative talent.”
“Creative talent?” She’s surely confused me with…well, pretty much any other Judson sibling. “That’s not me.”
Lauren looks incredulous. “You’re joking, right? The whole crocheting thing—not one of us could do that if we wanted to. You’ve got this perfect mix of patience and imagination I’d give my left tit to have.”
Lana grabs my arm again. “If I confess to my therapist sister that I still sleep with a crocheted slug, she can’t tell anyone, right?”
“I—wait, what?” I blink at her. “You still have the slug I made you?”
“Duh.” Lana looks at Lauren. “Don’t tell me you don’t still have your bumblebee.”
Lauren crosses her arms. “I will neither confirm nor deny spending weeks cuddling that stupid crocheted insect after Nick and I split.”
My head is spinning and not from dehydration. This connection with my sisters, it’s so new. But I’m realizing it’s been there all along. If I’d bothered to look, if I’d stopped hiding, I might have seen it.
“I’m so sorry, you two.” Jesus, where do I start? “For keeping you at arm’s length. For not being there for you like I should have been. For—”
“Christ, are we almost done with all the sorry?” Lauren rolls her eyes, but there’s softness in her voice. “None of us are perfect. Can we drink now?”
Lana looks at me. “Are you feeling hydrated?”
I’m feeling lots of things, and hydration’s nowhere near the top of the list. Grateful. Loved. Sad, but also grounded. I never realized what I was missing by walling myself off from my sisters.
“There’s white wine in the fridge,” I tell them. “Red in the pantry. Or beer—”
“No beer.” Lauren stands up. I expect her to head for the fridge, but she pulls me to my feet instead. “First, a group hug.”
“Awww.” Lana jumps up and throws her arms around me so hard I nearly topple. But Lauren’s got me, anchoring us both against her as she delivers a hug so fierce it steals my breath.
“I love you guys,” I murmur into Lana’s hair. “So much.”
“We love you, bitch.” Lauren lets go and heads for the kitchen. “And Griff can go to hell.”
Hearing his name makes my heart ball up tight, but Lana squeezes tighter. “We’ll get you through this, okay?”
“Okay.” For the first time, I believe it.
Maybe things are irreparably broken with Griff. Maybe I’ll never get over that.
But this, the unexpected bond with my sisters?
It’s more than I could have hoped for.
And maybe that’s enough.
Chapter 14
CONFESSIONAL 734.5
Walsh, Griffin (Brewmaster: Juniper Ridge)
When you’re a parent, you fake like you’re a hundred percent confident in all your decisions. Like, ‘absolutely this is your bedtime, and also you should eat vegetables.’ But what the fuck do I know? I’m doing my best, making the best calls I can. Really, I’m just winging it. It’s like making beer with experimental fermentation like decoction mashing or wild yeast strains. Sometimes, it turns out amazing.
Sometimes, you get bitter sludge.
“Hey, Dad. Come check this out.”
Soph’s voice bounces off the walls between the display called “Treatment” and the one titled “Why Am I Here?”
It’s a question I’ve pondered from the moment we got in the car at sunrise this morning. The plan was to pass through Portland so Soph could spend time with her mother at the Oregon Zoo while I stocked up on brewery stuff. From there, the three of us would drive an hour to Salem to see the Oregon State Hospital’s Museum of Mental Health.
But like most plans do, ours took a nosedive.
I peer over Soph’s shoulder at the words on the museum’s display, trying to gauge my kid’s mood. “Uh, that’s a straitjacket. It’s to keep people from moving around.”
Soph looks up at me. “Like when you and Mom used to strap me in my stroller and I’d unbuckle it and climb out?”
The memory knocks me back a step. “You remember that?”
“Nah, Mom told me. She made a joke about getting a stroller at the zoo.” She shrugs and moves on to the next display. “It’s too bad she got a migraine.”
“It sure is.”
I hold my tongue so I don’t say something shitty. Part of me wishes I could tell her there’s no damn migraine. When I got to the zoo at the scheduled pickup time, I saw Soph alone at the gate.
Panic was my first response, followed by anger. “Where’s your mom?”
Soph shrugged as she climbed into the truck. “She ran back to the gift shop.”
I found Elle leaning against the wall outside the restroom, deep in an intense phone call with her manager. “They’re casting out of the Portland office? No, that’s wonderful, Barney—absolute serendipity. I’ll be there at one.”
She didn’t see me standing there. Didn’t say a word when she climbed into the truck holding a gift shop bag. Ten minutes later, she clutched her head, moaning about migraines. “I’ll just check into my room at the hotel while you two see the museum.”
I’m still holding my tongue as Soph moves on to the next display. “Ouch.” She points to some scary-looking probes. “Electric shock therapy?”
“That looks painful.” I survey the next set of displays. “And lobotomies. And ice baths. And forced sterilizations. And—you know what? This is kinda depressing.”
Soph grabs my hand and tugs me to the next display. “You think Mari ever wished she could use shackles on a patient?”
Hearing that name in Soph’s sweet voice makes my chest tighten. “Odds are good.”
She looks up at me, blue eyes curious. “Mom said she’s a really good therapist. Mari, I mean.”
I nod because what the hell else am I supposed to do? “I’m sure she is.”
“But she’s not your girlfriend anymore.”
That didn’t sound like a question, so I settle for shrugging. “We were just seeing each other. Trying it out to see if we fit.”