She slammed the shot glass down onto the bar top much more aggressively than she’d meant to. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and sniffed as the warmth and tingling intensified.
“Better?” Viv asked with a knowing smile.
Strangely enough, it was.
“Better,” Ava confirmed.
As they made their way back to the table Audrey was seated at, they were approached by a man with a ball cap and green polo shirt. He was athletically built and attractive enough, but there was something slimy about him that Ava couldn’t quite put her finger on.
Ball cap threw his arm around Viv’s shoulders and tugged her toward him. Viv was still holding the vodka water she’d ordered and the liquid sloshed. “Hey red, what’s your sign?”
Viv didn’t miss a beat, she removed the man’s arm from around her shoulder as she firmly replied, “No trespassing.”
Did men actually use lines like that?
Was that what Ava had to look forward to in the dating world?
By the time they got back to the table, Grace had joined Audrey and the two seemed to be deep in conversation.
When Ava and Viv sat down, the conversation stopped. It was obvious that the sisters had been discussing Ava and she didn’t blame them. If one of them had gone through what she had, she’d be doing the same thing.
“How are you?” Grace wasted no time with small talk and got right to the heart of the matter.
“I’m good.” Ava smiled, repeating the answer she’d been giving for the past few days.
She could see the disbelief in her sister’s eyes. She took a sip of her vodka water and gathered her thoughts. She knew that the only way that her sisters were going to stop looking so concerned was to be totally honest and transparent. Which was normally very easy for Ava, but in this case made her feel uncomfortable. Being honest about how she felt about Ian calling off the wedding would expose the fact that she’d been too scared to do the same thing.
Ava wasn’t sure if she’d gone along with the wedding because she was too afraid to rock the boat or because she felt beholden to the promise she’d made to their mother on her death bed.
She was leaning toward the promise.
Cora Wells was the epitome of a hopeless romantic who truly believed in fairy tale, happily ever afters.
Even after The Sperm Donor, as Viv called him, left in the dark of night and cleaned out the families checking and savings accounts, it didn’t shake their mom’s faith in the four-letter L word.
Their mother was left alone with four girls ages five, four, three and two and she never once said a bad word about the father of her children that had abandoned them.
It was the opposite, actually. She said that she felt sorry for their dad because he was missing out on life’s greatest gift, Ava and her sisters.
But all of that was beside the point. Whatever the reason for her actions, Ava knew her sisters deserved the truth.
Thankfully, the two shots she’d taken and the few sips of her vodka soda were assisting her with liquid courage.
“Listen, to be honest, when I read the letter, I felt...relieved.” They say that the truth will set you free, but after speaking the words she’d been afraid to admit, even to herself, she felt anything but free. She felt embarrassed.
Grace continued staring at her, her expression not changing at all.
Viv’s eyes widened slightly.
And Audrey’s head tilted to the side as if she’d heard her wrong as she repeated, “Relieved?”
Ava took another drink, this one more significant than the sips prior, and then a deep breath. She was feeling all warm and tingly and the words just started pouring out of her mouth. “Yes. I am so relieved. I don’t know when I knew, or if I really allowed myself to know that I didn’t want to marry Ian. But I didn’t. I loved Ian, but I wasn’t in love with him.
“I don’t know if I went along with the wedding because we’d been together so long, or if it was because I promised mom that I’d marry him, but either way, I wasn’t marrying Ian because I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. I was marrying him because it’s what I thought I had to do.
“Ian did me a favor by calling it off. He was brave enough to do what I couldn’t.”
In her world of psychology, it was widely accepted that it was the secrets that people kept that made them sick. Ava had never had any personal experience to test that theory, but now that she’d made her confession, she had to admit she felt better. Lighter. Like a weight had been lifted off her shoulders. Like she was floating.
