Confessions from the Quilting Circle, Maisey Yates [animal farm read TXT] 📗

her head based on whether or not she would sleep with him... Maybe I’m not good,” she whispered. “Maybe I’m not special. I had to believe that I was, Avery. I really did. Because I was distant from all of you, because I worked, because I broke up with the only person that I have ever been in love with to pursue this. And I had to believe that it would work out, but now it’s all falling apart. I didn’t get the position that I felt like was guaranteed. And the reason I believed in it was because I bought into my own self-delusion, all those things that he said to me, about how I was special and I had to do these things to prove that I was worthy of that specialness. And you know, he couldn’t help himself when it came to me because I was just... So unique. But that’s not it, is it? He has probably stripped a hundred teenage girls naked and said exactly the same thing to each of them. It was a casting couch. And in the end, I happened to get a scholarship out of it. So maybe I’m the lucky one in one hundred who got what was promised along with it. But it was never about my music. It was about my body and the fact that he was a predator. I just never wanted to believe that.”

“Both of those things can be true, you know. He can be awful, and you can still be special.”

“But I don’t have what I wanted. And you know what? I don’t even know if I’m happy? I don’t know if I’ve been happy for a long time. I’m obsessed. I’m obsessed with trying to take this broken piece of my life and make it mean something. And I just don’t know how anymore. I don’t know if I belong there anymore. But I sure as hell don’t belong here. Because before I left here, before Marc, I believed a lot of things. I believed in love, and I believed in fate. I didn’t know how to reconcile the fact that I loved Josh with what I felt was my fate to be this violinist, because he felt like fate too. And I went away and I did it, and I have done it for all these years. And there was just one next thing. And now it’s out of my reach again and I have to keep working toward it, and I just don’t know if I want to. And I don’t know who that makes me.”

Avery reached out and took her sister’s hand. “I never wanted to be sitting here,” Avery said. “Facing divorce. Facing the fact that my marriage is broken. That my husband is broken. But I’m not. And neither are you. We might be a little bit banged up, but we get to choose. That’s the thing. We get to choose where we go from here. And you’re not stuck on a path. You’re not.” Hannah looked down at the diary still in her hands.

“I guess I should get some tea,” Avery said. “Since I promised it to you.”

“Why don’t we read?” She held up the diary. “I love that fabric for the quilt. I want to know more about the person who wore the dress.”

“Okay. I’ll go get Anabeth’s journal. We can read together.”

And Hannah suddenly felt like she had been stitched together with her sister, in a way she never had been before. Felt like they maybe weren’t so different. And like she wasn’t so alone.

Special had meant being singular. And it had meant isolating herself, too. And she was done with that. Tired of it. She opened up the diary and started to read.

He asked me to marry him...

29

I am home. I keep telling myself that. When you are not home, even in your own heart, where can you go? I gave her away to save myself. But there is nothing of me left to save.

Dot’s diary, March 1945

Lark

Today Lark felt hungry. For Gram’s face. Her smile. Her smell. For cigarettes and perfume and her laugh.

After being with Ben she felt...she felt good but also so...shaken. Like her world had been tilted on its axis and she wasn’t sure which way was up.

The door opened, and she hoped that it was Ben.

She wanted more of him. His touch. His kiss.

But it wasn’t Ben. It was Taylor, looking wide-eyed and upset.

“Taylor,” Lark said. “What’s the matter?”

Lark and Ben were proceeding with caution. They’d slept together a couple of times, both times at the garage, since that first time, but as far as she knew Taylor had no idea anything had happened between them, so she hadn’t been expecting a visit filled with teenage drama.

“She’s here,” Taylor said.

“Who?”

“My mother. She’s back in town.”

Fear twisted Lark’s heart. “Oh,” she said.

“I don’t want her here. I... I can tell my dad likes you. A lot.” Well, so much for subtlety, but she and Ben had been around Taylor a few times together and it wasn’t like they were actors. And maybe Ben had said some things about her. And she tried not to let that warm her. Besides, it wasn’t the point. “I like that you’re both happy and I was happy.”

Lark tried to keep her expression neutral. “Has your dad seen her?”

“No,” Taylor said. “He’s at work. She came by the house. I yelled at her. And then I...ran away and came here.”

Lark wanted to yell at Keira too. For everything. For hurting Ben, for being part of something that had hurt her, for hurting Taylor. For coming back.

But Keira was Taylor’s mother, and no matter how much Lark didn’t want her around because it complicated everything, she also couldn’t... She couldn’t deny the fact that she was Taylor’s mother. That she had loved a woman who had also abandoned her daughter, and who hadn’t been able to make it right with her before it was too