Sebring

And in the four months since Nick walked out of my house, as I had a great deal of time, I spent a majority of that time wondering how I ever believed in the first place.

Quite frankly, there wasn’t anything about me to love.

I was quite attractive, but deep down, people didn’t love looks.

They loved senses of humor. They loved personality. They loved manner. They loved someone who loved dogs, like they did. Or they loved someone who was passionate about issues, like they were.

Whatever.

There had to be substance to a person to be a person who could be loved.

There was nothing to me. There’d never been anything to me.

Now Nick, he was a person you could love. He teased great and he cooked great and he kissed great and when you spoke, he listened like there was nothing on earth he wanted more to do. He made me laugh. He made me feel. He made me believe there was something to me.

The woman he spent years plotting revenge for, I bet there was something to her.

But me?

I was a woman he could walk out of my house and never again see.

Truth be told, one of the reasons I decided to keep that house was because it was like keeping a bit of Nick with me. It was the only thing I had, memories of the few times he’d been there. Memories, if I was in the mood, I could pretend were based on something different.

Something real.

I’d been right that first day I woke up to him in my bed. Sometimes, if I was allowing myself to wallow (which I didn’t allow often, but it happened), I would ramble and remember his joke about the wood-fired stove. I’d remember falling asleep beside him on the couch after we got back from Vegas.

I’d remember right where he was, right where I was, precisely what he looked like when he lied that lie that was so pretty, telling me he loved me.

“Right, I’m here, I don’t wanna be here forever, so let’s start this. Harry’s retiring and he wanted me to ask you personally to come to his party,” my sister announced.

“His reinstatement didn’t last long,” I murmured.

“He wasn’t really reinstated, Liv,” Georgie murmured back.

No, he wasn’t. That was another bit of info I learned years late.

Harry didn’t need me giving him the odd job to make his load a little lighter. He was on Tommy’s dollar and on Georgia’s payroll, part of his duties being looking after (that meant monitoring) me.

An unexpected betrayal that shouldn’t hurt as much as it did.

But it did.

“I’ll take a pass on that,” I told Georgia.

“Babe, you gotta—”

I stared at her right in the eye. “There are a lot of things I gotta do, Georgie. All of them you know. So please don’t tell me what else I gotta do if it’s telling me how I should feel or if I really don’t gotta do it. You cannot dictate how I feel. Now, as you sign my paychecks, if it’s your order that I attend Harry’s retirement party, I’ll be sure to attend. But I’d rather not.”

“We were all looking out for you,” she informed me.

She truly believed that.

Which, of course, made it all the worse.

“That would make a great deal of sense, if I was seven,” I retorted. “As I was not, it makes no sense at all.”

“Liv—”

I interrupted her, “Can we move past this?”

She shook her head in annoyance.

“I don’t care that you didn’t want Tom back. Tom was patient, sure, but he was also weak. I’m actually glad you’re smart enough not to settle for that. He got his opening, and if he wanted to win you back, he could have. Months now, he’s done dick. He’s excellent in the role he’s in. Watching you, he learned from a master, put his spin on it, things are going great. But he’s not the man for you and you figuring that out, I’m glad.”

I said nothing because there was nothing to say and because I was bracing since I didn’t know where this was going.

“That said, I’m your big sis. I was looking out for you. Leading Tom along with the promise he’d get you when he had a purpose to serve, served my purpose. It worked out. You didn’t give him what he wanted, he’s got other shit he wants, so he’s not complaining. But again, you, Liv, got something up your ass and you just gotta let it go.”

“This is you telling me how to feel, Georgie,” I pointed out.

“This is me telling you that we are out of the fire but we jumped right into the frying pan. Valenzuela is up in my shit and things are hot and going to get hotter so you need to strap in, Liv. No way I worked my ass off to get us to where we are to have some psychopath pull that rug out from under me. And you gotta be all in because, however I need you, you’re gonna need to kick in.”

Marvelous.

“You with me on that?” she asked when I said nothing.

“Is there a choice?” I asked back.

“That’s not saying ‘I’m with you,’ Liv,” she retorted.

“It’s the best I have, Georgie,” I returned.

She sighed a beleaguered sigh.

I sought patience, and as I was a practiced hand at that, found it.

“You know where Sebring is?”

At this surprise question, I made a sharp noise in the back of my throat.

“What?” I asked.

Suddenly, her eyes on me were frightening and her tone was a whisper.

And with that look and tone, as she spoke, I wondered with not a small amount of alarm if I ever really knew her.

“Babe, you do, you spill. Okay?”

I stared at her. Right in the eyes, I stared at my sister.