Southern Hotshot (North Carolina Highlands 2)

“And you’re the one with a sensitivity for bullshit. Your own and others’ too. So, yeah, you’ve always known that’s magical thinking—believing that if you just try hard enough, you can be as perfect as your Instagram feed says you are. But I guess I had to learn that lesson the hard way.” She refills her glass with a hand that shakes. “Palmer loved CrossFit. I hated it, but I did it because I wanted to have a shared hobby or whatever. And I hate my job, but I wanted us to be in the same profession so we’d always have that to talk about. Because we didn’t really have much else in common other than that.”

“What?” I widen my eyes. “You hate your job?”

“Em, I work eighty-hour weeks putting together prospectuses for structured product deals. Of course I hate my job.”

“What the hell is a structured product?”

“Trust me, you’d fall asleep long before I finished explaining that. But it’s boring, draining, never-ending work, and I fucking hate it. So, yeah. Now I’m alone, with a job I hate and a dream house I have to sell, and I just want to quit it all.” She laughs, the sound hard and unhappy. “I just might.”

“But you have it all. You’re the dream, Linds. The success story.”

Lindsey looks me in the eye for the first time since the conversation started. “If living a lie is the dream, then I want no part of it.”

“Wow.” I give myself a minute to let her words sink in. “Just…wow.”

“Look. If my life falling apart has taught me one thing, it’s that perfection is a Ponzi scheme. You rob yourself again and again of the truth so you can show the world something pretty but fake. The more you do it, the worse you feel. But the world tells us if we just keep trying, if we just get that trip or that ring or that dollar amount in our bank account, we’ll get to the top of the pyramid where pretty is finally real, and it will finally make us happy. So we keep stacking the bullshit blocks, ignoring the voice inside us that screams wrong over and over again. When I finally listened to that voice”—she draws a shaky breath—“it was too late.”

“My God.” I swallow, hard. “That metaphor is beautiful. And awful.”

“No shit. My life feels like one giant joke. Only the joke’s on me.”

I lace my fingers through hers. “I know exactly what you mean.”

“What?” She arches a brow. “You think you’re a joke?”

“Everything about me is a joke. My profession. My love life. My future.”

She sets down her wineglass on the table and turns on the couch to look at me, folding her legs underneath her. She takes both my hands and looks me in the eye. “Listen to me, Em. And listen carefully. Have you ever considered it’s our world that’s a joke and not you? You left a lucrative future in law to follow your dreams. Not our family’s dreams, your dreams. Look at me. I don’t even know what my dreams are. I’ve spent my whole life trying to become what the world told me I should be. According to that world’s rules, yeah, I was successful. My social media feed was perfect. But now I’m fucked. I’m going to lose most of my money in this divorce. All the partners at my firm are friendly with Palmer and have worked with him in the past, so God knows what they’ll think of me now. Mom and Dad are going to be devastated. But more than that, I’ve wasted whole decades of my life doing things I hate with people who aren’t my people. If that’s not a joke…”

“Well, I haven’t been happy all the time, either.”

“No one’s happy all the time. If they are, they aren’t telling themselves the truth. I mean, what if success looks less like a highlight reel and more like a life you don’t have to share with the world to feel good about it?” She searches my face. “I don’t want perfect anymore. I want real. I want what you have with Samuel.”

I’m so startled I start to cry all over again. “What? Why would you ever want the hot mess that we are?”

“Because,” she says softly, “you took a risk last night that, if I understand it correctly, was extremely brave. The connection you have with Samuel is inconvenient and scary, but it’s real. Samuel is in love with you, and if he wasn’t, this wouldn’t have accelerated the way it has. Take it from me—that sort of connection I picked up on in the space of, what, ten minutes between you and Samuel doesn’t happen very often. It’s worth another act of bravery. Another leap of faith. It’s worth risking everything for. Even your job. Because at the end of the day, it’s not a job that makes us happy. It’s relationships. It’s our people, the ones who love us for who we really are.”