The Forever Girl Read online

Maze closed her eyes to her pain. “Heather,” she murmured. “Don’t.”

  But then Caitlin sniffed too, and when a tear ran down her perfect cheek, it shook Maze to the core, because Caitlin almost never cried.

  “Stop that. You’re all just proving my point.”

  Caitlin swiped angrily at her face. “Let me guess. You suck at meaningful relationships, so why bother, right?”

  “Something like that.” But the real truth was Maze didn’t just suck at them, she destroyed them. That was what she did: sabotage her own happiness. And she was good at it.

  “Bullshit,” Caitlin snapped. “You just don’t like needing anyone.”

  Maze drew a deep breath. “Look, I didn’t come here to ruin this for you guys. But we all know that we’re here because of me. I’m the one. This is all my fault.”

  At that, Caitlin stood, vibrating with fury. “No. You don’t get to own this, Maze.” She began shoving everything back into her bag, her movements jerky with anger. “We all made decisions we regret that night.”

  Maze was vibrating too, with sorrow and angst. “I’m not a kid anymore, Cat. You don’t have to protect me, and I don’t need your misplaced sympathy. You should hate me.”

  Heather was still crying, and Caitlin put her hand on her shoulder as she stared at Maze. “Is that what you want? Us to hate you?”

  Okay, so she’d backed herself into a corner, and as always she was going to start swinging, taking out only herself. “Yes,” she said. “That’s what I want.”

  Everyone stared at her in shock. Except Walker. He was still showing nothing.

  “I refuse to believe that,” Caitlin finally said. “You’re part of this family, whether you like it or not. You can’t just run away. Love doesn’t work like that and I thought you knew it.” She nodded to Heather. “Come on, honey, let’s go wait for Mom and Dad in the parking lot.”

  Maze didn’t watch them go. She closed her eyes and tried to think of something else. The ocean. Puppies. Thai takeout. But it didn’t work. She strained to hear their retreat, but they must’ve already gone because all that came to her was the rumble of not-too-distant thunder.

  Good to know she could still clear an area without even trying. Feeling sick, she opened her eyes and stared up at the churning, turbulent sky, which was in exact accord with her mood. Telling herself to get over it, she wiped her tears on the hem of her shirt before reaching for her chair to try to close it. When it fought back and pinched her finger, she gave it a good kick.

  A low male snort came from behind her and she froze. Why was it that Walker of all people always got to witness her most humiliating moments? Was it karma? Was it because she’d once forgotten to say thank you, or maybe very slightly cheated on her taxes? Lied about not wanting to be a part of the only family she’d ever truly wanted as her own?

  “Nicely done, Mayhem Maze.” Walker, of course.

  Rolling her eyes at the old nickname that she’d definitely earned—“borrowing” that tractor notwithstanding—she glared at her chair, now upside down on the grass but still fully opened. When Walker reached for it, she stopped him.

  “No, I’ve got it,” she said, practically choking on her stubborn pride. The theme of her life, of course: being stupidly, doggedly stubborn, because being perceived as helpless or needy made her nuts.

  Walker pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head and eyed her. “You going to kick it again?”

  “Probably.”

  There was a small smile on his mouth, but not in his eyes, those sharp blue orbs that saw everything and revealed nothing. “You never change.”

  Aware that this wasn’t exactly a compliment, she looked away, because facing Caitlin’s parents was nothing compared with facing Walker. Forget the chair. She needed to be anywhere but here. Even a root canal without meds would be preferable.

  “Walking off for the win,” he said to her back. “Shocking.”

  She whirled around. “You’re the one who’s always gone.”

  “For work. Not because I’m running scared.”

  A direct hit. “Yeah, well, your work doesn’t deserve your dedication. It nearly killed you.” She barely managed to get the words out.

  “What do you care? You’ve been ignoring me for years now.”

  Yep, for four years and two months, but who was counting? “I’m trying,” she said, tossing up her hands. “For all the good it’s done since you’re still talking to me.”

  He just looked at her for a long moment, then folded her chair with annoying ease—one handed—and set the strap on her shoulder. “Always good to know I still irritate the shit out of you, Maze.”

  He was so clearly favoring his right shoulder, and her heart hurt. “It’s time for a new job,” she said quietly. “You know that, right? At some point, you’re going to run out of your nine lives.”

  He just shook his head, either at the truth of her statement or because he just didn’t want to hear her opinion. Both were entirely possible.

  “There are lots of other jobs,” she said. “You don’t have to put your life on the line for a paycheck.”

  His smile was grim as another rumble of thunder sounded. Ignoring the rain as it started to fall, he shook his head. “It’s what I know. I can’t jump around like you do.”

  The rain cooled her skin but not her anger. Yes, she’d jumped around, doing a huge variety of jobs before landing on bartending while working her way through business school, but she felt she finally had it right. Not that that was any of his beeswax. “Still a total asshole, I see.”

  “Maybe I just care.”

  And maybe once upon a time, she’d believed that to be true. “Screw you, Walker.”

  “You already did that. Didn’t work out so well for me.”

  Since that was the shameful truth, she should’ve been wise and kept her mouth shut. But when had she ever been wise? “Just . . . stay the hell away from me.” Then, as she had the morning after they’d gotten hitched by an Elvis impersonator on one shockingly memorable drunken night in Vegas four years and two months ago, she turned and walked away.

  Chapter 1

  Now

  You’ve got this, Cat told herself. But note to self: she so did not in fact have this. Her nerves had taken over—her own fault, of course. She’d done a thing. A big thing. And though her heart had been in the right place when she’d done that thing, butterflies were revolting in her gut, telling her she’d be the only one who’d see it that way. It was times like this that she missed Michael the most, because he would’ve been her ally in this, she was sure. Back then, even at half her height and weight, he’d been her shadow. The cutest shadow on the planet. Over time, she’d gotten used to being without him, but it’d never gotten easier.

  Twin piglet-like snorts distracted her, and she looked down at her fiancé’s “babies.” The pug brothers had huge buggy black eyes and little round bodies and vibrated like they needed their batteries changed. Roly was black and Poly tan, both with black faces, black curly tails, and little black feet.

  They snorted at her until she gave in and scooped them up, one in each arm, having to smile at their smushed-in faces. “Okay, guys, listen up. We’ve got a lot to do today.” She took a good, hard look around the old cabin that had been in her family’s possession since the early 1900s. It sat right on Rainbow Lake, about twenty minutes outside of Wildstone, a small ranching community on California’s central coast. She had a lot of good memories here: visiting her grandparents, learning to swim . . . she’d even run away here a few times in her dramatic teens.

  Her grandparents were gone, and her parents now lived in South Carolina, where both of them were college professors. They were thinking of selling this place, but had agreed to let her live here until her wedding. At least that was the official reason. The unofficial one was that she was losing her collective shit and had needed the safety net.

  The problem was that there were still a few vital pieces missing from the puzzle of Caitlin’
s life: the most important pieces, the corner pieces, the ones you couldn’t do without. And since Michael was an angel now—and damn, her heart still squeezed painfully every time she thought about him, which was a lot—she was really counting on the wedding to bring the other vital pieces back to her. Those pieces named Heather, Walker, and Maze.

  The estrangement between them all felt like a huge, gaping hole. It’d started at Michael’s grave three years ago and had only gotten worse. Hence the thing she’d done.

  No one was going to thank her. And it was entirely possible it would all blow up in her face. But she’d had to try. Just thinking about it had the butterflies in her belly escaping and taking flight in her nervous system, giving her the shakes.

  But that might have been the five cups of coffee she’d consumed.

  She set down the pugs, much to their snorting, squealing displeasure, and got to it. Running around like a madwoman for the next few hours, she changed the sheets on the beds in the spare bedrooms, swept the wood floors, washed the towels so they’d smell fresh . . . all while fielding call after call from her boss, Sara. Cat managed the Wildstone deli that Sara owned. Cat also made all the hot food, which was actually the only part of her job she enjoyed, because the deli itself was a nightmare. She’d taken three weeks off for the wedding, but Sara, who’d missed her calling as the passive-aggressive queen of the universe, had been in contact almost every day in the guise of needing something, while really just wanting Caitlin to know of her every little mistake or misstep.

  So when her phone buzzed in her pocket yet again while Cat was folding clothes in the laundry room, she ignored it.

  “Caitlin?” came Dillon’s voice. “Can you bring me my laptop?”

  She transferred another load into the dryer, turned it on, blew a stray hair off her sweaty face, and poked her head out of the laundry room to find Dillon sitting on the couch in the living room, feet up on the coffee table, Roly and Poly curled up on his lap. “Are you kidding me?”

  He flashed her the charming smile that had caught both her attention and her heart a year ago. “Sorry,” he said. “But my ankle’s bothering me again. Do you mind?”

  Hard to, when his twisted ankle was actually her fault. She’d seen a Cosmo post online titled “The Top Ten Ways to Spruce Up Your Sex Life.” Feeling ambitious, she’d gone with number one: “Seduce Your Man in the Shower.” What could she say? The illustrations had looked intriguing.

  Turned out attempting intriguing things in the shower was dangerous.

  Feeling guilty, she ran up the stairs and got his laptop, stopping to straighten out the mess he’d left on the desk. When she got back downstairs, he was standing at the front door with his golf bag slung over his shoulder.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Just got a call from Mom. Her golf date bailed and she needs me to do the back nine with her.”

  “But your ankle.”

  “We’ve got a cart.” He handed her the pugs.

  Juggling the soft sausage loaves while trying to avoid the inevitable face kisses—a big no-thank-you, since they had a fondness for licking each other’s butts—she stared at Dillon. “You said that you’d be here to meet my family and have dinner with us.”

  “Babe.” His face softened. “I’m your family. Me and my mom, and your parents.”

  “You know that’s only technically true,” she protested. She and Heather and Walker and Maze might not be blood, but they were something even deeper. A self-made family, and yeah, okay, maybe it was a very dysfunctional one, but it felt more real than anything else in her life.

  “Come on,” Dillon said, putting his hands on her hips and giving her a frustrated smile. “When’s the last time you heard from Maze or Heather”—he set a finger against her lips when she tried to speak—“where you didn’t contact them first. I mean, have they offered to help you with the wedding? They’re in it—you insisted on them over your local friends—so . . . where have they been?”

  She could admit that he had a point. They hadn’t been together since their fight in front of Michael’s grave. Heather had vanished, just gone dark for a whole year before suddenly responding to Caitlin’s texts again as if nothing had happened. But she still hadn’t been back to Wildstone and wouldn’t give Caitlin much information other than that she was okay and “working on things.” Whatever that meant.

  Caitlin hadn’t seen Maze either, and not for a lack of trying. But they’d texted and had a few strained calls. And to give Maze credit, she always responded when Caitlin reached out, even with her busy life that was now in Santa Barbara, two hours south of Wildstone.

  But Caitlin had, however, seen Walker. Sparingly, but he’d been gone on the job nearly nonstop the past three years. She missed him.

  She missed all of them and wanted them back together. And as the self-appointed bossy older sister of the fam, she was determined—and, okay, also slightly desperate—to make it happen. And yeah, maybe, maybe, she’d rushed her wedding along, knowing it was the one thing that could bring her siblings of the heart back together. She couldn’t help herself. For whatever reason, the four of them had synced and melded into a core family that long-ago year, but they were losing each other, and that scared her. She’d already lost Michael; hell if she’d lose the others too. She needed this so badly she couldn’t even explain it to Dillon. But the truth was the last time she’d felt vibrantly alive had been when they’d all been in her life, and she was just desperate enough to play with fate to make it happen. “Please stay, Dillon.”

  He studied her face and sighed, his eyes lit with affection as he cupped her jaw. “I promised Mom, but I’ll get back asap. Take care of my babies?”

  It was the best she was going to get, so she nodded. He brushed a nice, warm kiss across her lips, and then he was gone.

  Caitlin blew out a breath and eyed his “babies.” They stared up at her with those googly eyes and she had to laugh. She’d grown up with big dogs, so she didn’t quite get the appeal of the little ones. They yipped. They had a Napoleon complex. Last week at the dog park, they’d terrorized a big dog into peeing on them.

  But Dillon loved them. When the two of them had first started getting serious, they’d talked about their future. As an investment banker, he had a solid job and made a great living. He was fun and sexy. But she hadn’t fallen in love until she’d seen his “Life” list on his Notes app: wife, kids, big house, and a big pension.

  And the past year had been . . . really good. They traveled, they laughed, and she’d felt so lucky. But lately there’d been missed dates. Fewer and fewer late-night talks beneath the stars. Less time spent together. She’d decided it was wedding stress, on both their parts.

  Because if Dillon was pulling away, she could admit that she’d let him.

  She’d kept all this bottled up because . . . well, that’s what she did, always. There were lots of corked bottles of emotion deep inside her. But this, with Dillon . . . for the first time in her life she didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t tell her parents, because they’d asked her—begged her—more than once to please think about dating Dillon longer before saying yes to a ring.

  She hadn’t.

  Her friends Charlene and Wendy were each very happily married and sickeningly in love, and Wendy was a coworker of Dillon’s. They loved him for her, said he was the best thing to ever happen to her. So maybe she just didn’t do sickeningly in love?

  Maybe it would catch up with her.

  When she’d finally finished her manic nesting, she critically eyed the cabin. She’d done everything she could to make it look homey and inviting. Exhausted, she jealously eyed Roly and Poly, now snoozing in their fancy beds, but before she could even think about taking a nap herself, she heard a car drive up.

  Her stomach jangled uncomfortably as she hurried out front in time to see Heather getting out of an old, beat-up two-door Civic. She was twenty-two now and had made it clear she no longer needed a big sister, but Caitlin
couldn’t help but still see the sweet, terrified, neglected nine-year-old Heather had been when she’d first come into Caitlin’s childhood home. Her hair had grown out a bit, straight and blunt to her collarbone, still black, but with pretty metallic blue streaks. At the sight of her cute, petite self, Caitlin felt her heart melt as she rushed over. “You made it!”

  Heather laughed. “Did I have a choice?”

  “Nope.” Caitlin pulled her in and hugged her tight.

  “Wow.” Heather patted her on the back. “Okay. Hi to you too.”

  Caitlin didn’t let go. She couldn’t. This was her baby sister, and Michael would’ve been Heather’s age now, still Caitlin’s shadow, she was sure of it, but also being her backup boss.

  “Um . . .” Heather patted her some more. “Not sure we can do this all day, so . . .”

  Nope. Caitlin still couldn’t let her go, not yet.

  Heather laughingly caved, hugging Caitlin back. “Okay, okay, all day it is.”

  Caitlin gave a little snort to beat back the threat of tears and reluctantly released her. “I missed you.” To hide just how much, she peered into the empty front seat of Heather’s car. “Your text said your plus-one was someone named Sam.”

  “Oh. About that . . .” Heather’s smile went a bit forced, the way it always had when she’d stolen food from the pantry to secretly hoard, even though Caitlin’s parents had made it clear that everyone in their house could eat as often and as much as they needed.

  Heather pressed a lever on the driver’s-side seat so that it slid forward, then reached in and pulled out a little girl from a toddler car seat. “So . . .” Heather said softly, nervously. “This is Sammie.”

  Caitlin’s mouth fell open. “A baby? You had a baby?”

  “I big girl!” the “baby” said proudly.

  Heather cupped the back of Sammie’s head and kissed her chubby cheek. “Yes,” she said, smiling at the little girl’s face. “You’re a big girl.”

  Caitlin was still gaping. “You . . . had a baby.”

  “I did.”

  Caitlin absorbed this blow, and yes, it was a blow, because once upon a time, she’d known everything—every single little thing—about her people. That was what she did: she was the center of their universe and kept them all connected. It gave her purpose and made her feel important in a world where she often felt invisible. The truth was she needed to be needed by them.