Confessions from the Quilting Circle by Maisey Yates (ebook reader color screen txt) 📕

It’s like she went crazy. Like she turned into another person. Everything was fine, and then she... She just... She quit. Like it was a job. A job she didn’t want anymore.”

Keira and Ben.

So much of her world was shaped around them.

Around their inevitability.

And now they were just...divorced?

Keira had won. She’d gotten Ben. She’d had his heart, his love, since they were teenagers. He’d married her. Had a child with her.

She’d gotten Lark’s dream and she’d walked away from it.

“I had no idea,” Lark said. “I... Is your dad... Is he okay?”

“No. Of course, he would never say that. He doesn’t like to talk about feelings.”

“No kidding,” Lark said.

“You knew both of them. Both of my parents.”

“Yeah. You know. We had a friend group.”

Her head was pounding. Lark wasn’t a terribly angry person. But it was like acid in her gut, in her soul, filling her with rage. Keira had quit them like a job. That’s what the girl had said.

“That’s weird,” she said, “to think of them...having friends. Or being friends. They didn’t like each other very much in the end there. He really doesn’t like her now.”

Those words twisted in that cavern carving itself out in Lark’s chest. Cut a deep groove in her soul.

They didn’t even like each other now.

She felt betrayed.

Deeply.

Utterly.

“Did you want a cookie or anything?” Lark asked. Because she didn’t know what else to do or say.

“Oh. I...”

“On the house.”

“Sure.”

She took a cookie from the glass jar on the counter and set it on a plate, pushing it toward the girl. “My name is Lark, by the way.”

“Taylor.”

“I’m sorry you’re having a bad day.”

She nodded. “Some days are okay.”

Lark looked at that young face. She was probably fifteen and she’d already experienced a cut that deep. That some days you could breathe, and some you couldn’t. Some days you felt normal and other days...well other days you skipped school and talked to strangers about your pain while eating a cookie.

“Yeah,” Lark said. “Some days will be. And eventually more days will be okay than not.”

She looked down. “That sounds more realistic than what a lot of people say. That it will all be okay.”

Lark shook her head. And this time she thought of her mom. Her mom who had been abandoned by her mother. “No. It won’t all be okay.”

Taylor smiled, just a slight lift of the corners of her mouth. “Thanks. I mean it.”

Here she was, giving Keira’s daughter the life advice her former friend wasn’t here to give. Lark could hardly breathe past that.

Another customer came in and took Lark’s attention for a moment, and then Taylor sat absorbed in her work, and Lark let her have it.

Around dinnertime, the girl hopped off the stool. “I’m going to go get my dad for food. He forgets to...you know, eat. He’ll just work.”

She had to take care of him, and that made Lark feel a host of things too.

“Yeah, I... Nice to meet you, Taylor.”

“You too.”

But even after Taylor left, and the shop emptied out, Lark didn’t feel alone.

Because her every heartbeat seemed to say his name. Over and over. After all that time of doing her best not to think of him at all.

She had her business up and running. She had a flower crown, wilting thought it was. And ancient history was exactly that. Ancient history.

Seeing him the other night when she’d gone to the garage had thrown her, and meeting his daughter had been a shock. Finding out about his divorce was a shock.

She wasn’t here to walk along old roads, she was here to find new ones in old spaces. She didn’t want to go back to the person she was, she wanted to find a better version of the person she was now.

But this was exactly why when she came back to visit her family, she didn’t loiter around town. This was why she made her visits brief. And infrequent.

And of course, she had moved back home without fully taking that on board.

She turned to the sink full of dishes and began to scrub angrily at some of the mugs. And slowly, clarity washed over her. Maybe it was the physical labor. Maybe it was the flower crown. Maybe it was the confrontation—so quickly—with one of the thorniest bits of home.

It was a good thing. This was exactly the kind of thing she needed to face down. Because she couldn’t let old memories and feelings matter that much.

Because disconnected from the source a real life memory could become a fantasy. Hazy, fuzzy, and mostly lies. A fantasy didn’t have boundaries. It could build itself into the most unobtainable joy, or the darkest of nightmares.

Ben Thompson was neither.

Taylor.

Apparently, his daughter was Taylor.

And her mother was gone.

She swallowed hard past the lump in her throat.

She looked around the room. “You would think this was funny,” she said to the air, hoping that her grandmother’s spirit was lingering in the walls, just enough to be amused by all the drama.

Gram would have popped a piece of candy in her mouth, adjusted her glasses and smiled. “Life has a sick sense of humor. The trick is to make sure yours is even more twisted.”

That’s what she would’ve said.

It was just too bad she wasn’t here to say it.

But even if she had been... Even if she had been, Lark wouldn’t have told her it was what she needed to hear.

And suddenly it made her sad that it was so much easier to talk to a ghost that it was to talk to somebody living.

10

We circle the wagons at night for safety. The men keep watch. One in particular is always watching. I’m told his name is John.

Anabeth Snow’s diary, 1864

Avery

“We can have keto friendly snacks at the trivia night.”

Avery was trying to listen to Alyssa talk about the upcoming event. But since it was intermingled with humble bragging about the progress on her diet and her daughter being student of the month, Avery was finding it difficult. She should be enjoying