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

secret that would never be as important as the one Avery was dealing with.

One that still had the power to cut and wound.

She had others. But they were like scars. Hardened and raised and like armor, not wounds.

And it was just... She wasn’t used to this. She wanted to fix it. She wanted to make things change with the force of her... Her feelings. Her deep conviction that it shouldn’t be like this. She wanted to knock David sideways, and she wanted to tell Avery to quit being sad about him. That was it. She just didn’t want her to be sad. Because he wasn’t worth it.

But she had a mortgage and kids and all kinds of things that made it complicated. And even if Hannah didn’t fully understand it, she could sort of get how... How it was complicated for Avery to lose that marriage even though it clearly wasn’t a great one.

But Hannah just wanted it to be fixed for her. And she couldn’t do it. Any more than she could fix the situation with her career. Well, at least that was... No. There was no at least. She had been working for years for that. And it was just... It was just a no. And there was no way of knowing when another seat would open up. Yes, she could start applying to other symphonies. But there weren’t very many that paid as well. Maybe she could go take Ilina’s spot in LA. But it still wasn’t a principal spot. And it wasn’t what she had set her mind on.

She took her violin off of the mantel.

She went downstairs, and saw Lark lying on the couch, holding her knitting above her head, making slow stitches.

“I’m going out,” Hannah said.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Lark said.

“Which would be?”

Lark shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ll get back to you.”

“It will be too late by then.”

Hannah stepped outside and looked down the street. She could drive. But then, she wouldn’t be able to drink. She started walking toward the Gold Pan. She had avoided that place. She had avoided... Honestly, anything that made her feel like she was back in town. Really back.

But her future was... She didn’t even know what it was now. Her plan was upended. And she was here. She wasn’t in Boston. She couldn’t fight her way into the position she wanted, apparently. Any more than she could dedicate herself to the symphony for years and earn it. So maybe for now she would just... Live in the present. It was a strange thought, one that honestly wouldn’t have occurred to her just a couple of days ago. Because the future was what everything was about for her. Planning. Making sure that she got where she wanted to go. That she hit the target she’d been aiming at for all these years.

But she missed it. Somehow. She’d done something wrong, but she didn’t know when or where. She’d had a sense of destiny. Like it was...meant to be.

And that made her feel stupid. Because if she had ever talked to anybody about how she’d gotten where she was, she wouldn’t have said destiny. She would have said that it was hard work. That it was all the lessons that she’d taken, that it was getting that scholarship and going to that college. Making the connections that she had. She would have said that she was the master of her fate, the captain of her ship. And that anyone who wanted to get where she was had to be too. But underneath all of that she had a sense that she was destined for it. And never had that been more clear than in those moments of futile outrage after she found out that she hadn’t gotten the principal position.

So here she was storming down the street in her hometown, headed to the bar holding her violin, which seemed to represent everything that was broken in her life at the moment.

You still have your first chair position.

But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t.

And she had been so close to having her goal. And close to feeling like...enough.

Like she had done it. The reward for all the work she had put in.

She shook her head, looked both ways, and crossed quickly at the crosswalk, and then again, making her way down the street, across four blocks to the Gold Pan.

She stopped in front of it, looking through the windows, at least, as well as she could. There were stickers on them. Mostly for energy drinks, ATV companies and truck logos. There was a guy with a guitar sitting on the stage, singing. Avery pushed the door open, and walked in, just as he finished his song. He set his guitar down, and walked off the stage. She did her best to close the distance between them. “Are you jamming?”

“It’s just open mic,” he said.

“Well. Perfect.”

There were a couple names on the sheet at the end of the bar ahead of her. And she ordered a shot, taking it in one gulp as she took her sweater off, and hung it on the back of the chair. And as she did, she looked up, and locked eyes with Josh.

Because of course Josh was here.

She couldn’t really lie to herself and say that he was the last person she wanted to see. Because she... She wasn’t really unhappy to see him. He was handsome, and familiar, and right at the moment that was a lot more desirable than she would like to admit.

Familiar. This place was familiar. Not because she had spent a lot of time here. She had vacated town before she was of legal drinking age. Not that they hadn’t tried to sneak in. But the real problem with small towns wasn’t so much the difficulty of landing fake IDs, as it was the probability of running into somebody who knew full well that you weren’t old enough to be in the bar. A teacher from the school, or