My Beautiful Neighbor (The Greene Family Book 1) by Piper Rayne (phonics reading books TXT) 📕

a message that he can’t turn the clock back to before she came into town. Those feelings he has for her are never going to go away. If anything, he’ll hate himself when he finally realizes he lost her when he’s sitting at her wedding as a guest.’”

All my siblings stare at me.

I hold up my hand. “Is this some kind of bullshit intervention?”

Chevelle puts her hands on Mom’s headstone. “‘Thanks, Mom. We love you and not a day goes by that I don’t think about you.’” She drops a daisy in the vase. “Happy birthday.”

I stalk down to my truck, shaking my head, upset that a day we came to remember our mom has turned into something focused on me.

“Cade!” Chevelle runs after me and grasps my elbow. “It’s okay to put yourself out there.”

I turn back around to find all my siblings standing with Chevelle.

“We all feel the pain,” Xavier says. “None of us want to feel it again, but we can’t just stop living.”

“I’m surviving after Lucy,” Adam says. “I’m here and her leaving devastated me.”

“You guys were too young to understand,” I say.

“I’m only two years younger than you,” Fisher says. “It hurts, yeah, but you can love someone again.”

“I’ve seen you two together,” Adam says. “You’ve already fallen in love with her whether you want to admit it or not.”

My dad’s truck pulls up behind mine. He always joins us a few minutes after we start in case we want to say something we don’t want him to hear.

“What’s going on?” he asks as he walks over to us.

I cross my arms. “Seems my siblings earned psychology degrees I didn’t know about. They have a lot of opinions about why it didn’t work out with Presley.”

Dad sighs and pats my siblings on the shoulders. “Give us a minute,” he says to them.

“We’ll be at the house,” Xavier says.

Marla is making a huge meal at the house like she usually does after we’ve done our graveside visit.

Chevelle hugs me with tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry if you’re angry, but I can’t let you ruin your chance at happiness.”

I hug her tightly and pass her to Fisher, who walks her over to his truck.

“Walk with me,” my dad says.

I follow, expecting him to go back up to my mom’s grave, but he heads the opposite way.

“When your mom died, I never thought I’d love again. I didn’t want to put you guys through having a stepmom, and I wasn’t quite sure I could open myself up to caring like that for someone again. But when Marla returned, we just fit.”

I say nothing and keep walking, kicking at the leaves that were left behind under the melted snow.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but having Marla in my life was worth putting you guys through a huge change. I’d forgotten what it was like to have a partner. Someone to listen to you, give you advice, or just love you. Someone you knew would have your back at all costs. I felt empty, and though I could stand it, once Marla came and filled that emptiness, I knew what I’d been missing. As scared as I was of going through a loss like I did with your mother’s death, I didn’t want to turn away because I understood that my life would be better with Marla in it.”

“Yeah, but you and Marla liked each other in high school. You already had feelings for her.”

He sighs and glances at me as if I’m grasping at straws. “I did like Marla in high school, but when I met your mother, I fell head over heels in love with her. You loved Reese in high school. Do you feel the same for her now?”

“You know, I don’t think I really did love her, looking back now. If I did, it was teenage love. Not all-consuming adult love.”

“I was scared to love someone again, to open myself to the devastation I felt when your mom died. But I got through it once. If I had to do it again, I could. So could you.” Dad gestures toward all the gravestones. “All of these people lived life. Some had their lives cut too short, like your mother. Some lived until they were a hundred. The problem is, you get one life and you have no idea how long it will be. You might as well live it. Some things work out how you hope, and some don’t. Even if it doesn’t work out how you want, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.”

He stops at a gravestone. It reads Benjamin Oliver and I calculate the birth to death dates, figuring out he was only eighteen when he died.

Dad says, “I went to high school with Benny.”

The name Benny rings a bell. A car crash, I think.

“I always think about what he missed out on, dying so young. He never got married, had the blessing of having kids, seeing them grow up, watching them make bad decisions.” He raises his eyebrows at me. “It puts things in perspective. You can be dead and not living, but you can also be alive and not living too.” He pats me on the shoulder. “I’m going to wish your mom a happy birthday. See you back at the house.”

He leaves me standing in front of Benny’s grave.

I drive over to Marla and my dad’s house, leaving my dad at Mom’s gravesite. He’s probably complaining about me to her too.

The driveway is filled with all my siblings’ and stepsiblings’ cars.

I hear laughter in the kitchen when I walk in the house, a noise I’m so accustomed to here—a noise that never would’ve been here had Marla not entered our lives. Sure, we were happy before her, but she brought something special, as did each of my stepsiblings. Had my dad not taken that chance, my life now would be very different. Marla’s even helped Chevelle work through some of her guilt. I could never repay