The Other Side of Ever After: A Fake Dating Romance by Meg Bradley

Author:Meg Bradley [Bradley, Meg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

21

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I didn’t plan to tell Mina all of that. Or any of it, really.

In fact, I haven’t told anyone the entire truth about what happened to my mom. Not even Kayla, and she’s my person. She knows the bits and pieces that I’ve felt safe sharing, but not everything.

Joel is the same way about our past. His teammates have no clue what our family has been through. Sure, if someone really wanted to know our history, they could look it up online. It doesn’t require an investigator to sleuth out the gory details.

At the time of her death, it made headlines. Local ones, only. She wasn’t famous enough, nor important enough to the outside world, to grace national papers or bigger news sites. She was just a middle-aged suburban mom who volunteered at the animal shelter when she could, worked as a checker at the local grocery store, and loved her boys with every fiber of her being. To her detriment, probably.

But her death definitely headlined in my own life. For years, all I could think about was the fact that I’d failed her. How Joel and I were so stupidly oblivious to her turmoil. So quick to believe the lie she’d told us about our father’s passing, no questions asked.

I mean, we didn’t even have a funeral for the guy. That should have been a clue. But I accepted his death at face value because I wanted so badly to be rid of him. I wanted freedom for my mom, and yeah, maybe a little freedom for Joel and me too. His fabricated passing gave us that. Gave us a chance to live without the restrictive cloak of worry and responsibility blanketing our every move.

But my mom never had that true freedom. It’s something I’ll never forgive myself for because my brother and I could have been the means to give it to her. We failed her in the worst way possible.

“I’m sorry.” I finally get my emotions in check. Maybe I should have downed the rest of that wine first. My small surge of courage is long gone. Hissing through my teeth, I clap my hands to my thighs. Shrug my shoulders now burdened with remorse. “I didn’t mean to unload on you. That was really heavy.”

“Life often is,” Mina says. She’s moved closer to me, so her knees touch my thigh. It’s just a small point of connection, but I feel it like electricity zinging through my whole body. It’s everything. “Life isn’t a fairytale.”

I definitely know that. Sometimes, people think just because I work at a place that manufactures happiness that I must live in a state of it all the time. But truthfully, I think one of the main reasons I’ve continued working there is because when I needed an escape from reality the most, Ever After provided that.

When reality is too much to bear, fiction is a soft place to land.

And somehow, in this moment, Mina feels like my soft place.

The way her expressive green eyes look into mine, as if she’s holding my hand with them—it’s all so real.

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