Not admitting that.
Because New Livi does everything for her and herself alone.
Right?
Right.
Guilt still wraps around my belly.
“You’re . . . here,” Cami says when I sit down at the table next to her and Cici, my dad’s worried eyes burning into me from across the table.
“I’m here. This breakfast is the best in the area. I’m not missing it.”
The entire table looks at me, faces cloaked in confusion and worry.
Except for Cami.
Cami’s face is firm, puzzled, and she’s staring at me, trying to decode me.
Cici’s hand grabs mine.
“Liv, honey. Yesterday . . . Bradley—” She pauses like the name is poison, like she’s worried I might break at the mere mention, and I smile so as to assuage her guilt. It’s fake, but they don’t have to know that. I lay my free hand on top of hers.
“Cees, it’s fine. I’m fine. Bradley called off the wedding and that totally sucks, but I’m fine. It was for the best.” The knot in my chest tightens a bit with my words, but I shake it off. “Better to find out now rather than later when it would take much more work to undo.”
“It’s okay to be sad, Liv,” she says, her voice low, and there’s my sweet best friend, the woman I’ve known since kindergarten. The one who walked alongside me through all of my awkward phases and cried with me when boys broke our hearts and listened to me bitch about my mom without judgment. The woman who forgave me when I treated her like shit, when I chose to please my mother and keep my evil stepsisters happy over her.
It’s then I let myself put the new Livi on the shelf for a moment, let the old version who wouldn’t want my friends and family to suffer because of what happened to me out once more.
I’ve put these people through enough. I don’t need them to worry about me. If I show them this version, this happy, well-adjusted version, they won’t panic and can go about their lives.
But of course, I can’t be too happy, or else they’ll think something is up.
It’s a very fine balance, trying to convince people you love you are totally fine. That becomes even more difficult when I make the mistake of looking around the dining room.
All eyes are on me.
Not all are as obvious as others, some staring at their phones and giving me little sideways glances, some pretending to talk to a tablemate but occasionally giving me stealthy looks, while others are straight-up eyes locked on me.
Waiting to see if I’ll break.
Wedding guests.
Friends, family, acquaintances, people I’ve never even seen before in my life but still know as a far-off family member or a friend of my mother’s. I wonder how many of them are texting a friend back home with minute-by-minute updates.
I can’t hate on it—I would probably do the same.
But before I can move forward with my mission to convince everyone I’m just fine or attempt to save face further, my phone bleeps with a new text message followed by another and another, and then even more eyes are on me. Most notably, there are three sets of wide eyes I know incredibly well, staring intently.
“Don’t look at your phone, Liv,” Cami says, her eyes locked to where I’m grabbing my cell from the bag I brought downstairs with me.
“It could be media looking for insight,” Cici agrees.
“It could be Bradley,” I say, digging in the bag to find it. A part of my dad’s duties yesterday, as assigned by Cami, was to go to my apartment and grab some clothes and a bag since everything I handpicked with me was perfectly bridal white.
I don’t want you to be reminded nonstop, Liv, she had said when I objected, not wanting to put my dad out even more than I already had. And neither does he. Let him do this.
I caved and this morning, when I was able to put on a light-pink top and a pair of black leggings, I have to admit, I was relieved. Unfortunately, he grabbed the biggest tote bag I own, and I can’t find a damn thing in here.
“Even more reason not to grab it,” Cami says under her breath.
I ignore her.
Cami is an incredible judge of character, and I should have known this would happen when she looked at my now-ex the first time they met at the Beach Club and her top lip went up in the teeniest, tiniest sneer.
I didn’t, of course, so enamored by his smile and the way he paid me attention and the way he held my hand under the table at the Fourth of July party and made me feel . . . special.
If you were to ask me right now what made me fall for Bradley Reed, I’d tell you it was because he made me feel special.
Well, actually, I’d probably battle with the lump in my throat and tell you I have no idea before losing said battle and breaking down in tears again despite my brave face, but in a week or so? I’ll probably say I was because he made me feel like I might be special.
He made me feel seen.
And in a life where I’ve spent most of it making myself small so my mother can shine, making myself small to avoid any kind of backlash, that meant something to me.
And it was something I can now recognize faded quickly, something I stopped feeling as soon as we were both comfortable in the relationship, but I held onto that initial feeling and it carried me through the end of our engagement.
Cami calls me a people pleaser—she says it’s why I’m so amazing with the public relations and marketing of our events. I know what people want to see, the message they need to hear in order to buy what I’m selling, and I give them exactly that.
I guess she’s right.
But that’s what also made me blind to all the damn red flags that are Bradley Reed, so it has to go.
In a personal capacity, at the very least.
Everyone is holding their breath when I glance at the lock screen and furrow my brows. “I don’t know the number.”
“Ignore it, Liv. Seriously,” Cici says.
I ignore her instead.
I mean, if I ignored everyone’s warnings in the first place, I might as well keep that ball rolling, you know?
Tapping my screen, I open the messages and read them.
Then I reread them.
And a third time.
“Who is it?” Cami asks.
“Is it the jackass?” That’s Cici, a bit of a shock since she never once said anything bad about him, not even when I was in the peak of my meltdown yesterday.
“Your mother?”
“Your dad?”
“I’m right here,” my dad says, but Cici and Cami ignore him.
“Tabloids?” Cici asks.
I continue staring, reading the strange and unexpected message a fourth time.
“No,” I say, finally breaking my silence.
“Who is it?” Cami sounds even more concerned than normal, and I think that must be a terrible, horrible indication of the state I was in yesterday.
“It’s a . . .” I squint at my phone, trying to decide if what I see is even real. “It’s a support group?”
“A support group?”
“What asshole is sending you links to fucking support groups?!” Cami says, and the rage in her voice makes me worry she might go run to this person’s house with a pitchfork and a torch, Beauty and the Beast style. “And even more, a support group for what?” She looks at me with a slightly calmer face. “You know you don’t need that, right? You’ve got—”