As she watched Nancy leave, Lexi couldn’t help but cringe at the ten-dollar bill in her hand. It was given as a compliment, but something about it still felt insulting, like she was her mother-in-law’s paid help.
Well, at least she’s gone, Lexi thought as her body relaxed a little. She hadn’t realized how tense she was.
Lexi checked her phone, the lock screen lighting up with a stack of messages from the group text with her sisters. They were making plans for their monthly girls’ night the following evening. The tradition, which consisted of getting tipsy off boxed wine, eating too much take-out food, and playing the lotto, began three years ago after a big jackpot had everyone in town trying their luck.
The most recent text from Hanna read, “Lex, don’t forget the lotto tix. Your turn to grab!”
Thank god for payday, Lexi thought as she tossed her cracked phone into her old frayed bag and headed out the door, stopping by Rae’s station to pick up her check. She’d get the lottery tickets at the gas station, along with a full tank of gas.
Her boss was sweeping snippets of brown hair off the floor, looking deep in thought when Lexi approached her.
“Hi, Rae, just wanna grab my check.”
Rae leaned the broom against the wall and frowned. “Oh, hon. I’m so sorry.” She lowered her voice. “It’s not ready yet. Think you could wait a week or two? I had to move some things around in the account because of that air conditioner repair last Tuesday.”
Shit.
Lexi felt as though she might cry, but she supposed there wasn’t much she could do about it. This had happened before. Rae was good for the money; but still, it wasn’t a convenient time.
“Okay,” she agreed and walked out into the humid May air.
After she got into her car, Lexi shuffled through her wallet and began counting all the dollar bills she had earned through tips that day.
Twenty-four.
That would fill up a little less than half her gas tank with a few extra bucks to buy the lotto tickets. She rummaged through the glove compartment, searching for any extra loose change. But all that was in there were a few pennies and a thick pile of old McDonald’s napkins she’d been hoarding for years.
Her sister’s words from the night before echoed in her mind again. It’ll only get worse from here. At this moment, perhaps for the first time, it felt true. She felt raw, as if life was scraping her along without her consent.
Holding the cash in her hand, Lexi closed her eyes and let out a loud scream. It felt good, like she was finally releasing the bad energy hovering over her all day. There had to be more than this. There had to be.
When she opened her eyes, Lexi saw with horror Nancy was standing only a few feet away, looking right in her direction. She must have just come out of the drugstore next to the salon—she was holding a plastic bag in her hand.
Lexi cowered in her seat, hoping Seth’s mom hadn’t actually seen her pathetic breakdown. But the look on her face—confused and concerned—told her she had indeed seen it all.
Before Nancy could have the chance to say or do anything else that would make her feel even more embarrassed, Lexi peeled out of the parking lot in her dirty car.
As her tear-filled eyes darted from the road to the gas gauge, she began to pray she’d have enough fuel to make it to the station. And since she was already talking with God, she figured she’d go ahead and ask for something else that she needed at that moment: an antidote to the poisonous feelings overtaking her body—humiliation, envy, and disappointment with how her life was turning out.
CHAPTER 2 Callie
The Brady Herald office had a signature scent of newsprint and coffee, two of Callie Breaux’s favorite things. She was already on her fourth cup of coffee for the day, hoping it would help her get through the Friday afternoon slump. As she clicked through emails, snuggled in her oversized office sweater, and settled into her saggy mesh chair, one of the messages stood out.
“Hey, Garrett? You got a second?” She looked up from the computer screen, and her fellow senior news reporter Garrett Jordan met her gaze over the two-foot partition separating their desks.
“What’s up?” he asked, holding his paper coffee cup in one hand and adjusting his black-rimmed glasses with the other.
“So, I just heard back from the research firm that was inspecting the new levee…” She swiveled in her chair to face him. “It failed inspection.”
Garrett’s mouth dropped. “That’s odd.…” The city officials had been boasting about the multi-million-dollar project, promising it would protect the low-lying areas of town from flooding. The state-of-the-art levee would replace the previous one, which had gotten damaged during Hurricane Sebastian a couple of years ago.
“Crazy, right?” She had been reporting on the entire progress of the levee so far, and everything had seemed to be going fine. “I’m gonna reach out and get a statement from the engineer about it,” she said, pulling up her contact list on her laptop. “Maybe you can get some quotes from one of your city official contacts?”
Garrett had every politician in town on speed dial since he covered the government beat.
“You got it.” He sat back down in his squeaky office chair and started typing furiously on his computer keyboard.
If there was anyone who was as passionate as Callie was about journalism, it was Garrett. The two of them started at the Brady Herald as interns and never left. Jerry Masters, the paper’s crotchety seventy-year-old owner and editor in chief, had offered Callie the internship after the paper did a spotlight on her as a rising star.
In high school, Callie had started a teen activism blog that got her a journalism scholarship, which allowed her to attend the University of Louisiana at Lafayette for almost free. She was able to commute and save money on housing since it was only twenty-five minutes away from Brady. Garrett had a similar story, getting a scholarship to LSU thanks to his work as editor of his award-winning high school paper. During the internship, they bonded over their nerdy love for journalism, the stresses of school, and their addiction to coffee.
Even though they both covered different beats and wrote their own stories, they were very much a team, bouncing ideas off of each other, sharing sources, and even proofreading each other’s stories. Six years later, Callie couldn’t imagine work—or life—without him. She admired his talent, his passion and, well, him. He was so smart, so nice, and so… cute.
Ugh.
But there was no way she’d ever let him or anyone else know her true feelings for him.
He was her best friend. The person she’d hang out with on the weekends, catching matinees at the movie theater or devouring sno-balls at the little stand near the river—red velvet was her go-to flavor, amaretto was his. He was the one who cheered her on when she needed encouragement about anything. And he sought her advice when he needed help, too. They had inside jokes that sometimes made her cry because she would be laughing so hard.
But even though she’d dropped a thousand humiliating hints about her feelings for him over the years, he never once took the bait.
Callie refused to ruin their friendship by doing something stupid like asking him out. If he turned her down, or worse, went out with her on a pity date, things would never be the same between them. Better to suffer silently and ignore her feelings, like some heroine in a Jane Austen novel. It was all so cliché, it made her want to roll her eyes.