Baking Me Crazy (Donner Bakery, #1)(11)

"I get it," Sylvia said, unaware that behind her, Connor gave me a sympathetic smile because he knew. I kept my eyes away from him. "This will be a big week for you then. Don't you start with your new PT tomorrow?"

My head snapped in her direction. "You're starting with a new therapist?"

She had the decency to grimace. "Did I not mention that?"

"How come? What happened to Denise?"

Joss sighed, and I felt a momentary twinge of guilt for making it sound like an inquisition.

"They have this new guy starting, and I guess working with people like me, it's kind of his specialty."

I nodded slowly. "You're still favoring your left when you're in the walker, aren't you?"

"Ugh, yes. I've been using my chair more than normal." She rubbed at her right thigh, like she could magically heal the decaying muscles there. Joss's arms and core were toned and strong, and even so many years later, I knew she still struggled with looking down at her thin legs.

"Want me to come with you to your appointment?" I asked.

From my peripheral, I could feel my brother's eyes boring a hole in my head.

"It's okay," Joss said. "You'll just glare at them if they're not doing the exercises you think I should be doing, Mr. I have a master’s in sports medicine."

"I didn't glare at her," I muttered. I'd absolutely glared at her. "Denise just didn't push you hard enough. You can do so much more than she asked of you."

Joss gave me a tiny smile.

"You guys." Sylvia sighed. "You're so cute."

My eyes snapped in her direction.

Joss scoffed. "We're friends, Sylvia."

My future sister-in-law rolled her eyes. "I know, I know, so you've said. At least tell me you'll go to our wedding with Levi. That way you get to sit at the head table and will be in all our pictures, instead of some rando girl."

Connor was trying to pinch Sylvia's side, but she swatted his hand away. Clearly, they'd had this discussion already.

Joss glanced over at me and laughed. "Yeah, right. Levi probably already has some co-ed on the hook who'll show up in a little black dress that barely covers her hooha."

"Hey," I said, only slightly affronted. "That only happened one time, and I had no idea she would flash the entire restaurant. You can't blame me for a blind date's inappropriate dress choice."

Connor and Sylvia laughed. Joss grinned in my direction, and I gave her a tiny wink.

I had no intention of taking anyone to that wedding, not unless it was her.

I just had to figure out how to ask her in a way so she knew exactly what it would mean to have her there by my side.





Chapter 4





Jocelyn





"Do you want me to drive you to work?"

I jumped in my chair, hand flying to my chest when my mom's voice came from behind me as I was pouring myself a cup of coffee.

"Sorry," she said, settling her hand on my shoulder for a brief touch as she passed behind me.

"I didn't expect you to be awake." I added some cream and stirred it into the steaming hot liquid.

She sat at the small dining room table; the same one my grandma had used when she lived in the house before she passed. It was probably the same table my mom had eaten at as a small girl, though it was hard for me to imagine it.

We hadn't brought much with us when we moved here after my grandma's lawyers informed my mom that upon her death—peaceful and in the middle of the night as she slept—my mom had inherited the house that we now lived in. A Godsend at the time when my mom was drowning, quite literally, in hospital and therapy bills after I'd gotten sick. Neither of us cared too much that the décor appeared untouched since the early nineties. It was paid off, and it was hours away from the place that now reminded us both of the immediate aftermaths of my sickness.

Working third shift labor and delivery at the Eastern Tennessee Children's Hospital, my mom had slowly chipped away at the medical debt, keeping her head down, and her eyes hyper-focused on that and only that.

Now that she could breathe again, I'd realized that for the past two years, she turned that focus to me, like she was trying to make up for the fact that I'd adjusted to life in Green Valley completely without her help.

"I probably should be sleeping," she admitted, watching me push my wheelchair with one hand as I carried my coffee mug in the other. "I could've grabbed that, you know."

"I know," I said lightly.

It had taken me a couple of years to realize that my mother defied my neatly separated little categories.

She was a Blinder. But not really. Nothing intentional or born from malice or insensitivity.

I'd realized long ago that something was ingrained in us Abernathys, something that kept our eyes down and focused on the immediate problem, and we didn't waste time dwelling on the things we couldn't change. It was why my grandma had accepted it quietly when my mom moved to Georgia just after high school. Why my mom never came to visit but didn't complain about the fact we weren't asked.

When I ended up in my wheelchair, it was much the same. Even though Mom was a damn good nurse, she couldn’t protect me from a simple virus that attacked my nervous system. Complaining about it and letting it eat her alive would do no good. But she also didn't really understand my life because of her instinct to focus on what she could control.