Page 19 of Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail

Few people understand the travails of true love better than thirty-three-year-old Dr. Spencer Hale. After enduring a crushing breakup with one Astrid Parker of Bright Falls, Oregon, Dr. Hale fled to Seattle to tend to his broken heart.

“I came here to heal,” Dr. Hale said. “I didn’t expect to discover what true love actually was.”

Astrid felt all the color drain from her face. Her wine sloshed in her empty stomach, an acidic mix threatening to come right back up. She knew she should slam her laptop shut. Get up. Go take a bath. Better yet, get her ass to Stella’s and maybe do a few shots of hard liquor for the first time in her life. She should not, under any circumstances, continue reading this article. And Astrid was very, very good at doing what she should.

Usually.

Her fingers scrolled on the track pad, revealing more of Dr. Hale’s journey to everlasting love.

Dr. Hale, a successful dentist in Capitol Hill, met his bride-to-be on a blustery day in September, when Amelia Ryland (24) walked into his office in need of a cleaning.

“Her teeth were perfect,” Dr. Hale said, laughing as he wrapped his arm around Ms. Ryland. “I should’ve known right then she was the one for me.”

After the couple weds in June, Ms. Ryland, a recent graduate of Vassar equipped with a family fortune that rivals the Vanderbilts’, plans to volunteer and prepare for the couple’s already budding family—

Astrid finally slapped her computer closed. She was breathing so heavily she could feel her nostrils flaring.

...discover what true love actually was.

...already budding family.

She poured more wine, but then just held the glass in her hand, unable to choke it down as she tried to parse her feelings. She wanted to observe Spencer’s new fiancée in all her poreless skin and perfect-lipstick beauty, and feel nothing but a wave of relief that the woman in the picture wasn’t Astrid herself.

Shewantedto feel nothing so badly.

But she didn’t. She felt something. A lot of somethings, in fact. Regret, thank god, wasn’t one of them. She didn’t envy Spencer’s fiancée either. In fact, she felt a tiny twinge of worry over the woman’s future—Spencer was the worst kind of controlling asshole, gaslighting and smiling his way through his relationships. So, no, she didn’t envy this woman.

Still, her heart and mind weren’t blank slates when she thought of Spencer. They weren’t impartial observers. As Astrid sat in her dark living room, thinking about how her lone email of the day was from her own mother, bearing news of her ex-fiancé’s blissful happiness with another woman, she tried to figure out why.

Or, rather, she tried toignorethe reason why. Because she knew. Oh, she knew all too well this feeling of inadequacy, this constantpush in her chest to be more, make the right choices, land the big account, marry the right man.

Interesting, her mother had said of Spencer’s news. But as Astrid opened up her laptop again, closing out of the article and starting a search for recent real estate sales in the area, she knew that’s not what her mother truly wanted to say at all.

THAT SUNDAY, ASTRIDstood in front of Wisteria House, the purple flowers that had earned her childhood home its name curling over the terra-cotta brick. Funny, how something as simple as walking through a door could feel extremely complicated, a web of knots she wasn’t sure she would ever untangle. She would worry her mother was watching her pace on the front walk, but that wasn’t Isabel’s style. Isabel Parker-Green didn’t seek anyone out. People came to her.

Astrid rolled her shoulders back, put a heeled foot on the bottom step. She could do this. It was brunch, for god’s sake, not a root canal, though the two seemed to conflate in the dread pooling in her gut.

She put her foot back down on the sidewalk.

Taking out her phone, she texted the only person she could think of who would understand her ridiculous predicament right now.

Tell me how you do this again?she tapped out to Delilah.

Do what?Delilah wrote back immediately.

Walk into our house.

Oh, that. Easy. I try very hard not to.

Astrid huffed a breath.But if you had to.

Those three little dots bounced on the screen. Disappeared. Then resurfaced again before a bourbon emoji popped up, followed by the wine emoji, then the martini emoji, and finally, the beer emoji.

You hate beer, Astrid texted.

Desperate times.

Astrid nearly cracked a smile.I don’t exactly have a flask in my bag.