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Assuming Finn’s talking to me, I look up only to realize it wasn’t a call to attention, but a soft, surprised greeting.

Only to find his gaze elsewhere. Only to be abruptly reminded that I’m not special.

The touching, the smiles, they’re not all for me.

He’s generous with them—with the girl I recognize easier than I should, considering our single, fleeting encounter.

Joy . What a fitting name for someone radiating with it. Shit, I guess I’d be pretty damn joyful too, if the man I was so obviously infatuated with had his arms wrapped lovingly around me.

“What’re you doing here?” Finn asks and Joy shrugs, all demure, like she just happened to stumble upon a small, local market in buttfuck nowhere. “It’s good to see you.”

You saw her a week ago , I think, snarkier than he deserves, snarkier than I deserve. You’re not long-lost lovers.

I must make a noise, a sigh or a snort or something, because two gazes swing my way, one impossibly dark and the other bright and light and ever-so-slightly narrowed.

Joy might be looking at me, but it’s clearly Finn who she asks, “Who’s this?”

She knows. She remembers me. In her eyes, I see a reflected memory of me and Finn sitting in that booth for God knows how long, sharing food and talking about nothing, or literally not talking at all, just sitting in comfortable silence.

And just as clearly, I see the jealousy.

The confusion. The question— what the hell is he doing with her?

Finn doesn’t. He’s oblivious as he makes the introduction, and he’s just as blind to how her entire demeanour changes when she hears my last name.

Ah , I practically hear her think. He’s working. They’re working, not taking a friendly jaunt through the market. That makes much more sense.

Just like that, I’m dismissed. Invisible. Threat neutralized—different target acquired.

As Joy shifts her attention back to Finn, mine moves too. I move, onto the next stall a couple of feet away so I can eavesdrop, but I don’t have to. I can just as easily ignore them.

What I can’t ignore, however, is the delicacy I happen to stumble upon.

Wine.

Lots of it.

Samples.

Lots of them.

I look away. I find Finn and Joy again, I hear her asking if he’s coming on Sunday, him saying maybe in that drawn out, teasing way that really means yes, and I look away again.

I look at a bottle of deep, rich red, and I practically lick my damn lips.

I start thinking that one little glass wouldn’t hurt, that a bottle would be fine, I—

“What’re you doing?”

I jolt. I turn to Eliza and I know I look guilty as all hell, I know I sound it too. “Nothing.”

My little sister blinks at me, then the object of my attention, then me again. And the look on her face… fuck .

“Jesus, kid, I’m not gonna crack open a bottle right here.”

Eliza swallows. She looks like she doesn’t believe me, she looks so very young as she slips her arms around my waist, hugging me sideways, holding on tighter than I prefer, but I don’t stop her.

Guilt has me holding her just as tightly—the tangible proof of just how much my little habit affects my family has me feeling pretty damn tight too.

And I only get tighter when another presence brushes my other side. “Did I miss something?”

“No.” I paste on an apathetic expression before glancing at Finn. “Finished with your girlfriend?”

“Not my girlfriend.” He winds a strand of my hair around his finger and yanks. “Got a preference?”

It takes me a second to realize what he’s talking about—it takes Eliza just as long, and half that time to bark, “Lottie doesn’t drink.”

I flush.

Finn stops surveying the array of wine for sale, and frowns at me instead. “Oh. Sorry, I didn’t know.”

“There’s nothing to know,” I insist as breezily as I’m capable of. Shrugging off Eliza, I pinch the skin above her elbow discreetly before moving closer to the table, trying to act nonchalant as I browse the selection. Picking a bottle at random, I hand it to Finn. “This one.”

He takes it. Doesn’t even glance at the label before buying two bottles. Tucks both in his bag before continuing their meander.

And he never tells me what’s happening on Sunday.

I learn what the wine is for the next day.

The ranch hands are not going out tonight like they usually do.

They’re having a party . It’s just the four of them, just dinner, but a party, it still definitely is.

I can hear them downstairs, the clang of dishware and the thrum of a playlist and the endless chatter of people who never get sick of each others’ company.

They invited me, of course.

I declined, of course.

And then I holed myself up in my room with Grouch, and that’s where I’ll stay. Where I have to stay. Because if I accepted that dinner invite, I would’ve accepted something else too.

With a frustrated grunt, I toss aside the knitted project I’ve been trying and failing to start for hours now.

This is so stupid. It’s ridiculous. It’s all Lux’s fault because she’s in my head, insisting I have a problem, making me overthink until I’m fucking scared to even be in the vicinity of an alcoholic beverage.

This , an insistent voice in my head that sounds an awful lot like my older sister claims, is what craving feels like. It’s what alcoholics do.

Shut up , I hiss back. Shut up, shut up, shut up.

I’m getting that feeling again. The same one I had only last week.

The helpless sensation of losing control, like fumbling my grip on a rope, friction burning my palms as I desperately try to hold on.

There’s a pit in my stomach, an empty void that only one thing will fill.

And I’m pissed because it would be so easy, the cure for the throb behind my eyes, the restless itch, the fucking temptation is two floors down, but I can’t. If I do, I can’t…

Fuck.

I can’t pretend anymore. I can’t lie. I can’t be so resolute that I don’t have a problem because the evidence proving otherwise will be trickling down my throat.

The dog curled up by my hip whines when I push to my feet, disturbing our cozy nest on the floor at the foot of my bed.

One hand bracketing the base of my throat, I press the other to the window, letting the cold glass cool my skin—flushed from hot, unrelenting anxiety.

And as it creeps over me, growing, I squeeze my eyes shut, trying so hard to ward against the swell of memories I’d rather forget, but there’s no stopping them.

I can’t help thinking about the first time I felt anxiety like this.

It wasn’t like it was with Grace. I didn’t grow up struggling with frequent attacks. I didn’t even have infrequent ones like the ones Lux thought she hid so well from us. I never had any at all.

Until the first time I went to rehab. It wasn’t the first time I went through withdrawal, but it was the first time I recognized the chills and the tremors and the fucking delirium for what they were.

And it was the first time I felt real anxiety.

Not panic or nerves or fear, but bone-deep, unrelenting, tear-inducing anxiety that freezes your body, that makes you feel like you’re not in your body at all.

Which is common, I learned, among recovering alcoholics. A consequence of my own damn actions. Another fucking cross to bear, like I don’t already have enough of those.

A knock on the trapdoor pulls me out of it.

Relief isn’t an emotion I’m capable of right now, nor is gratitude, so when I yank up the slab of wood, I’m neither. I’m tired. Spent. Incapable of being anything other than exactly what I am, and that sure as fuck isn’t friendly .

“Jesus.” I sigh a dry laugh, palming my aching temples. “You’re fucking everywhere, huh?”

As Finn flinches away from my snapped comment, I wonder why he looks so surprised.

Did he forget? Is a week really all it took to lull him into a false sense of security, to make him think I’m a good person, a better person, the person he wants me to be?

The person I might’ve been, if things were different?

I wonder how he’s so capable of just… shrugging it off. Continuing upstairs like nothing was said, carrying a plate loaded with pasta and offering it to me rather than, I don’t know, throwing it at me. “Brought you some dinner.”

Straightening from my crouched position, I wipe my clammy palms off on my sweats as I stride to the other side of the room, as far away from Finn as I can get. “Not hungry.”

Entirely unphased, he sets the plate on my bedside table before slipping something out of his hoodie pocket—a thermos. “You want tea? I put in some of that honey you like.”

Tugging at the tip of my ring finger, I frown. “What?”

“The one from the farmer’s market.”

When my confusion persists, he unscrews the thermos lid and pours some of the steaming liquid into it. As he holds it out, that’s when the smell hits me.

Chamomile.

Honey.

And orange blossom.

“I got it yesterday,” he tells me. “Saw you looking.”

I flinch. I actually fucking flinch. I am so unfamiliar with kind gestures that they hit me like a sucker-punch, they make me feel fucking pathetic and inadequate and childish , I feel like a child .

I think I probably look like one too, small and cowering as I back up until I hit the dresser, my arms wrapped tightly around my middle, a palm flat against my chest and rubbing circles over the spot that aches. “Get out.”

“What?”

“Get the fuck out, Finn.”

He doesn’t. He does the opposite. He steps forward, painfully concerned, maddeningly perceptive, making it all the fucking worse. “What’s wrong?”

“Well, for starters, there’s a man in my room and he won’t fucking leave.”

Nothing. No reaction. No anger. Just a soft, firm, “Lottie.”

Everything. All reaction. All anger. And a curt, cursed, “ Finn .”

“Do you really want me to leave?”

“That’s what I fucking said, isn’t it?”