Page 52 of Touch the Sky

Pain.

She really is cut up about this. They both are. The intervention might have felt ridiculous and reality TV-inspired at first, but now I realize they wouldn’t do something like this if they hadn’t been worried for a long time.

“I get that, okay?” Natalie says. I can hear the strain in her voice now. “You have more on your plate. You’ve had more on your plate than both of us, ever since…”

She doesn’t say it out loud, but she doesn’t have to. We’re all thinking the same thing, even if after all these years, the two of them have followed my lead in never mentioning him either.

I’ve had more on my plate since my dad left.

“But I’m not just going to sit here and watch my best friend run herself into the ground. You need help, Jass. You need to let people help you.”

I wince at how much she sounds like all the friends and relatives who’ve told me the exact same thing. That’s what they all said after my dad left for good andMamanturned into a ghost for the better part of a year, wandering around the house without really seeing anything in front of her.

Everyone was wrong, though. We didn’t need help. We didn’t need more people making promises they wouldn’t keep.

We needed to handle it ourselves, and we did.

I roll my shoulders back, shaking off the memories, and focus on reassuring Natalie instead.

“I told you, things will calm down in a few months. I?—”

“You’re not going to last a few months!”

Her shout echoes through the kitchen. I jolt with shock, my spine knocking against the wooden back of the chair. Even Maddie jerks away in alarm.

“If you keep going like this,” Natalie says, her voice cracking, “you’re going to get sick or hurt or run your fucking truck off the road.”

Her eyes are haunted, like she’s already at the scene of the accident in her mind.

I jump to my feet and pull her into a hug. She stays stiff in my arms, but at least she doesn’t push me away.

“I know you are worried,” I say, holding her tighter even though her poofy hair is practically suffocating me now. “And I appreciate that.”

I take a deep breath as I prepare to do something I might regret.

These past few weeks, Maddie and Natalie haven’t even been able to hear Tess’s name without wagging their eyebrows at meor asking how my ‘crush’ is doing. It’s gotten to the point that I’ve just stopped mentioning her at all.

I’d rather stick with that plan, but if I want to avoid sending Natalie into a nervous breakdown, it seems like I don’t have a choice.

“Just so you know, I do have help now.”

Natalie breaks out of my grasp, and I let my arms drop back to my sides.

“Huh?” she says, a flicker of hope in her eyes, like I’ve just announced I’m doing some experimental treatment for a rare disease.

I guess the disease would be my personality.

“You do?” she urges. “Who?”

I chew on my lip for a moment and then dive straight into the deep end.

“Tess is helping me at the farm.”

Maddie scoots in closer. “She is?”

My shoulders tense as I brace for some dumb question like when Tess and I are planning on getting married.

“Yeah, she helps with the morning barn chores,” I say through a clenched jaw. “It’s helping me get more sleep. She does a lot, to be honest. She even pickedMamanup from an appointment when I got tied up here the other day.”