Meet me at the lake at the tire swing. p.s. maybe change first. Nothing personal, but it wouldn’t hurt you to up your game from your usual fashion sense, which screams “I’m cold and tired.”

Piper looked down at her fleece-lined stretch pants and oversized flannel button-down. Okay, so maybe her sister had a point. When she got home, she upgraded to jeans, but stuck with the flannel shirt because comfort.

Besides, there were other things to worry about. Like her siblings. Her motto had always been, if she couldn’t fix it, she put it on a list and set it aside for later. Some people might consider that denial, but she called it survival.

But she and Winnie had a lot to work on.

The swing was about a half mile around the north side of the lake where the landscape was open wildland. The three of them had spent many, many summer days there, chasing the ducks, swimming, and using the tire swing—which hung from a huge old oak tree—to jump into the lake. Well, Winnie and Gavin had. Piper never jumped into the lake.

As she walked, she told herself that Winnie’s text seemed like a white flag, a way to meet in the middle, in a place where there were only good memories. She had no idea what to expect, but when she got there twenty minutes later, there was a cute picnic basket at the water’s edge.

But no Winnie.

Piper sat down on the blanket, and while she waited, pulled out her journal. She thumbed to her Home Depot list and what she needed in order to finish upgrading the cottages, but quickly got bored with that and flipped the pages to her secret secret bucket list.

So many things to add . . .

But she realized that all of them, the things she’d written and the things she hadn’t, represented one thing.

Loneliness.

It was a hard pill to swallow. She’d purposely protected her heart to save it from the pitfalls of life, and in doing so, had closed herself off.

The truth was, she wanted to be wanted. She wanted to feel something. She wanted passion and hunger and desire, but more than any of that, she wanted someone to feel those things for her.