But then, Avery would kill me if I bailed on tonight.

Well, okay. She wouldn’t kill me, because who would babysit Ava and little Alex so she and Cam could have a date night? Tonight was a rarity. Cam’s parents were in town, so they were watching the babies, and I was here, sitting in my car, staring at one of the Japanese maple trees that lined the parking lot and looked like it was seconds from toppling over.

“Ugh,” I groaned, tipping my head back against the seat.

If I was doing this any other day, it wouldn’t be so bad, but this had been my last day at Richards and Decker. There’d been so many people in and out of my tiny office. Balloons. An ice cream cake that I may have had two . . . or three slices of. I was all peopled out.

Leaving my job of five years had been weird. I’d convinced myself for so long that I’d loved it there. I went to work, closed my door and, for the most part, was left alone while I processed insurance claims. It was a quiet, simple job I could lose myself in, and I had no risk of ever bringing it home with me at the end of the day. It paid for the two-bedroom apartment and covered the loan on my Honda. It was a quiet, boring, and harmless job to go along with a quiet, boring, and harmless life.

Then my father had finally, literally, made an offer I’d be an idiot to walk away from, and that offer had unlocked something inside me, something I’d long since thought was dead.

The desire to start really living again.

Yeah, that sounded cheesy to even think it, but it was the truth. For the last six years, I’d existed from one day to the next. Not looking forward to anything. Not doing any of the things I used to dream about.

Taking the offer my father made was the first step—the biggest step—in finally moving forward with my life, but I still couldn’t believe I was doing it.

My parents hated . . . they hated how things had turned out for me. They had all these dreams and hopes. I had those same—

A tap on my car window startled me and I jumped. My knee cracked off the bottom of my steering wheel as I looked to my left.

Avery stood outside my car, her hair a fiery red in the fading evening sun. She wiggled her fingers at me.

Cringing because I felt foolish, I reached over and hit the button. The window slid down silently. “Hey.”