“Fine, but make sure you’re here for more than just a day. I don’t want you flying up the morning of the party and then on the red-eye back to Texas.”

Count on her mother to read her like a book.

“I won’t,” Taylor said. “I promise.”

“Good. I have to go. The work at the office never ends.”

“I wondered what you were doing home in the middle of the day,” Taylor said.

Her mother’s penciled brow spiked. “I could say the same for you, but I didn’t.”

Taylor reminded herself that her mother would see it if she rolled her eyes. “Goodbye, Mother.”

She blew an air kiss toward the digital display before ending the call; then she folded her arms on the countertop and dropped her head on them.

Taylor wasn’t sure there was a word in the English language that adequately represented the complex, oftentimes thorny space her family occupied in her world. She couldn’t imagine loving another group of people as fiercely as she loved them, but a simple conversation with her mother left her feeling drained.

She dreaded going home to North Carolina, enduring bouts of anxiety over her family’s judgmental attitudes. It usually started weeks in advance, with the apprehension steadily escalating as the date to fly home drew closer. Taylor found herself waking up in cold sweats, hardly able to catch her breath. Her skin became tight and itchy, as if something was slowly sucking the moisture from her pores.

The most ridiculous aspect of all of this was that, for the most part, she enjoyed her time at home. Last Thanksgiving she’d had the best time watching old movies with her sister, playing gin rummy with her niece, and baking pecan pies with her dad. It had been her most blissful holiday in ages, until her brother, Darwin, made a comment about one of Taylor’s old friends who’d just opened up a franchise of a regional pizza restaurant. That’s when the murmurs about wasting her time with that “fitness thing” had flitted around the dinner table, and her holiday had turned to shit.

She was done putting herself through that kind of turmoil. She’d learned that she could love her family from a distance. She would endure them for her dad’s birthday party, because she owed it to him to celebrate this milestone in person, but she wouldn’t subject herself to their thinly veiled censure any longer than she had to.

The next time she made an extended trip home, she would have some measure of success that she could shove in her brother’s face. She would no longer be the Powell Family Fuckup. She would be the one everyone talked about with pride, the one her mother bragged about to the people in her law office.

She just had to completely turn every single thing around in her life.

Piece of cake.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN