The Paradise Problem

by Christina Lauren

She says this like any other fact: it’s hot today, the sky is so clear, my mother wasn’t ready to be a mother. For a breath I’m so envious of her easy vulnerability. My siblings and I were raised with our shields up, swords drawn. It’s taken me years of therapy to be able to talk about what’s going on inside me, and I’m still not very good at it.

“When we care about someone, they deserve the benefit of the doubt. We have to consider not only what they did, but also why they did it. Intent matters,”

The current COO will be CEO in the interim—a woman who is apparently a badass with silver hair and balls of steel (a Capricorn, of course)—with

“When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”

Sticking to her rule that she can be selfish for the people she loves, she lets me buy her father a house nearby, a small two-bedroom bungalow with a giant garage, so that David Green can retire, tinker with cars, and enjoy the life he fought so hard to live, and his daughter never has to be more than five minutes away from him again.

“Because even if it goes off the rails, even if everyone ends up shouting and crying and accusing, they’ll still leave at the end of the night, and we’ll still have our house and our life and this love that nobody can touch.”