The Last Second Chance (Blue Moon, #3)

by Lucy Score

Because I realized I didn’t have to change everyone else in my life to make me happy. I just had to remember who I was.”

That’s what it was all about, wasn’t it? Mattering. Connecting. Resonating.

“If we waited to go for something until we feel worthy, no one would ever do anything.”

“If you can, you can. If you can’t, you’ll do something else. That’s what life is all about. Living. Trying. Loving.”

“Don’t ever let anyone make you feel less than, and that includes yourself,”

What did matter is we took a moment, a slice of a day, and did with it exactly as we wished. A lesson I could never iterate in a father’s lecture but one so essential to the way a man lives. Find your slice and live it.

She was the kind of strong that came from learning not to depend on anyone else.

I’d learned long ago that actions spoke louder than words with my Phoebe. A man could say “I love

you” ‘til he was blue in the face, but send her out on the porch with fresh lemonade while I do the dishes or surprise her with a ridiculous and completely sappy bouquet of flowers picked in the fields, and she heard me loud and clear.

There is nothing like being a parent. A piece of you is walking around the earth maybe with your eyes and your wife’s smile. And that piece of you has to grow up and build his or her own life, feel the pain of that life, and find the joy in that life. When you see that piece of you hurt and scared, it is a horrible, helpless feeling. Because you just want to fix it, swoop in and take over and solve the problems and protect them from this hurt. But you can’t. Because they aren’t just a piece of you. They are a human being learning how to survive and thrive in this world. And if you clean up every mess and bandage every scrape and shield them from every hurt, you take that self-reliance away from them. And that is what turns children into good men and women.