Magnolia Parks: The Long Way Home (Magnolia Parks Universe, #3)

by Jessa Hastings

It’s been one of the great burdens of my adult life knowing that I love him and he loves me and we just cannot for the life of us figure out how to be together. Needs me? I’m not so sure, but loves me? I’ve always known that. They’re right in lots of ways about the history. There are those attachments — Bridget’s trauma bonds, the willow tree, all the ways we’ve hurt each other to feel close to each other, all the ways he saved me when we were little, literally and metaphorically, the oysters, the bad men in Greece, the losers in London night clubs with busybody hands, the teachers, Marsaili, shitty boys in school with big mouths full of lies. I have all these ties to him. First boyfriend, first kiss, first love, first time, first everything, really. How he was my teacher and my partner in so many key life areas. My best friend and my family and my pillow and my quilt. Each of them are like bricks laid in the house I built to love him, but the point is really that house I built isn’t a monument to a love I used to have. It’s a house I want to live inside of still.

AW