Three Wrong Numbers: A Military Reverse Harem Romance (Forbidden Hearts)

I went to Catholic school for years. All girls. Lots of talk about virtue and dignity and self-respect.” She laughs once, but there’s no humor in it. “Which sounds nice until you realize nobody’s actually teaching you how to have any of those things. They’re just teaching you how to be afraid of disappointing people.”

“He’s been working too much. He’s trying to save up.” “For what?” “Who knows? He’s just been very serious about it lately, about needing to save up. He comes home all floury and tired. But he smells like cake, so I can’t complain. People always talk about big love like it’s the defining thing,” she says. “The rush of it. The big gestures. The certainty. But honestly, I think most of it is just witnessing. Day after day. Knowing how someone takes their coffee. Knowing what mood they’re in by the way they shut the cabinet. Knowing when to push and when to leave them alone. It’s kind of boring when you describe it out loud.”

“Project management, basically. Which sounds fake when I say it out loud, but mostly it means I clean up after people with advanced degrees who can’t answer emails.”

“I like fixing things,” she says finally. “Not physical things. Systems. Tangles. I like being the person who can walk into a mess and go, okay, here’s what matters, here’s what doesn’t, here’s how we get from here to there without everything catching fire.”

“We are allowed to be overwhelmed,” I say quietly. “That does not mean you’ve done something wrong.” She blinks. I go on before she can dismiss it. “This is a lot. It’s supposed to be. It would worry me more if none of us felt it.” I keep my voice steady. “But you are not a problem we’re solving, Olivia.” Olivia’s mouth trembles. I lower my voice further. “You do not have to make yourself smaller to make this easier on us.”

“Please don’t make this dramatic,” Olivia says. “Impossible request,” I tell her.

That it was supposed to be built on plans and boxes checked in the right order. That if I just worked hard enough, bent myself small enough, ignored enough of the ache inside me, I could make something stable out of something empty. I really believed that for a while. That almost-happiness was the same thing as happiness.

I mistook survival for peace and familiarity for love. It’s no one’s fault. That’s an easy trap to fall into if you don’t know how big love can be. But love shows you how big it can be. You don’t ask love to show you. It just does. It raises standards and stretches your capacity for tenderness.