Chapter 17 Tara

Chapter 17

Tara

C an I tell you something kind of awful?" Miriam asked, sitting next to Tara on the porch swing.

She'd come outside because the energy in the dining room was a little too romantic for her to handle, and it was starting to give her traitor brain ideas about how she and Holly could, next year, be celebrating their anniversary at Carrigan's. If they really got together. Which they obviously couldn't, even if she wanted them to. She didn't even think Holly was interested in a real relationship.

Holly had a whole world to see, and she hadn't said anything to make Tara believe she wanted anything past their agreed-upon weekend.

Tara startled at Miriam's voice. "Please! I love a terrible confession."

Miriam sighed. "I want to be unreservedly happy for Cole and Sawyer, but I'm feeling a little… jealous. That I'm going to have to share him with a romantic partner."

"I get it." Tara nodded, although in actuality she had lost Cole's affection years before, when she'd walked away after the fire, and when he'd met Miriam. Miri had never, really, had to share Cole with Tara. "And I feel better that I'm not the only one."

"Hmmm, I mean, he became friends with me, and he didn't stop loving you. It will probably be okay? Cole's very big—he has a lot of room for love in his body."

"I'm not sure it's the same thing," Tara argued, though she should leave it be, since Miriam was only trying to make herself feel better. "I was never the most important other person in his life."

"Are you sure?" Miriam asked skeptically. "Because the way he tells it, you were his other half, and then after the fire, you pulled away and he was floating around desperate for a life raft when he happened to meet me."

As if he had been summoned by his name being spoken, like the chaos demon he was, Cole appeared. "What are we talking about? Is it me?"

"Not everything is about you, Nicholas," Tara said, but Miriam threw her under the bus.

"We were talking about how you love Tara the most of anyone."

His blond waves bobbed as he nodded emphatically. "Not just of anyone, of anything. Oceans, sailing boats, lobster pants, international crime, bad decisions—there's nothing and no one on earth I love more than this one."

He pointed at Tara, and his tone was melodramatic and ridiculous but his eyes were serious as they held hers.

That was the most absurd thing she'd ever heard, and she wouldn't—couldn't—entertain it as an option. Even the possibility that it might be true overwhelmed her, gutted her, and tried to rewrite her, as if Cole were able to hack her most basic wiring. If he loved her that much, as much as she loved him, she had been dismissing his love for half her life, refusing to believe in him. If he had been serious every time he effusively adored her, and not joking, as his manner implied, he had offered her his heart and she'd rejected it, and she could have spent the last twenty years with a soulmate but instead she'd sent him off to sea alone and hurt them both.

Her version was safer. "You love me like a blankie," she said, but she couldn't meet his eyes.

She felt herself be swept up, and then she was sitting on his lap. It was unfair, how fast he could move, and also how strong he was. He settled her against him, his arms around her waist. "Your ass is way too bony to be a good blankie, Tar."

She wiggled her butt bones against his thighs to make him yelp, because messing with him was much, much easier than dealing with what he'd said.

"Where's the rest of your crew?" she asked, changing the subject. "Don't y'all usually travel as a pack these days?"

Miriam picked at an imaginary loose thread on her overalls. It was, Tara knew, one of her tells for when she was uncomfortable and trying to hide it. "They're having some Feelings about Cass and it's best if I give them space for that."

"You don't have feelings about Cass?" Tara asked, nudging Miriam with her knee.

"I do"—Miriam shrugged—"but I didn't exactly have feelings at all for ten years, so I'm still kind of in the training-wheels phase." She looked up at the sky, like she was trying to figure out how to phrase her next words. "Plus, like, not to invalidate how they're feeling, but I'm so much more mad at my parents that Cass's idiosyncrasies barely register. Is that terrible?"

It was Tara's turn to shrug. "It's a feeling. It doesn't have moral value. I probably wouldn't tell it to Levi, but…" Tara had heard a lot about Levi's Issues with Cass from his wife.

Miriam laughed. "Noted."

"Speaking of your parents…" Tara grimaced.

"Oh my gosh, is my mom being awful?" Miriam asked, clutching at Tara's sleeve. "She promised she would behave."

"She implied I should object to the wedding and try to win you back My Best Friend's Wedding style."

Miriam's eyes got huge in her tiny, elven face. "That ratfink."

Tara had forgotten that Miriam said shit like ratfink , and how charming it was. God, she was glad they were getting back to being real friends again. She would never want to lose one of the few people she genuinely liked in this world because they'd had the bad sense to try to date. "The weird thing is, I think she genuinely adores Noelle. It's like some sort of compulsion, to set you up with the wealthiest person in the room."

"I know!" Miriam threw up her hands. "Since she found out Cole's getting his trust fund, she's been trying to suss out if he's gay or bi, and whether we ever slept together and might do so again."

" Ew ," Cole said. "You slept with Tara! That would be like incest!"

"You're so weird," Tara said, but then remembered a story she'd meant to tell Miriam. "I forgot! When he came out, my mom told me, ‘Oh that's great, now you can get married and you won't get in each other's way.'"

"WHAT?!" Miriam screeched, almost falling off the porch swing with laughter.

Cole gasped. "You never told me that! Ew times a thousand."

"It's a good thing that we never introduced our mothers," Miriam said when she caught her breath. "We wouldn't have survived their scheming."

Tara wiped tears of laughter off her cheeks and shook her head.

"It turns out, I'm glad we didn't get married." Although she was fairly certain Miriam knew this, she felt it still needed to be said.

"Me too," Miriam agreed.

"Third!" Cole agreed. "We always needed Noelle in our karass."

"Although," Miriam mused, "we did make a good team. You're going to make some lucky girl a hell of a wife someday. Maybe soon?" At this, she elbowed Tara gently.

Tara grimaced. "I really like Holly, and I think she would make an amazing wife, but I'm not sure she wants to be one. I think I've been hiding my head in the sand a little about whether or not I could ever fit her into my life, and vice versa."

There, that was true, if not the entire truth.

Cole snorted. "Where there's a will, there's a way, my friend. Look at Hannah and Levi! He wanted to see the world, she wanted to stay at Carrigan's, he left her alone for four years in a remote hotel in the woods with his parents while he wandered off on a boat to find himself, and yet, here they are. Two little peas in a pod, living their best lives. You like her, that's what matters."

"It's more complicated than that, baby, you know it is," she told him. And herself.

He made a dismissive noise. "Is it? When was the last time you liked anyone this much?"

Honestly, maybe… never.

Tara did really, really like Holly. She was quick, and funny, thoughtful and always down to help. She was a freaking clinic escort, and what was sexier than a girl who rode hard for reproductive rights? The sex was so hot it felt like her brain was melting.

"What if I like her too much?" she asked, not meaning to speak out loud.

Miriam whooped and pointed at Tara. "I told you you were going to get turned ass over teakettle by love when you least expected it!" she crowed.

Tara glared at her. She would have glared at Cole, who was shaking with laughter underneath her, but she couldn't twist her head far enough.

"I'm changing the subject," she said, trying to keep the laughter out of her voice. She secretly loved how much her friends wanted to meddle. "Tell me what's happening with your names? Are you keeping Blum, after everything?"

When they were engaged, Miriam had been ecstatic about legally becoming Anything-But-Blum, even if she needed to keep her maiden name for her art business.

Miriam shook her head. "No. I can't keep his name, no matter how much time I've spent making it my own. Noelle doesn't feel particularly attached to hers, although she loves her parents' memories. There's something a little too on the nose about being a Christmas tree farmer named Noelle Northwood, after all. Plus, we both want a shared name."

"So, what are you going to do, become Carrigans? Go extremely millennial and combine Rosenstein and Northwood?"

"We thought about Rosewood, actually!" Miriam agreed. "Which is very lovely."

"But?" Tara asked, hearing the unspoken word.

"But it's not Jewish enough!" Miriam exclaimed. "Too many of my ancestors had to give up their names in the diaspora, and I'm lucky enough to have this long family tradition stretching back generations. Even Cass never legally changed her name. She was born and died a Rosenstein."

Tara smiled. This was another thing that Noelle could give Miriam that she could not have—she wouldn't have been able to give up the Chadwick name, without giving up the power and influence that came with it. The power to do good, with a terrible legacy.

"So, you'll be Miriam and Noelle Rosenstein, then. Is your family thrilled?"

"You should have heard them!" Miriam's eyes sparkled, actually sparkled as if happiness were surrounding her like pixie dust. "The cheers were absurd when we told them. Noelle is going to keep North as a middle name. And I…"

"Are going to finally, really be Mimi Roz," Tara finished for her.

Miriam nodded, so much weight in the action.

Mimi Roz had been the name Miriam had used for the paintings she'd done right after college. Her father had burned most of them, but a few had survived, and the sale of some of those remaining pieces had been what helped save the farm a year ago. The deepest part of Miriam, her truest artistic self that Tara had never truly known, was attached to that name.

"I'm going to take Sawyer's name," Cole said, though he'd been quiet up to this point—probably because he knew all this. "We're not getting married, we don't believe in it, I'm just going to change my name because I hate my family. I'll be Cole Bright. I like it."

Tara and Miriam looked at each other and started to laugh again. Then they caught up on each other's lives. She'd noticed before how different Miriam seemed. It was part of why she'd been okay with the breakup (or, mostly okay), because even a year ago, Miriam had been obviously so much happier here. After a year of growing freely into herself, though, she was like a whole different woman. Someone mischievous, hilarious, strong-willed.

Tara had always thought of Miriam as sassy and sad, but she wasn't particularly sad anymore, except around the edges where the loss of Cass still haunted her, and her personality had blossomed to fill that space and beyond. Tara was, honestly, thrilled for her, even emotional at the sight of it. And, speaking of terrible confessions, jealous. Not that Miriam was marrying someone else or had fallen in love, but that Miriam had found herself.

Eventually, Holly stuck her head out onto the porch. "There you three are! Hannah says we all have to sleep, because there are so many more wedding activities tomorrow."

Miriam groaned. "I should have eloped! Hannah is using my wedding to make up for the fact that she had zero wedding hoopla, either time she and Blue got married."

"I assumed she was using the fact that you have millions of social media followers to market Carrigan's as a wedding venue," Tara said.

Huffing, Miriam pushed up from the swing and crossed her arms. "I have, max, half a million followers. They're just very… intense."

Miriam's followers, self-named the Bloomers, were intense, for sure. Tara had gotten a few hateful messages from them after the breakup, which she'd forwarded to Miriam, who she assumed had gone scorched earth on them because no one had bothered her at all in months. Except that every once in a while, someone would stop her at Emma's for a selfie.

Miriam leaned down and took Tara's hand to pull her up.

Holly made a gimme gimme gesture. "Come on, I have plans for you, and they don't involve being out in the middle of the night in the freezing cold with your ex-girlfriend."

Miriam flashed her a smile. "Go with the hot redhead who's trying to seduce you."

Cole squeezed her, extra hard, for just a moment, his head against her back, before he let her go.

Tara paused on her way inside.

"You made it possible, you know," she told Miriam, gesturing to Cole. "For him to fall in love with Sawyer. You gave him the safety and solidity to face the scariest thing in his life, actually trusting in romantic love, because he knew he'd always have somewhere to land."

Cole shook his head. "She wasn't the one who did that, Tar."

Back in their room, Holly pulled her in by the lapels of her shirt dress. "Hey," she said, dropping a slow kiss on Tara's lips. "What were you and Miriam talking about?"

Tara smiled, leaning in to prolong the kiss. "Oh, our… Cole called it a karass? What the hell is that? Did he make it up?"

"He did not, although Kurt Vonnegut did," Holly said. "He defined it as a group of people brought together to do God's work, but I've always thought of it as a sort of… spiritual caravan. A group of people predestined to travel through the human experience together."

"That's pretty deep for Cole," Tara observed, pulling away and flopping on the bed.

Holly flopped down next to her, and they lay on their sides, looking at each other.

"What's actually bothering you?" Holly asked.

Tara pushed a wave of hair out of Holly's face. "They both keep trying to tell me that I'm loved here and it feels… hard to believe."

"Why is it hard," Holly asked, running a hand down Tara's arm, "to believe that your friends like you?"

People trying to love her shouldn't make her lungs seize up. She wanted to pick it apart, to find all the reasons she didn't deserve their love.

Blinking, Tara tried to articulate what was patently obvious to her. She never talked about this with anyone, mostly because it seemed like saying the sky was blue. "I mean," she said, "I'm not very likeable."

"Who says?"

Holly's tone wasn't demanding, or accusatory, just curious. It made Tara give her a real answer, instead of the flippant "everyone" that was her first impulse. How did Holly keep getting real feelings out of her?

She held up the hand she wasn't lying on, which caused the bed to shift, and she wobbled a bit before resettling. She began counting on her fingers. "One, my parents."

"Okay, your dad would be a Civil War reenactor, on the Confederate side, if he didn't hate grass stains; your parents are fundamentally unlikable. What else do you have?"

Tara didn't know how Holly knew that about her dad, although it was true. She kept counting. "Two, all the kids I grew up with—"

"Except Cole," Holly interrupted.

No one ever interrupted Tara when she was in the middle of her patented intimidating Argument Lists. It was disconcerting. Holly wasn't intimidated by her at all.

"Except maybe Cole, but I have no way of knowing."

Holly blinked at her this time. "You could believe him when he tells you, constantly and specifically."

She waved this off. It was too close to what she'd been contemplating earlier, and she still couldn't look at the thought straight on. "He's too good, you see. At his core, he's too good for this world, and he would never break my heart by telling me the truth."

"Okay." Holly sounded unconvinced. "Who else?"

Tara held up a third finger. "My law colleagues."

"The rich old cishet white men whose entire system you want to see dismantled don't like you? Seems like a good sign, actually."

Tara blew out an exasperated breath. "Most people don't like me when they first meet me, Siobhan. They think I'm cold, and prickly, and kind of a bitch."

"Well, I like you because you're cold and prickly and kind of a bitch," Holly said, "but also, your friends didn't just meet you. They've known you for a long time, and they've learned all the other wonderful things you are."

"You like me?" Tara whispered. Her brain had caught on that part of what Holly said and wouldn't move on.

Holly smiled a little. "I do. I like that you argue in lists, that you match your handbags to your suits, that you eviscerate bad people for money but also for fun. I like that you're slyly funny and you don't think anyone notices. I like that you always, always try to do the next right thing, even when I think you're wrong about what that is."

"I like you, too."

"What do you like about me?" Holly asked. Her hand had moved from Tara's arm to tracing the neckline of her dress, and it was very distracting.

"Is everything a reasonable answer?" Tara asked, and Holly shook her head.

"You're good at lists. Make me a list."

Tara traced the freckles on Holly's face with her eyes, trying not to lose her focus to the whisper-soft fingers undoing the buttons of her dress. "I like that you don't take shit from anyone, even when it seems in the moment like it would be easier to. I like that when you see something that needs to be done, you do it. I like that you're proud of where you came from. You know yourself. You don't have inhibitions. You're always the brightest thing in any room, like you're lit from the inside out."

"Oh God, don't say I light up a room," Holly groaned. "That's a surefire way to get me murdered and talked about on Dateline ."

Tara giggled.

"But," Holly said, "I think you might be the one rewriting reality to make it kinder."

"I'm not. You're brave. Much braver than I am."

Holly smiled sadly. "I'm not brave, Sloane. If I were, I would visit my family more, but I'm afraid if I go there and stand still, I'll somehow get caught in the trap of turning into my mother. And my mom has a really good heart, but it's not the life I want!"

"You don't ever have to be like your mother if you don't want to be like your mother," Tara told her.

"That's not the only thing," Holly argued. "If I were brave, I would have a food truck."

Tara gasped. "You do want something more permanent!"

If Holly wanted something permanent, maybe she'd want culinary school? A pastry chef and successful small business owner could fly under the radar at social events, so she wouldn't be eaten alive by the debutante sharks.

"I do, if it was something where I could make my own hours, get to decide where I go, where I park, who I feed, and if I could pick up and leave whenever I want. I want it, but it's too risky. Most food trucks fail, and I can't be broke again. I can't lose my meager savings on a pipe dream."

Tara began to speak, and Holly stopped her. "Don't tell me you'd finance it. I can't handle that. I don't want your family's money, and I don't want our… whatever is between us… to have that kind of debt in the middle."

She wanted to argue that it wouldn't be a debt, it would be a gift, or an investment, but she could see that, no matter how she felt, to Holly it would be charity. Besides, she didn't want to argue and ruin this moment, especially when Holly had just admitted that there was something between them, and it could maybe exist outside of these walls.

"You're much braver than I am," Holly told her. "You're the bravest person I know. You're bearding the lion in its den; you've faced the worst mistake you ever made and decided to make good for it instead of letting yourself off without consequences. You keep loving your friends fiercely even though your brain is convinced they don't love you back."

Tara shook her head, then rolled onto her back and covered her eyes, because she couldn't look at Holly while she talked about this. "I'm not brave at all, either. I do have all these things I've always wanted to do, like sing in a band, and volunteer for the Innocence Project, and learn to cook, and all I do is what I've always been told, but I tell myself it's a long con. I'm not even brave enough to fall in love! I put one foot out of line one time, and it exploded, and now… I'm living this life that matters to me, that I fought for, that I chose, yes, but that I don't think can ever make me actually happy."

She felt Holly lift her hand from where it was covering her eyes and peer down at her. "I think you've been expanding your circle pretty damn well this weekend," she said, dropping a soft kiss on Tara's forehead.

"But what happens when I go back to Charleston?" Tara asked. "I'm going to go back to my little bubble. I'm going to be just like my mother."

"Tara Sloane Chadwick," Holly said seriously, "you couldn't be your mother if you tried."