Two weeks later, I was back in California staying at my sister’s house. Except for the pain, it was almost like I’d never left.

“Cara? Do you want to go shopping for baby clothes?” Autumn asked.

“Maybe later,” I said, not looking up from the pictures of Derrick and Elyse on my phone.

A few hours later, Ford popped his head in the door. “Dinners ready. Do you want to eat?”

“Maybe later.”

The next day, Autumn found me in the sunroom, staring out the window. “I could really use your help to get the nursery ready.”

“Sure,” I said. “Maybe a bit later, though.”

When she left, I pulled my knees up to my chest and hugged them. I knew Autumn and Ford were worried about me, but I couldn’t seem to snap out of it. I felt like I was in mourning. In a way, I was. I’d never see Nico, Derrick, or Elyse again. They were lost to me, so of course I grieved.

For some reason, it was easier to remember the good times with the twins. When I’d ordered a copy of the photobooks for the queen, I’d gotten ones for myself as well. Sometimes I spent hours flipping through them or the pictures on my phone.

Leaving the twins was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. A few days after I got back, we talked online, but seeing their little faces on the screen had hurt more than looking at their pictures. Just like their father, they’d captured my heart, too, and were part of the reason it was broken now.

The next day, Autumn all but dragged me to the table at lunch time. It was just the two of us, Ford was out.

“You have to eat something,” Autumn insisted, so I filled my plate and dutifully took a few bites. Vaguely, I wondered if the pasta really tasted like cardboard or if it was just me. Autumn seemed to have no trouble eating her portion, but then again, she was eating for two.

After a few more bites, I set down the fork. Autumn had finished, and I knew she gearing up for a lecture. She was my sister, it was her job to step in when I was upset.

But nothing could heal this pain.

“How about after lunch we drive over to campus and scope out where your classes will be?”

That held no interest for me. “It’s only the end of July. The graduate program doesn’t even start for a few more weeks.”

“It’s August second,” Autumn corrected. “And don’t you want to check out the campus?”

“No.”

“You have to do something besides mope around here all day.”

I took a sip of water to buy time. I knew she meant well. “There’s nothing I want to do.”

“Really? Nothing? You’re going to be an aunt. Don’t you want to help me fix up the nursery? You love children.” She rubbed her rounded belly.

“I miss Derrick and Elyse,” I said.

Her face softened. “I know you do, but they’re not the only children in the world. You can love them and your niece, too.” She’d found out the sex of the baby right before I’d gotten back.

“I will love her,” I said, conviction filling my voice for a change. “I already do.”

“I know you do,” Autumn said, reaching over to pat my hand. “And she’s going to love you. You’re going to be a huge part of her life, so I thought you’d want to help me prepare for her.”

“I do. It’s just… hard.”

“I know. When I thought I’d lost my chance with Ford, I could barely breathe.”

“I remember.” It had been very had for Autumn, but in the end, she’d gotten the man of her dreams. There was no fairy-tale ending in my future. But she was still my sister, and I needed to try harder for her sake. “I’m sorry. I’ll go up and see the nursery soon. It just… it reminds me of the twins.”

“And what about Nico?”

Her question made my heard stutter painfully. “What do you mean?”

“You keep talking about how much you miss the children, but what about him?”

I stared down at my uneaten food, blinking back tears. As much as I missed the twins, I could at least think about them without breaking apart. But with Nico? Every time I thought about him, I couldn’t breathe. The only reason I was functioning at all was because I tried to excise him from my mind as much as possible.

“Cara?”

“It hurts too much to even think of him,” I whispered.

Her face was full of empathy. “I know it’s hard, but it’s not always going to feel like that.”

“Yes, it will.” I knew that with every fiber of my being. “I love him, and my life will never be the same without him.”

“No… not the same,” Autumn said slowly. “But that doesn’t mean you’ll never be happy again. Your future is still in front of you, and it’s going to be a good one. But it’s going to hurt for a while.”

“Hurt?” I echoed. “It hurt when I got that cut in my arm in London. This is way beyond that kind of pain.”

“I know, honey.”

“It feels like I’m dying.”

She moved to my side and put her arms around me, my head resting against her belly. “I know it’s awful now, but you’re not dying. At some point, you need to resume being an active participant in your life even if it’s not what you envisioned.”

I didn’t say anything, but I closed my hand around the one she’d placed on my shoulder.

“Please come up to the nursery when you get a chance.”

“Okay,” I said.

For her sake, I’d try.

“Can I come in?” Ford found me in my room a few days later.

“Sure.” I was sitting on my bed, an unopened book next to me.

He sat down in the desk chair opposite the bed. “Autumn said you don’t want to talk about Nico.”

“That’s right, I don’t.”

“So I’m here to talk about Nico.”

I sighed. Neither my sister nor my brother-in-law had gotten where they were by giving up. A sudden thought struck me. “Do you know him?”

“No, but I know of him,” Ford said. “His firm has a good reputation. And I’ve had a few business dealings with his friend Blake Hollister.”

That was news to me. I sat up a little straighter. “You’ve met Blake?”

“A couple of times.” Ford rested his forearms on his thighs as he leaned forward. “I don’t know either of them well, but I do know how men think. And sometimes that thinking is really fucked up. Mine used to be. But you can’t change someone’s world view even if it’s wrong.”

“What do you mean?” Ford’s words were mysterious enough to keep the pain temporarily at bay.

“I mean Nico has been through a lot. Just being a single dad is all encompassing. But he also has a hell of a lot of responsibilities, plus a whole lot of baggage from his past. If I were ever to lose Autumn—” he broke off, putting a hand to his forehead. “I don’t know how I’d ever go on.”

Tears prickled the back of my eyes, but I ignored them, focusing on Ford. “You’re not going to lose her.”

“I almost did,” he said looking up at me. “Not through an accident, but through my stupidity. For a long time, I thought I wasn’t good enough for a woman like her. And even though I was falling in love, I thought letting her into my heart was going to change everything.”

“Did it?”

“Of course it did—for the better. But it took me far too long to figure that out. If you’d come up to me and said ‘Ford, you handsome devil, stop being an ass and marry my sister’ I likely wouldn’t have listened.”

“I think I did want to say something like that.”

“I doubt it would’ve helped. Some things—some realizations just take time. If I’d met Autumn a year or two before I did, I don’t know if I would’ve pursued her the way I did. I wasn’t ready. The past, my issues with my father, had too strong a hold on me.”

“Then I’m glad you met her when you did.”

“Me too. It still makes me shudder to think that I could’ve lost out on the most amazing woman I’d ever met just because I needed time.”

“You’re saying Nico needs time.” I stated the words flatly. They didn’t fill me with hope—I knew there was no chance for us.

“I’m saying that there was likely nothing you could’ve done to speed up the process. I may be biased about women in the Andrews family, but any man would be lucky to have you. The fact that he couldn’t accept the gift you offered him shows that he wasn’t ready. That he still has certain realizations he needs to reach on his own. And—and maybe he never will. Some people live their whole lives lost in the past. It’s a fucked up way to exist, but it happens. I don’t want it to happen to you.”

He reached out and took my hand in his. “This lackluster person hiding out in her room isn’t you, Cara. When I first met you, I thought you were the most annoyingly cheerful person I’d ever laid eyes on.”

The corner of my mouth twitched involuntarily upward. Even through the gloom, Ford had reached some part of me.

“I know you’re in pain, but… could you please, for me, make at least a little effort? You can’t stay holed up here until your graduate program starts.”

Actually, that didn’t sound like a bad thing, but I didn’t tell him that. And apparently he wasn’t finished.

“If not for me, then do it for Autumn. She’s excited about the baby, but she’s scared, too. It’s a bit undertaking. She wants to be there for you, but I hope you’ll be there for her, too.”

That got through. “I want to. It’s just so hard. I can barely get out of bed each day.”

“I know it’s hard. But do you know how many of your plays I’ve attended over the years? You’re an incredible actress. Maybe you could try out that whole fake it till you make it thing. Maybe it’ll get you started along the right path, at the very least.”

Part of me wanted to jump on his suggestion, to close my mind to the pain and act like everything was normal. But it wasn’t—and it never would be again. I sighed. Ford did have a point though. The last thing I wanted to do was to upset Autumn. I owed her everything. “Okay, I’ll try.”

“Good,” Ford said, sitting up straighter. “It doesn’t have to be an award-winning performance, but if you aimed for slightly more lifelike, that would be a start.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“I have faith in you,” he said with a smile. “So much so that I got you a rose for your future performance.”

Huh? He folded his arms in front of his chest, the long sleeves of his blue shirt rubbing together. Then he reached one hand inside the other sleeve and pulled out a red rose.

“How did you learn to do that?” I asked as I took it from him and brought it to my nose. The beautiful scent seemed to cut through the still air.

“YouTube,” he said with a wink.

“Really? When I first met you, you probably would’ve gone overboard and hired Penn and Teller to give you personal lessons.”

He chuckled. “Probably. But I’ve changed. You can, too. It just takes time.”

“Autumn?” I entered the nursery, but my sister wasn’t there. For the past week, we’d spent many hours in here, painting, decorating the walls, and arranging the furniture. I sat down on the rocking chair and looked around. The little room was almost ready.

A mobile hung over the gleaming white crib. Speakers nearby could provide music, lullabies, or white noise. Baskets under the window seat held soft toys for infants. Next to the rocker was a bookcase filled to the brim. After much thought, I’d added my copies of The Princess and the Bow and The Prince and the Falcon.

Rocking gently back and forth, I stared at the crib. In a little over three months, a baby would be there. It was hard to believe. Would she be blonde like Autumn and me? Would she have the acting bug like we did? Or would she be full of quick-witted humor like Ford? The possibilities were endless.

She’d need me. Yeah, she’d need her parents more, but she’d need Aunt Cara too. I’d buy her clothes and take her out to eat. And we’d go to the theater. There were all sorts of children’s plays that were wonderful. Maybe we could make a tradition out of going together each year before the holidays.

The baby hadn’t even been born, and already I had so many plans for her. I wanted to take her to museums. Teacher her Spanish. Find out what she was interested in and help her learn more about it. There were so many things I wanted to teach her.

My thoughts stopped abruptly, a jolt going through my body.

I wanted to teach her.

Slowly, I rose from the chair and walked through the house. I found Autumn outside, watering some plants on the deck.

“Autumn?”

She looked up and smiled.

“Umm… I know you’ve already paid the first installment on my tuition, but… I don’t want to go to graduate school anymore. I want to teach.”

She stared at me in silence, water spilling onto the wooden slats below her.

I squirmed under her gaze. “I know it’s late. Most schools will start in the next week or two.” I babbled on, trying to make her understand. “But I have to try. I may not be able to find a position for this semester, but I want to try.”

Finally, she spoke. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. I know you might not understand about graduate school, but—”

Autumn held up her hand, silencing me. She whipped her phone out of her pocket and tapped at the screen. Then she held it up to her ear. “Ford? It’s showtime.”

An hour later, the three of us sat at the dining room table. Folders and stacks of paper were everywhere along with several laptops.

Ford showed me his screen. “And here’s a list of all the openings in District 7.”

“It was updated yesterday, but I’ll look again when we’re through here,” Autumn added.

They’d done so much work—it was still hard to take in. “But I still don’t understand how you knew I still wanted to be a teacher. I didn’t even know.”

“You don’t want to be a teacher, Cara, you are one. We just had to wait for you to figure that out,” she said.

“It doesn’t look like you’ve done much waiting.” On the contrary, they were as organized as generals in a war room.

“We knew you’d come around,” Ford said. “We’ll keep looking for open teaching positions. You just focus on the applications. We’ll help as much as we can, but there are some things only you can do.”

“I have your resume here,” Autumn said, indicating her laptop. “You should update it with your time in Falkenberg.”

An awkward silence fell, and I knew they were waiting to see if I’d fall to pieces at the mention of Nico’s country. Truthfully, it was a struggle, but I kept my voice neutral. “Do you really think my experience as a nanny will help?”

“It might,” Ford said. “It shows you’re good with children. What have you got to lose?”

In the days that followed, I applied for every teaching position they found. Most were filling up fast, however. And a sizeable chunk of them were contingent on student enrollment. I had a few interviews for those positions, but they wouldn’t know if they could hire anyone until after classes started. Autumn still held out hope that I’d get a permanent position before that.

Then I got an e-mail that made me feel more excited than I had in a long time. “It’s for a full-time position at a private school. It’s a boarding school, actually, and they want someone who not only can teach but can also be sort of a residential advisor for the borders. They say that my experience as a nanny was what caught their eye. You and Ford were right.”

“We usually are,” Autumn said smugly. But she could be downright insufferable and I wouldn’t care. She and Ford had done so much for me.

“Thank you,” I said. “For everything. If you two hadn’t been poised to act, I’d still be gathering my application materials at this point.”

“We knew you’d come around. You’ve wanted to be a teacher your whole life. Like the theater, it’s a part of who you are.”

“Or it will be if I get this job.”

“When’s the interview?”

“The day after tomorrow. Most of the students have already arrived, so they need someone as soon as possible.”

“I hope you get it,” she said, giving me a hug.

“I hope so, too.”

And it was really true. Hope wasn’t something I’d felt in a long time, but I felt it for this. Some parts of my life had been forever altered by my time in Falkenberg. Though it had led to a great deal of heartache, I could see now that it had also led me back to teaching.

There were students out there who needed me, and I wanted to help them more than anything.

If only someone would hire me and give me a chance.