Page 32 of Break Me Not

So, in the darkness of the night, I allowed myself to linger outside her apartment, dreaming about everything I would do to make it up to her.

Liz

“Hello? Earth to Liz?”

I looked up to see my friend Andy waving her half-drunk matcha at me.

She wore her long black hair up in a ponytail and had thin oval sunglasses covering her sapphire eyes so I could see the way her brows pushed up behind them.

I jumped back to myself, looking around. Andy had graciously agreed to be my date today as we looked at a few empty houses.

I was getting desperate, and even with a couple million in my bank account now, what I could find in the suburbs of New York wasn't what I wanted. There weren’t many houses on the market that suited my needs, and I wasn’t willing to pay a big price tag for something that was… so mediocre.

“Sorry,” I said, and took a sip of my own matcha. “There's just been a lot on my mind recently.”

I walked around the kitchen island and leaned against it as I looked out into the… backyard? I wasn't sure if I could call it that. It was more like a small box with a fence around it.

Maybe I could use it for vegetables or something?

Right, as if I ever wanted to grow anything.

She came up beside me and nudged me with her elbow.

“Got some dirty gossip for me? Let me guess, you met someone and now you can't get your mind off them and all you can think about is moving here and having babies and⁠—”

I pushed her away with an eye roll.

Andy was younger than me and still at that stage of wanting to build a family when she found the right person. We had met a few years back when I went back to school for a business certificate, and she was just starting, which created a very unlikely, but if I was being honest, fun friendship.

Despite our whopping almost sixteen-year age gap, which was almost the same as between my daughter and me, Andy had been the only one who didn't give me a weird look when she found out how old I was. If anything, she used it to her advantage and always came to me for advice, especially in the first few years. As she started living her life, she came to me much less for that and more to just hang out.

She was always down for a little errand or, as she called them, side quests.

When she graduated, she started working as an investigative journalist, which surprised the hell out of me since she’d told me she would for sure go into business planning. But, to be fair, with her weird research rabbit holes, I shouldn’t have been that surprised.

I still remembered the day she told me she thought she’d found a new serial killer in New York. I really quickly changed the subject, but every time we saw each other, she would just come back with more.

Do you know who the biggest purchaser of glitter in the United States is?

Did you know about the family that couldn’t sleep?

She was fun. She’d always been fun.

Now we were here. Looking at disappointing houses over the weekend.

“I'm not having any more babies,” I whispered to her.

The admission sent a pang through my chest. Some nights, I lay in bed and thought about what it would have been like to marry someone I truly loved. I got Claire out of that relationship, but what if I had married someone else?

Would I have more kids?

Would I have gotten to where I needed to be faster?

“I'm old.”

Andy let out a scoff.

“You're not. Besides, science has come a long way. However, you didn't deny the rest, so… Who did you meet?”