Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 112249 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112249 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
Every word stabbed a little more at Gracen’s heart, but even that prick of pain wasn’t enough to scrub away the icky feeling that lingered about her twenty-five-year-old ex marrying a girl that had only graduated from her private high school—funded and supplied by the Truth and Faith Tabernacle Pentecostal church—not even a month ago.
Had the fact that he’d been older caught Alora’s attention like it once did Gracen?
Something that sucked about a small town like theirs? Everybody knew everything about everybody else even when you didn’t want to. Being a hair stylist, even if that had been Gracen’s dream from the time she cut her doll’s hair as young girl, meant she heard the rumors of the town twofold when someone sat in her chair. A hazard of the occupation.
Despite the church’s large congregation, who made up a good thirty percent of the town’s population overall, refusing to send their children to the public schools in The Valley like everyone else—well, they opted into funding their own construction of a homeschooling center and the education of their youth. Their class of students started and graduated a month earlier than the others in town who turned their month of June into an extended party from a week-long Sober Grad to a three-day prom celebration. Out of all the teenagers who walked through their salon’s door, the kids from the church on the hill weren’t one of them.
“Is there more?” Gracen questioned again the longer Delaney stayed quiet. “There is!”
“Maybe Bex asked me—”
“What?”
Delaney gave Gracen that look again. The try me one that made her nostrils flare, and her eyebrows rise high on her wide forehead. Even though she had to look down at Delaney, if she were being honest, Gracen couldn’t say she wanted to go head-to-head with her friend if it came down to it.
People had to watch the short ones.
Crazy.
“I told my little cousin I’d help her out—she’s the maid of honor. Whatwas I supposed to do when she called and asked if I’d lend a hand with a few things? She’s treated me like a big sister ever since she could talk. Maybe the rest of my family is trash but not all of them are. I’d like to at least keep the ones that I think are decent.”
Gracen blinked and forced herself to ask her next question without the same attitude and slightly hysteric tone as before. “What ... few things?”
Delaney picked at her nails and surveyed the cream-colored walls surrounding them—the only thing their landlord was strict about despite the cheap rent. No painting, and they couldn’t hang a thing on the wall that would leave holes behind. It left the friends to come up with creative way to bring color and their personality into their current living space. Gracen liked wall art she hung up with sticky strips that didn’t damage the wall and plants she had shoved in every old window ledge of the small house. Delaney, on the other hand, used rugs and cushions. The teal ones on the breakfast nook at the large bay kitchen windows took up her friend’s attention as she tried to rearrange them while the silence between them stretched on for longer.
Anything to avoid looking Gracen in the face as she admitted, “They’ve got everything basically done. It’s mostly the follow through. It’ll be over when they marry in the fall. Like, end of September, I guess.”
What?
Gracen blinked again.
She’d heard Delaney right.
It wasn’t even the end of the first week of June. September was practically right around the corner.
“That soon?”
The cushions were left more crooked than they had been at first when Delaney finally straightened to her full height and turned to Gracen once more. “I guess Alora’s heading to the bible college in the Miramichi—but she won’t start until the second semester. Her parents got her an apartment, but he can’t go with her unless they’re married.”
Of course.
Gracen couldn’t find it in herself to be shocked.
Because heaven forbid young people new to a relationship get to know one another and decide if they’ll work as life partners before they become them. After all, the good church people wouldn’t want a nasty thing like premarital sex to ruin the education of a young woman that would mostly consist of how to be a good wife with a happy husband, and a respectable member of their congregation. All the while minding everything about girls and women from the way they dressed to the length of their hair.
Then again, Gracen’s ego and pride wasn’t so huge that she couldn’t admit her bias at play regarding the people who sat in the pews of the Truth and Faith Tabernacle at the top of the far hill on the same side of the river as their new salon. People talked. A lot. About why the church and its people were so private while allowing themselves to also be controlled; the whispers of different abuse had leaked out over the years by those who had chosen to separate; and more.