Page 162 of Liberating Lily

“Yeah, but you didn’t have to go along with it, Lily. You didn’t have to do everything she wanted. I get it. You wanted her approval, but it went too far. You were going to marry a man who was a complete asshole. You would have gone through with it too, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah, I would have, and I probably would have gone on living my life in utter misery, without knowing exactly why I was doing what she wanted.”

“Why were you? It had to be more than just pleasing our mother.”

“It was,” Lily said. “It was a whole lot more, and it gets a whole lot worse. I get it if you can’t forgive me, if you don’t want anything to do with me, but I was just hoping you might listen to what I had to say. But if you want me to leave, I will. However, could you please just get that steer away from my car and find me a ladder so I can get down from here?”

Clem just grunted and stared up at her. The lamb started bouncing around her. Oh, that was seriously cute. Lily hadn’t thought herself an animal person, but the lamb was adorable.

So were the little piglets that suddenly appeared around the corner of the house. “Oh my God, Clem, you’ve got piglets? They’re so cute. They surely didn’t come from that pig, right?”

“Of course they did. We’ve got Bacon, Porkchop, Crackling, and Emma.”

“Emma?” she asked. Emma didn’t sound like a pig’s name. Not that those other names were normal names for a pig, but at least they all stuck to a theme.

“Yeah, I ran out of other names, and Emma just really liked the name Emma. Didn’t you, Emma?”

As if the pig understood what her sister was saying, it waddled toward her. Just then, a truck started coming up the drive and came to a stop behind her car. Out climbed Jaret Malone.

He was dressed in a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt that was partly unbuttoned. He looked from Clem, then up to Lily.

“Everything okay here?” Walking over to Clem, he drew her close and kissed the top of her head.

Tears filled Lily’s eyes. That was something that Harvey would have done. He would have gone straight to her and given her a kiss.

Was he worried about her?

Of course he would be.

The way she’d left hadn’t been right. She should’ve stayed and told him what happened, and that she thought she should leave. But she’d known he’d try to talk her into staying.

Still, she should really send him a message and let him know that she was all right. It was the mature thing to do.

“Hi, Lily. Are you okay up there?” Jaret asked.

“Oh, sure. I’m fine. I’m just getting a bit of this lovely Texas sunshine.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Well, maybe you’d like to get some of that Texas sunshine down here, yeah? ‘Cause you look terrified that you’re going to fall off.”

“That’s a good plan,” she said, nodding. “I should definitely get down from here. There’s just one problem; I can’t find the ladder.”

He sighed, shaking his head. “Yep, that’ll be the llamas. Clem decided she wanted some a few weeks ago. For some reason, they love that ladder. Any chance they get, they steal it.”

They stole it? How did they steal it? Llamas didn’t exactly have hands.

“First they knock it over, and then they pick it up with their mouths and trot around with it,” he told her as though reading her mind. “Craziest thing you’ve ever seen. I swear, Clem really knows how to choose her animals.”

“Hey, I didn’t choose most of these animals,” Clem said, putting her hands on her hips. “They chose me. And Chuck Roast, stop eating that tire. Lily needs that car to leave.”

“Lily’s leaving already?” Jaret asked.

A knot tightened in her stomach. Obviously, Clem wasn’t interested in listening to anything she had to say, and she couldn’t blame her sister. Why would she want to listen to her?

“Well, yeah, at some stage, after she’s explained everything.”

Relief filled her.

Jaret found the ladder, then helped her down, and she walked with him toward her sister.