I’d been okay with my life. Well, I was okay-ish. I was missing love, missing that happily ever after like my friends Elodie and Hollis had, like the kind plenty of their friends did, like Lincoln and Melody, and many others.

And then life happened, and things fell apart...for Lincoln. But Elodie was Elodie, so she knew how to draw me in to help. So, help I did, which led to friendship, which led to my stupid heart being involved. Except it was only my heart involved.

Denial! That was what I did to keep things the way they were. The problem was, it was getting harder and harder to deny my heart, and Lincoln was making it easier and easier to love him. And our friendship was growing, even outside of the walls of the Park Avenue Pick-Up.

But that was all it was. Friendship. As long as I kept telling myself that, then I would be fine, right? If I believed it, then maybe my heart would too.

But then he found out about our link. (He didn’t remember me anyway–so it didn’t even count, right?) Either way, it forced us to look at some hard truths...about the heart. Our hearts.

Insert happily ever after here, right?

See...life didn’t usually happen just once. It tended to make things fall apart often. And ours was no exception.