* Friends/Family/Fun. The three Fs. Use them. Have your friends to take you out, make you laugh—put them through the wringer. That’s why they’re your friends. Lean on your family. Go to them if you need support, or just to forget reality. If you need to revert back to your early childhood years when everything was safe, go there. Embrace this time when you can be selfish. You’re the one hurting. You’ll hold them up later, when you can hold them up. Until then, be selfish. Enjoy their support, and above everything else, seek to have some fun at the end of the day. That will chase the heartbreak away, little by little. And if all else fails, go on to number six.

* One-night stands. Getting under someone new can be the best way to jumpstart getting over someone old. But just be safe about it. Don’t let a one-night decision, or a more-than-a-few-nights decision, alter your future. And if you go this route, empty a drawer and fill it up with condoms. Take charge, ladies. Don’t rely on the guy. After all, that might be why you’re in this mess in the first place.

With that said, drink up, eat up, let the tears flow, use the anger, and proceed with whatever helps you endure the pain. You’ll have your walls back up in no time.

I left.

Sia drove me to my parents’ house, a few hours away. When the door opened and my dad appeared, wearing his usual blue plaid flannel pajamas, I couldn’t hold the tears back any longer.

This was when I raged, when I threw things, when I screamed, when I let everything out. But when it was over, the next week, I wasn’t sure who I was grieving: Liam or Cole.

My parents were speechless when they first saw me, but I ignored their reactions. I didn’t have the words to explain, so Sia did once my dad had carried me inside. I heard their soft conversation on the porch as I waited in the kitchen, tears pooling on the table. And that night, when they came back in and after Sia asked for the seventh time if she should stay and I told her no again and walked her out to her car, my dad pulled out a bottle of whiskey.

My parents didn’t drink a lot. The alcohol was for special occasions, maybe one glass on holidays. But that night, my parents were lushes. My mom kept crying. She’d wipe her tears away, remark that they shouldn’t have let me have my space even though I’d requested it, and get a forlorn look in her eye. Over and over. And every time that look appeared, she’d refill her glass.

My dad was much the same, except he wasn’t crying. From time to time a murderous rage came into his eyes. His hands curled into fists, and the veins bulged out in his neck. Then he’d refill his glass with whiskey.

After a month, Sia and Jake offered to help pack up my apartment. Of course I would want to move, and of course they understood why I wouldn’t want to come back, to face the place where I’d fallen in love with Cole. They understood. They were more than willing to help me move on with my life, but the only problem…every time I tried to think of that, I couldn’t. My brain would shut down. The words to answer Sia never came out of my throat, and when we talked on the phone, it was always about my parents, about me being back home, or about her life. She told me about her job, how the Gala was doing great, and how her relationship with Jake was going as well.

I couldn’t bring myself to ask her to help me move on. I tried. I did. I attempted to force the words out of my throat. But they never came, and every time after I hung up the phone with her, I was flooded with other memories instead. They weren’t the ones I needed to remember, but they were torturous in their own right.

I’d remember the first time in Gianni’s, when Cole walked in with his friends. I remembered how I woke up, like I’d been asleep for the last year.

I’d remember seeing him in the elevator, holding Carl up. My body burned as it had then. I felt it all over again, how much I’d wanted Cole, even then.

The sight of him on that running track, how my stomach had gotten butterflies and my palms were sweaty, like I had a schoolgirl crush on him.

Then I’d remember the table at our first dinner together, how we didn’t order and went back to my place—the feel of his lips, the way he held me, the way he carried me. The way he made me groan, as I raked my fingers through his hair. The feel of him inside me.

The feel of him all the other times, too.

And I always asked myself the worst question, the one that plagued me:

Did he miss me like I missed him—utterly and completely?

Three months later

“Addison, can you clean out Taffy’s stall?”

“Who was that?” Sia asked over the phone.

I tucked my phone more securely between my shoulder and neck, gave Kirk the thumbs-up, and began heading to the opposite end of the barn. Horses looked up in every stall as I passed by.

“That was the guy I’m helping,” I told her. “My mom got tired of me moping around the house. When the barn manager for our county fair mentioned he was looking for volunteers, guess who she suggested?”

“She didn’t.”

“She did.”

I stopped halfway to Taffy’s stall. My bags were stashed next to the food bins. I grabbed some of the apples I’d brought and kept going. When it came to the alpha mare, I’d learned bribes went a long way.

“It’s been fine for the most part, and honestly, it really does get me out of the house.”

Sia made a noncommittal Mmmmm sound as Taffy stuck her head over the stall door. She had large doe eyes and a long white blaze down the middle of her brown face. Her nostrils flared as she smelled the apples, and she nuzzled against my hand.