Songbird

One: Lennie

"Len, baby, come on. It was an accident."

I clenched my eyes shut and pinched the bridge of my nose between my thumb and index finger. "No, Brad, forgetting to pay the cable bill is an accident. Impregnating my best friend is a string of definite choices."

"What am I supposed to do, Lennie?! I can't handle this rent by myself! You know that! You wanted this place not me!"

"Maybe you should've thought of that before YOUR DICK ENTERED MY BEST FRIEND!"

Shout out to the old lady across the street who definitely heard me. Not a good first day back home, Len. Not a good first day. I was definitely going to have to readjust to small town Georgia life.

"I can't believe you just left, after all we've been through..."

"I didn't just LEAVE, Brad. I told you I was helping Maggie with the bed and breakfast this summer, just like I always do. Then I found you in bed with Ellie... so I moved out. Do you perhaps see the correlation there?"

"Lennie..."

"Brad, I have to go. I have..." Quick, Lennie! Think of something! "a job interview..."

What? I shook my head at my panicked answer. Good one, Len.

"What happened to the bed and breakfast? Why would you need another job?"

"None of your business. Goodbye, Brad, good luck with the baby and... all that shit."

"Lenore, don't hang up on me."

"What? Sorry, can't hear you. Cutting out. Damn small town. Byeeeeeee!"

Okay, so maybe I didn't have a job interview, but my ex didn't need to know that. I, Lennie Tyler, was officially single and ready to... go into the nearest country bar and drown my sorrows in a bucket of whiskey. Or whatever it was of age people did here. I left when I was eighteen, I had no idea.

Weird part? I wasn't even that sad about Brad. More annoyed than anything else. The rose-colored glasses of dumb love had come off a long time ago. Bradley Richards was not my forever. I knew it, he knew it. If I'm honest, we moved in together more out of convenience than anything else. We'd been 'together' five years. I was thirty-three. Not like I was getting any younger so... might as well try, right?

Wrong. So very wrong.

Ladies, if you're reading this: don't push these things... and don't settle. It's not worth it. You'll end up miserable and then come home from a songwriting session to find him in bed with your so-called best friend and all those little moments your brain told you he wasn't the one, will become foghorns. Honestly, the only reason he was upset was because it meant paying rent on the new two-bedroom, ritzy apartment in Nashville that we literally just re-signed the lease on.

Oh shit. That was under my name. Mental note to call my lawyer ASAP.

I know what you're thinking, but don't worry. I wasn't the girl who ran back home because her ex is a cheating douchebag. It actually was a happy accident. My aunt Maggie was the woman in charge of our family's long running bed and breakfast here in Snyder, Georgia. Snyder wasn't a tiny town, but it wasn't real big either. We were large enough for stoplights and a few restaurants and of course some hole in the wall country bars, and we were just close enough to the bigger Georgia cities, that the bed and breakfast had been a lucrative family business for years. My parents ran it for a while, before opening their own place in some Florida retirement town. I couldn't even tell you the name. My parents and I weren't really close.

My aunt Maggie was my mother's littlest sister, a good twenty years younger. She was the "Oops!" baby of my grandparents and was a mere twelve years older than I was. She was more of my older sister than my aunt and every summer I came back to help out during the busy seasons, plus it was a great excuse to leave city life and be home for a while. I might've moved, but I'd always be the small-town Georgia girl at heart. Her daughter, my cousin Makayla, had just graduated high school and was gearing up to move to Nashville like I had done over fifteen years ago now, so it seemed like an even better idea to be here this summer. Hopefully, I could help Makayla make a few less mistakes than I had. Lord knows I had made a laundry list of them.