She closed her eyes, trying to hold back all these emotions, the messy ones, the ones that Isabel had spent the last thirty years teaching Astrid how to control. But she was so goddamn tired of keeping it together, of knowing every next step and exactly how to execute it. She was lost, for fuck's sake. She was ready to act like it. So she did something she'd rarely done in front of her friends.
She cried.
As the warm saltwater streaked down her cheeks, she realized she'd only ever really sobbed in front of one other person – Jordan Everwood, on her back porch, as she fell apart, and then Jordan put her back together again with a love
song. The thought only made her cry harder, and soon, she was sobbing into her hands, her shoulders shaking with deep, bone-breaking breaths.