The Lease Up

28. Your Heart

Song for chapter: Trusfall ~ Pink

VANESSA

(Six Months Later)

Sometimes when your life goes to shit, there's a chance you'll find out what you were always meant to do.

Turns out I was meant to meet and fall in love with Gabriel Tate.

But now, I live with the fact that I ruined what could have been a great love and adventure with someone who genuinely cared about me. The pain that I feel from that truth is the only thing I have left to hold on to to feel connected to Gabriel. It helps me remember the love I felt from him was real even though I was not necessarily deserving of it.

I've learned a lot about myself in the last six months. Some good things, some bad.

Always start with the positive.

My tenacity and persistence was put to the test looking for employment in a very challenging job market. But eventually landed a promising position. 

Emerald did try—several times actually—to get me to come back. But I was honest with Jaqueline and Savannah and told them if I came back I wouldn't be the same employee from before. I would work hard and do what was asked of me, within reason, but I wouldn't go above and beyond.

Maybe that's the way it should have always been, to keep a better work-personal life balance, but that's something else I discovered. I'm still learning who I am. But returning with Emerald was something that wouldn't make me happy and declined their offer in the end.

With the limited options I encountered, I needed to open my mind to different possibilities and found a position as an intern that thankfully pays.

I'll be starting in a couple of weeks. I was beginning to get worried once I started to tap into my emergency funds to pay for rent, food and other necessities.

Though therapy is helping me interact and handle myself with my parents, dread filled my stomach when the thought of possibly moving back in with them or worse, asking for a loan until I got on my feet again.

I took a part-time job as a delivery driver to keep some income coming in for now; it's been an interesting adjustment, to say the least.

Jenny and Lily both left Emerald, too. Jenny found out she was pregnant shortly after I quit and because of complications with preeclampsia as she got further along, she and Jason decided it was best for her to stay home until the baby is born. She has less than five weeks to go, but if you ask her the baby should have come yesterday.

Lily decided to go school and get a degree in real estate. She and Evan are also engaged and will be getting married in a few months.

Aside from hunting for a new job, I put my time and energy towards working on myself and addressing my fear of commitment. I swallowed my pride and started going to therapy. It took three different consultations with three different Dr. 's , but I found one I feel comfortable enough with; even though it still doesn't feel natural for me to share personal things, it's been going pretty well. I've even confronted some of my deeper issues with my parents, too.

It'd be easy for me to put blame on my abnormal and cold family life for my awful mistreatment of Gabriel's trust and love, but no one's responsible for that than me. I think I've always known my parents are not the ideal example of genuine love between two people. Their relationship is more like a business, a necessity. And very cold.

Growing up my mother made it a point to tell me not to look for sparks in life because they don't exist, but if you happen to feel them, they never last. So, I learned to accept what I could get in terms of affection and mostly focused on my education and career.