They invited her to a lavish baby shower, left her without a chair, and sent her to a pub with a cruel “that place is for you,” but no one imagined how she would end up humiliating the entire family.

“My sister invited me to her shower, but they did not actually set a place for me at the table,” I explained as my voice wavered slightly. Desmond frowned as if the insult to the establishment was just as offensive as the insult to my character.

He pulled out a chair for me without asking any annoying questions, and I finally sat down in a place where I felt genuinely welcome. I admitted that I was just so tired of my family praising Whitney for simply existing while looking at my bookstore as if it were a failure.

Desmond listened to every word without interrupting me until I had finally run out of things to say about my mother’s definition of success. He asked if I trusted him to handle the situation, and I realized that I had trusted him since the day he first walked into my shop looking for rare poetry.

I told him that I did trust him, so he immediately picked up his phone and made a quick call to a woman named June. He placed a glass of water in front of me and changed the subject to rare first editions to help me calm my nerves while we waited.