Another Piece of My Heart Read Online Free PDF

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    The long renovation had been more expensive and more time-consuming than either of them had realized, they told her, within five minutes of meeting her, but it was all worth it. Would she like to see? Would she, by any chance, be interested in a tour?
    Walls had come down, windows put in, the space had been opened up. They walked from room to room, these two, tall, handsome men leading the way, brimming with excitement at their new home as Andi fell in love.
    It helped that they had done exactly what Andi would have done herself, only with a more masculine design, and were working on plans for a beautiful garden—gardening, Drew confessed, was his true passion.
    Several hours later, Andi hadn’t left. She found herself sitting at their kitchen counter downing peach mojitos and laughing more than she had in years. When Ethan texted her to find out where she was, she told him to come next door, and a firm friendship was formed.
    Even Emily liked them, which was something of a first. When they did the garden, they put a hot tub in the corner, with grey wooden sun loungers on a gravel terrace, under the shade of a large eucalyptus.
    They told the girls to use it whenever they wanted, and the girls took them at their word. Andi was terrified they would overstay their welcome, or that the boys, as they had come to be known, would regret their kind invitation; but they truly loved having the girls there, to the point where Drew removed one of the fence panels in the backyard, and put in a wooden gate so the girls could just go straight there.
    The boys were a huge port in the storm that was Emily. They loved her, and seemed to understand her, and she was sweet with them, and chatty, and revealed things, in a way she never would with Andi, choosing instead to shut down when Andi was around.
    “It’s almost like a veil that comes down over her face,” Topher once said. “I totally get what it’s like because I’ve seen it.”
    “Can’t you talk to her about it?” Andi pleaded.
    “I just do it subtly. Talk about how much we love you, what a wonderful person you are. The couple of times I asked, she just goes into a bit of a diatribe, and we can’t seem to get through.”
    “Oh, God,” Andi had groaned. “I don’t want to know.”
    “You really don’t,” Topher said. “Not because it’s bad, but because it’s just classic teenage hating the parents stuff. It’s meaningless. And it will pass.”
    *   *   *
    Topher is a recovering alcoholic. He will happily mix the mojitos but won’t drink them. He has been sober for nine years, and his life, he says, has never been better.
    Andi knows his routine. Three meetings a week, Tuesday mornings, Thursday nights, and Sunday mornings, seven A.M. If he misses a meeting, which he tries not to do, he will go to one the next day. Nothing is more important than his sobriety, he says.
    Drew, as his partner, goes to Al-Anon. He doesn’t commit to it quite as seriously as Topher does to AA, but certainly in the early days, when Topher was getting sober, Al-Anon was his support system, teaching him how to live with someone using drugs or alcohol, teaching him how to get on with his life instead of becoming enmeshed in Topher’s.
    In much the same way Andi’s life is becoming enmeshed with Emily’s. For when Emily is sweet, Andi is sweet. When Emily is angry, Andi is angry.
    It is the very definition of codependency, as Drew gently pointed out, after months of listening to Andi talk.
    They couldn’t get involved when it came to Emily’s accepting Andi as her stepmother, but they could get involved when it came to drugs and alcohol. That is something they both knew about, and with Ethan refusing to take it seriously, refusing to do anything about Emily’s drinking and, Andi suspects, drugs, the boys are the ones she turns to.
    Maybe the boys can tell her what to do.

Four
    “This is not good,” Drew says sternly, handing Andi another cappuccino from the giant