Joelle Morrow has her focus set on the future. As an up-and-coming lingerie designer, she's overcome multiple setbacks on the road to achieving her dream of opening her own boutique but has yet to be knocked down, leaving her no time to think about...
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With my mind preoccupied with thoughts of my boutique, my designs, and Seb, I barely remembered Thanksgiving was approaching. After all, it was a holiday that'd more or less fallen to the wayside for me. Last year, I'd been in between jobs and too frazzled to head home for the holiday, and before that, I'd been an overeager designer, gung-ho and willing to give up my days off to show my boss I was a hardworking employee.
This year had been shaping up to look the same, because while I did, in fact, have Thanksgiving Day off, I was still scheduled to work the day before and after.
That was before I called my mother to tell her the news, however, because she simply wasn't having it. She didn't want me missing yet another Thanksgiving, and somehow, when I hung up the phone twenty minutes later, she'd roped me into believing the only suitable solution was for me to host my family's dinner this year.
An agreement I began regretting in the days leading up to the holiday. Especially when Aimee's last-minute change of plans had her jetting home for the long weekend and left me to play host on my own. Scrambling, I somehow managed to stock up on food and decorate the apartment with a few cheap knick-knacks, but, like any amateur host, I left the important things until the day of.
With no food prep done and the apartment still needing a good clean, it didn't matter that the night before had been uncharacteristically busy for a Wednesday night shift; I was up at the crack of dawn. Dusting, vacuuming, containing all my designs to my bedroom—checking off each item mentally in my head as I moved on to the next one.
Luckily, I remembered enough from Thanksgiving dinners growing up to know the turkey, no matter how small, needed a decent amount of time to cook. So, when noon rolled around and I got a text from my mom telling me they were leaving their house right outside of Portland, Maine, I took a break from cleaning to follow a simple set of online instructions I'd found for how to best prepare a turkey. And under an hour later, the bird was stuffed, buttered, and ready for the oven despite a fair few trial and error steps along the way.
From then on, the time seemed to pass like lightning. I'd managed to finish cleaning, jump in a quick shower to make myself presentable, and almost had the rest of the dinner fixings prepped and ready to cook when I got a text from Mackenzie telling me they were all pulling up to my apartment complex.
Reaching for a dish towel, I wiped my hands off before heading to the door to buzz them in, and not a minute later, saw them coming down the hall, my mother leading the pack.
"Oh honey, it's so good to see you," she exclaimed, a joyous grin on her face as she handed off the pie dish she held to my dad before pulling me into a hug. Though as I wrapped my arms around her to return it, she was already leaning back to look me in the eyes. "You're not overworked, are you? Tired?"
"I'm good, mom. I promise."
Holding my hands, her forehead creased with worry. "But what about your boutique, Jo? And the loans you've taken out? Have you got a plan—"
