The Love at First Sight Box Set

eyes. "I know, I know, so you've said. At least tell me you'll go to our wedding with Levi. That way you get to sit at the head table and will be in all our pictures, instead of some rando girl."
Connor was trying to pinch Sylvia's side, but she swatted his hand away. Clearly, they'd had this discussion already.
Joss glanced over at me and laughed. "Yeah, right. Levi probably already has some co-ed on the hook who'll show up in a little black dress that barely covers her hooha."
"Hey," I said, only slightly affronted. "That only happened one time, and I had no idea she would flash the entire restaurant. You can't blame me for a blind date's inappropriate dress choice."
Connor and Sylvia laughed. Joss grinned in my direction, and I gave her a tiny wink.
I had no intention of taking anyone to that wedding, not unless it was her.
I just had to figure out how to ask her in a way so she knew exactly what it would mean to have her there by my side.

Chapter 4 Jocelyn
"Do you want me to drive you to work?"
I jumped in my chair, hand flying to my chest when my mom's voice came from behind me as I was pouring myself a cup of coffee.
"Sorry," she said, settling her hand on my shoulder for a brief touch as she passed behind me.
"I didn't expect you to be awake." I added some cream and stirred it into the steaming hot liquid.
She sat at the small dining room table; the same one my grandma had used when she lived in the house before she passed. It was probably the same table my mom had eaten at as a small girl, though it was hard for me to imagine it.
We hadn't brought much with us when we moved here after my grandma's lawyers informed my mom that upon her death—peaceful and in the middle of the night as she slept—my mom had inherited the house that we now lived in. A Godsend at the time when my mom was drowning, quite literally, in hospital and therapy bills after I'd gotten sick. Neither of us cared too much that the décor appeared untouched since the early nineties. It was paid off, and it was hours away from the place that now reminded us both of the immediate aftermaths of my sickness.
Working third shift labor and delivery at the Eastern Tennessee Children's Hospital, my mom had slowly chipped away at the medical debt, keeping her head down, and her eyes hyper-focused on that and only that.
Now that she could breathe again, I'd realized that for the past two years, she turned that focus to me, like she was trying to make up for the fact that I'd adjusted to life in Green Valley completely without her help.
"I probably should be sleeping," she admitted, watching me push my wheelchair with one hand as I carried my coffee mug in the other. "I could've grabbed that, you know."
"I know," I said lightly.
It had taken me a couple of years to realize that my mother defied my neatly separated little categories.
She was a Blinder. But not really. Nothing intentional or born from malice or insensitivity.
I'd realized long ago that something was ingrained in us Abernathys, something that kept our eyes down and focused on the immediate problem, and we didn't waste time dwelling on the things we couldn't change. It was why my grandma had accepted it quietly when my mom moved to Georgia just after high school. Why my mom never came to visit but didn't complain about the fact we weren't asked.
When I ended up in my wheelchair, it was much the same. Even though Mom was a damn good nurse, she couldn’t protect me from a simple virus that attacked my nervous system. Complaining about it and letting it eat her alive would do no good. But she also didn't really understand my life because of her instinct to focus on what she could control.
She was also a Pitier. But not because she thought I wasn't capable of doing things.
Helping me, doing things for me when she was around, made things easier. In her mind, at least. My insistence to do them myself did not seem easier, and it was something she'd never understood.
"Do you want me to drive you to work?"
The coffee was scalding as I took my first sip, and I hissed when I set the mug down on the table. "I've got my car. I'll be fine."
We'd taken Grandma's vehicle, since that had been left to us too, to Knoxville not long after we moved here to have it modified and the hand controls added.
"I guess I didn't need to get up, after all," she said quietly. "You've got it all under control."
I watched her stand from the table and make her way back down the hallway to her bedroom. Between us, there was no chitchat about my new job because she didn't understand why I wanted one anyway. If we'd had a different relationship, maybe I would've asked her why she became a nurse. How she decided what she wanted to do with her life and what kind of classes I should take to try to map out a course for my life when I couldn't see my future very clearly.
I might have told her about Cupcake Guy, and how I was supposed to navigate dating and guys and my chair when I'd never thought about it before.
Instead, I sat there and sipped my coffee, took a deep breath, and got ready for work.
* * *
By the time I got the bakery, it didn't take long for me to realize two things that were generally accepted as normal within those walls.
Joy was the actual happiest person in Green Valley.
And she was in love with Cletus Winston.
When I met Jennifer Winston that second day, her vivid purple eyes smiling at me as she talked about what she wanted us to