Healed by Rebecca Brooke

being overprotective.” Sarah wrapped her arm around me. “Come on, sweetie. I’ve got a ton of food in the kitchen.”
    Sarah led me into the kitchen and I almost stopped dead in my tracks. There were no words to describe what was in front of me. It looked like a bakery or restaurant that was getting ready for some kind of banquet.
    So—much—food.
    “Um . . . Sarah, who else is coming for dinner?”
    She led me over to the table in the kitchen, which was almost completely covered with dishes and dishes of deliciousness.
    “Oh, just my sister, her husband, and her kids,” she answered, moving farther into the kitchen.
    My eyes practically bulged out of my head. With the amount of food on the table, I was expecting at least twenty more people. Andrew’s aunt only had two kids—I’d met them at a barbecue last summer. What she was going to do with all that food, I had no idea.
    “What do you want to eat? How about a piece of spinach and feta quiche?” she asked, searching around the kitchen.
    I’d been so distracted when I walked into the kitchen that I hadn’t realized Jess had followed us, until she took the seat across from me.
    “Hey, Mom, what about the cinnamon buns you made?” she asked, giving me a wink. I think she was trying to save me from the quiche, but I was so hungry everything sounded good.
    “Oh! Good idea,” Sarah said. She was standing at the counter, already loading two plates with quiche when, suddenly, she turned and made a beeline for the other side of the kitchen, returning with a plate overflowing with the most delicious looking cinnamon rolls I’d ever seen.
    “So tell me about the wedding plans,” Jess demanded.
    Switching my attention from Sarah and whatever she was putting together at the counter, to Jess, who was practically bouncing in her seat, I answered. “There’s not much to tell really. We chose a date, the first Saturday next April and . . . well, that’s about it.”
    “What about bridesmaids? You have to have picked bridesmaids. Or colors? What about colors?” She continued to ramble, her eyes gleaming, not once giving me the chance to answer.
    I laughed. Her excitement was infectious. It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought about it, but there hadn’t been much time to do anything other than schoolwork recently.
    “You already know them. My sister is going to be the maid of honor, and you and Angie will be the bridesmaids. Besides that, I was really waiting on Andrew to decide how many guys he is going to have so the numbers would be even.”
    Her eyebrows drew together. “You mean he hasn’t decided yet, either?”
    I shrugged. “He might have, but between both of our schedules we haven’t had a lot of time to sit down and talk about it.”
    She looked at me for a second. “Andrew!” she yelled, making me jump.
    A second later, Sarah set a plate in front of me, overflowing with food. It was insane, but looked wonderful at the same time. There was no way I was going to be able to eat all of it. “Don’t worry about the little things right now, you have time. It’s the venue that you should start looking for.”
    “What do you want? I was talking to Dad in the other room,” Andrew said, strolling into the kitchen.
    Although he had a close relationship with both of his parents, Andrew and his father were cut from the same cloth. They liked the same jokes, the same sports teams. While Andrew respected his father as a parent, he also saw him as a friend, a person he could go to with his problems. He talked to his dad a lot. He’d been the first to know that Andrew planned to propose.
    Andrew must have seen the incredulous look on my face because he started laughing.
    “Mom’s feeding you, I see.” He tipped his head indicating the enormous plate in front of me, his smile a mile wide.
    “Yeah,” I answered, completely bewildered about what I was supposed to do with all the food.
    “I made a plate for you too,” Sarah said, bringing over a plate with