About

Being an elementary school counselor has always been my dream job. Not because I have some weird obsession with tiny humans carrying backpacks bigger than their bodies. No. I wanted to become a counselor because of Mrs. McKim. She was my third-grade counselor. Quite honestly, she was my hero. My mother died in a horrible car accident when I was eight. One minute, I had a mom. The next, I had relatives whispering in hallways and a father who looked like someone had reached inside his chest and ripped his heart straight out. I’d never seen a grown man fall apart the way my dad did. He didn’t know how to be a father without my mother beside him. And I didn’t know how to be a daughter without her. So while my dad spent most of his days and nights at his stepbrother Keenan’s house, trying to figure out how to keep breathing after losing the love of his life, I was passed around from relative to relative like a very emotionally unstable hot potato. Which was probably why Mrs. McKim became so important to me. She didn’t try to fix me. She didn’t tell me everything would be okay. She just sat with me. She listened. She let me cry. And somehow, she made an eight-year-old girl who had just lost her entire world feel like she still had somewhere safe to land. I never forgot that. So when I grew up, I decided I wanted to be that person for someone else. That safe place. The person who noticed when a kid wasn’t okay. The adult who could make a child feel a little less alone when life decided to be particularly cruel. So, I finished school as quickly as humanly possible because I was determined to get into a school and start doing what I’d spent years preparing to do. And then, a few weeks after graduation, my dad’s stepbrother called. Keenan. The same Keenan whose house my father practically lived in after my mother died. The same Keenan I had spent very little time around. The same Keenan I had never quite managed to call Uncle because, well… He wasn’t really my uncle. He was my dad’s stepbrother. And that distinction had always felt important to me. “Your old man tells me you’re done with school. Congratulations, kid. Now that you’re ready to join the real world, you looking for a job?” He asked. And that was how I ended up accepting a position as the new school counselor at Horizon Ridge Elementary. Where Keenan happened to be the principal. Which meant I was going to be working with my dad’s stepbrother. Which was already mildly awkward. But it gets better, because the first time I walked into his office as an employee, I discovered something I had somehow failed to notice during the entirety of my childhood. Keenan had gotten hot. Like… really hot. And suddenly, calling him Uncle wasn’t the only thing I was uncomfortable with. Because there are worse things than getting your dream job… Like getting your dream job and discovering your boss is the ridiculously attractive man who also just so happens to be your father’s stepbrother. Welcome to Horizon Ridge Elementary. Where I came to save emotionally unstable children… Yeah. Wish me luck.