“She does deserve better.”
“Good, we agree on something. Did you eat?”
“I’m not finished.”
I blew out a long breath.
“Whether she wants to admit it or not, I could tell at the funeral that Jamie only has eyes for you. Those gray eyes so befitting of her last name.”
Those sad gray eyes I was constantly disappointing.I thought it but didn’t dare speak it.
“She didn’t even return my last few texts.” I’d sent her another few messages after the first unanswered one and she ignored them too. I hadn’t admitted this to anyone until now, but she’d put me on ice and froze me out. As she should have.
Setting her wineglass on the table next to her, my sister looked at me. “I wasn’t going to tell you this, but desperate times calls for desperate measures, and all that jazz. When Mom saw Jamie at the funeral, she was furious. You’d gone to look for her, and Mom muttered some BS under her breath.”
Standing and rising above Billy’s chair, I gritted my teeth. “What did she mutter?”
My sister, not one to ever back down from me, motioned for me to sit down. “Your snarling doesn’t scare me.”
I nodded, knowing full well it didn’t. “Get on with it.”
“Mom whispered to me she was going to have her head on a chopping block at work. Jamie’s head. Because she’d gone to see her and told her to stay away from the service and you. Then she went rambling on and on about how it didn’t mean a thing if Jamie had to come to the funeral for work. She was asked to stay away.”
I was standing again, pacing, and wondering what the hell happened with James and my mom. Assuming the worst, I realized Jamie wasn’t ignoring me because she didn’t care. She was ignoring me because she was afraid of losing her job—which she might have already lost. I’d been alerted to a quarterly board meeting in September at the hospital, but I’d been given no further information on the wing or the donation.
“I see you’re no longer upset about Bella.”
“Don’t be sarcastic.”
“Are you going to her?” She spoke with a broad smile and a twinkle in her matchmaker’s eye.
If she only knew. I was going to fix things and that was it. “Obviously. Well, after I go home and sort out what bullshit Mom has been up to. No, maybe Jamie first, so I can make sure she’s okay.”
Billy nodded at the latter. “Okay, my job is done. Still want to buy me dinner?”
“Order sushi for delivery and put it on my tab,” I told my sister. “I need to call Ryan to book my tickets and a hotel.”
“Food for Ryan too?”
“Order the food, and I’ll tell Ryan to buy dinner on me after he books my travel.”
Jamie
If pressed, I’d deny it. But the truth was I’d cried my eyes out when Ford married Apple.
Never mind that I’d already been married and divorced myself—I’d harbored some strange hope Ford would come back. Then I’d seen the pictures online of the happily married couple and was reminded of that damn prom again.
Early in our senior year, we’d been at a football game, sitting next to one another and cheering on our posh private school team. We’d made a pact to do everything together.
“It’s our last year,” I’d commented. My voice cracked when I said it; the future was as unknown as what our friendship really meant.
“Well, we could tell each other where we are both applying to college. Maybe we have some of the same choices,” he’d snarked back.
It was me who’d decided we should keep our applications private. I didn’t want him to alter any of his plans for me, and my decision would rest primarily on scholarships. “What’s the fun in that?” I joked. But inside, the whole process hurt.
Later that year, after we both knew we were going to Georgetown, Ford used it as an excuse over prom.
“My mom is making me take Regina. Apparently she promised her mom I would do it, and if I don’t, then I can’t skip the formal dinner at the house to go to prom. Plus, we have four more years together. G-town, here we come.”
