“Don’t roll your eyes at me. You can put a front on for everyone else. But I can see right through you, Skye, dear.”
“I can’t let him in again.”
“And why ever not? People change. There’s a lifetime of learning between who you both were then and who you are now.”
Heat crawled up my neck. “He left. I told him that bloody manager would eat him alive, and he left anyway. He wrote a song and sold my name to the entire planet.”
“You told him your truth,” she said. “Good. And then you told yourself a story so sharp you could live inside it and not feel anything else.”
“That’s very poetic for a hallucination.”
“Skye Kerrigan,” she said, and my name in her mouth made me ten and thirty-seven at once. “Do not let history repeat itself because it’s easier than risking joy.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “I’m not repeating anything. I’m avoiding potholes.”
“You’re avoiding love.”
“I’m not…he’s not…” I flailed uselessly.Why was my hallucination of Gran discussing love and Noah in the same breath?
Noah wasn’t here because he still loved me. That ship sailed long ago. She was confused with a fairy tale.
“Gran, Noah is a man who has a complicated relationship with commitment and publicity and his own hair. I am an innkeeper with a budget spreadsheet that could make saints weep. This is not a fairy tale.”
“You are allowed to still love him and to also be angry. You are allowed to need help and also be capable.”
“Is this on a tea towel somewhere?” I muttered.
She ignored me. “That boy broke his own heart when he left. Yours too. You both did what you thought kept you safe. And now you stand here with your eyes clenched sotight you can’t even see the second chance the universe is handing you.”
I sucked in a breath. Did Noah and I really have a second chance at love? The thought was so wild and untested, and yet, it surfaced from the hidden recesses of my heart like a submerged buoy floating for the surface.
“The only thing that matters,” she said, and her voice went low like a secret, “is love.”
I bristled. “That’s easy to say when it’s not your heart on the line.”
“I have very few regrets, Skye. Not telling your granddad about the day I decided to keep the inn even though we’d have to take out a loan? That was a regret—brief. He forgave me before I finished the sentence. Not taking the trip to Greece when the girls were small? I thought we didn’t have the money. We had enough. We would have found it. And the last … is every time I watched you use stubbornness where tenderness would have done the job and didn’t push you to relent.”
Tears pricked hot. “I’m not stubborn.”
She raised one white brow. “You are a granite wall in a pretty dress.” She looked sadly at my worn trousers. “When you wear a dress, that is.”
“I can’t let him come in here and push me around,” I said, still hung up on my hurt.
“No one said you had to,” she said. “And he’s hardly pushing, is he? He’s helping. Let him in the door. Keep your keys in your pocket. That’s called love, not surrender.”
“I don’t know how to do that.” The word “love” in the same breath as Noah felt shimmery and shaky, likesomething as ephemeral as my gran sitting in the chair talking to me.
“You learn,” she said simply. “You learn by doing.”
Silence fell in a soft layer. Downstairs, a phone rang, someone laughed, and the boiler hummed, loyal now that it had received attention.
I wiped at my face with the heel of my hand like a teenager. “If you’re not real,” I said, defeated, “you might be here because I’m edging toward a breakdown.”
She smiled, brief and pleased. “Or you might be edging toward a breakthrough.”
“I hate that more.”
“I know.”
