Unknown Number: Thank you for a great evening. Tomorrow. I’ll pick you up at 7:00.
Me: I don’t usually like being told what to do, but I guess I’ll make an exception.
The next day, a giant bouquet of roses was delivered to my office with a note.
Just thinking of you makes me smile. I hope these flowers do the same for you.
* **
Present Day
“Morning, sweetheart. How’d you sleep?”
“Good,” I lied. “Thanks for letting me crash here again.”
My twin-size bed in my childhood bedroom was lumpy and sunken in from disuse—two nights on that and I felt like I was ninety—but that wasn’t why I hadn’t been sleeping. Between the recurring nightmares and the deep-seated shame that permeated my soul, sleep was proving to be impossible to come by.
I thought that by coming home for a few days, I would be able to take back some control over my life. I thought that was what I was trying to do the other night with my brother’s best friend and my worst enemy, Sebastian Devereux.
It didn’t feel like control though. If anything, I felt out of control. I never meant to say those things to him. I wanted to mess with him, to prove to him that I was desirable, even if he didn’t think so all those years ago.
Shame ate at my insides. I could already hear Blake’s voice in my head, telling me…
“You’re always welcome home, Lydia. Why don’t you take a seat at the table? I’ll whip us up some pancakes.”
My dad’s voice cut through the noise in my skull. Charlie Wilder had perfected the fluffiest pancakes in the world back in the day. I wasn’t sure if he still had it after all these years, but I was willing to risk it on the off chance he still did.
“Sure, Dad. Thanks.” I forced a smile.
He got to work making the batter, deftly manhandling the bowl as he hummed to himself.
“So, you and Sheila, huh?” I asked. My father had been in a self-imposed dating hiatus for the past sixteen years. Afterthe cancer took my mother, he focused all of his energy on raising his four heathen children. It was strange to see the feminine touches around the house, but a nice kind of strange. And the fact that I had known Sheila Rawlins my entire life was weirdly not weird. As the owner of the Downtown Diner, she was a staple in the community.
He didn’t turn around, but I could feel the grin that stole over his features from my perch at the dining room table.
“Yeah. Thought maybe it was time to get back out there,” he said.
“Eh, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
“The wrong ones never are,” he sighed.
Wasn’t that the truth.
I sat silently at our old kitchen table while my father cooked the pancakes, expertly flipping them on the griddle.
He plated up the pancakes, giving me the middle of the batch—because everyone knew the first pancake was the worst—and joined me at the table with the maple syrup.
“I can’t believe Reid’s married.” I shook my head, shoveling the first delicious bite of the fluffy goodness into my mouth.
“That boy found a good one. You’ll like Claire, if you plan on sticking around long enough to get to know her. She’s good people.”
Ouch. I had been pretty MIA for the last ten, almost eleven, years, but the sting of his words still cut me. He must know that I had my reasons. I hadn’t told anyone about my stupidity, but it had surely gotten around town about what a simp I was. Gossip could run through this seaside town faster than lightning. And put a bunch of twenty-year-old, male-brained idiots at the center of it, and it was sure to spread through town how I spread my legs for him.
The idea of sticking around for a while played in my mind. I didn’t have to. I had options. Limited ones, sure. But I didn’t have to run back home with my tail between my legs. I could go back to my apartment in the city. To Blake.
That thought sent a shiver down my spine. My hand grazed my hip, the spot where the purple bruise was just starting to turn yellow.
“What have you been up to in that New York life of yours? You still with that Blake character?” my dad asked, like he could hear the thoughts that were rolling through my head.
