“Again. Will, come on, you should talk to them.”
“I’m mad.”
“And puffy. And pukey. I get it. But you were also the happiest I’ve ever seen you when you were with the Morgan brothers. Why let old history with Sheila, of all people on this wretched planet, ruin that for you?”
I take another deep breath. Nausea threatens to drag me back to the bathroom, but I honestly don’t think I have anything left to expel at this point. I pull my hair into a loose bun and secure it with a scrunchie, then haul my ass up from the sofa and join Jamie in the kitchen.
“Come on, let me help you,” I say and get busy unpacking the flour.
“Will.”
“You’re right,” I concede. “But it hurts, okay? They kept it from me. What kind of relationship was it if they kept secrets from me? Besides, what are we buildingtogether? How would it ever work in the long term? Me and three guys. Maybe it’s better it ended the way it did.”
Jamie laughs. “The way you keep trying to convince yourself that you did the right thing is almost endearing.”
“You don’t think I did the right thing?”
“I think you had every reason to get mad over the whole Sheila and Cole sitting in a tree a long, long time ago. But it’s the past. I think you’re so afraid this thing with the Morgan brothers could actually be real and beautiful and precisely what you need that you picked the very first chance you could to walk away from it.”
I stare at him in disbelief as he gingerly takes the flour bag out of my hands and adds some to his whisking bowl. Slowly but surely, the composition comes together, thickening under his care. A whiff of vanilla tickles my nose as he adds some along with a few other seasonal spices.
“Wow, Jamie, thanks for the free therapy.”
“It’s the truth, isn’t it? You’re used to fighting tooth and nail for everything you have,” he says with a shrug. “You’re used to getting your heart broken by men who never deserved you in the first place. Heartache of any kind is familiar territory for you.”
“What should I have done, then? Just forgive them?”
“Give them a chance to apologize, first and foremost,” he replies. “Then give them a chance to prove it was a one-time mistake. If they had any other skeletons in their closet, that would’ve been their opportunity to air them all out. You would’ve started fresh in a way. They’re human, Will. They’re not perfect.”
“Perfection is unattainable, anyway,” I mutter.
He does make a point, though. I’ve had the same thought running through my head. I let my emotions get the better of me, but I’ve yet to find much fault in my reaction.
“But can you blame me?” I ask Jamie. “It’s Sheila. Of all the women in the world, it had to be her.”
“It could’ve been anyone,” he says. “And frankly, with the rumors I’ve heard about that woman since we’ve been organizing weddings for the upper class of this city, I’m not that surprised either.”
“What do you mean?”
He adds cranberries into the mix while I turn the stove on and drizzle a bit of oil in a frying pan.
“Sheila Madison married young. She had Terrence when she was like nineteen or something,” Jamie says.
“I knew that.”
“Well, she didn’t grow up in society,” he replies. “She grew up in the Bronx. It’s a mystery as to how she and Mr. Madison got together in the first place.”
“What do the rumors say?”
“They supposedly met at an exotic dance club, though the locations vary. Some said the Bowery, others Upper East Side. It’s a little blurry, but apparently, she wooed him with her sexy dance moves.”
I feel green around the gills all of a sudden. “As if I wasn’t nauseated enough.”
“Point is,” Jamie laughs, “the woman was a gold digger. Still is. I’ll bet she got it on with Cole, thinking he wasgoing to make a Morgan out of her: young widow, easy on the eyes, preteen son. She squandered the money she got from her dead hubby, that much I know for sure.”
“But Cole wouldn’t marry her.”
“Exactly, so what does the woman do?”
