“Your mom wants you to go to their house for dinner. Do you want me to take you there now or back to the hotel?”
“Let’s go there now, and you’re staying for dinner. You don’t need to eat alone.” My voice is gruff. I don’t mean it to be, butfuck, fuck, fuck.I’m a fool. Ember has moved on. She made a life for herself. Of course she couldn’t wait forever for me.
Honestly, I deserve it. I deserve to feel ripped open. Bare and exposed. She let me go twice, even when she knew she loved me. Even when she knewIlovedher.
Miranda doesn’t say anything more the whole drive to my parents’ house. When we get there, I head straight to my dad’s office and grab the decanter of bourbon off a shelf. Two thumbs of the brown liquid spill into a tumbler, and I take it like a shot.
A throat clearing at the door draws my attention. My mother leans against the frame, her arms folded. “You okay?” She tips her head to the side and gazes at me with concerned eyes.
“No,” I say roughly, pouring more bourbon into my glass. Just one thumb this time.
“Is it about Ember?”
I trace the edge of the glass with my fingertip and nod.
“You know she has a boyfriend?”
Confusion pulls my eyebrows together. “How doyouknow she has a boyfriend?”
My mothers emits a tiny, sardonic laugh. “You’re not going to believe this, but I go to her yoga studio.”
I bark out a laugh.
“I know,” she says, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Ironic, right? But it’s helped me a lot. She’s a great teacher.”
I laugh again and shake my head. Of all the things I could’ve been told, my mother becoming one of Ember’s yoga students would have never entered the realm of possibility.
“She’s engaged,” I say.
My mother tilts her head again, and pity comes into her eyes. I look away.
“The guy seems nice, Noah. He comes into the studio sometimes.”
“She’s settling,” I respond, louder than I intended.
My mother pushes off from her place against the door frame and strides to me. She takes the tumbler from my hand and sets it on my father’s desk. With her hands on my upper arms, she levels me with a penetrating, parental stare. “Is it settling if it’s anybody but you?”
“Maybe,” I admit with a disappointed murmur. She gives me a small smile and backs up a few feet, setting her hand on the back of a chair.
Suddenly my conversation with my dad pops into my head. “You sent Dad to see Ember’s mother.”
Surprise makes her eyes grow big and her lower lip drop away from her upper. “Yes.”
“Why?”
She walks around to the front of the chair and sinks. Folding her legs up, she wraps an arm around her knees and peers up at me. “I never particularly cared for Maddie Dane, but your father sure did. I was jealous, of course, but it was high school. Everyone is jealous of someone. They weren’t good together. She was impulsive and headstrong. She made him crazy.”
Her eyes look far away as she talks, one hand waving in the air.
“Your grandparents died the summer after high school graduation, and your dad needed to grow up. Fast. The vineyard had been my summertime job for three years in a row. That summer, one item on my to-do list was teaching your dad everything I knew about the back office. Maddie didn’t like it. She wanted him to spend the summer with her, doing whatever it was Maddie liked to do at the moment. She was a bit all over the place.”
Mom wrinkles her nose. Even in memory, she doesn’t appreciate that trait.
“He told her he couldn’t, their fights became bigger and more frequent. The rest is history.”
Sometime while my mom was talking, I grabbed the tumbler and drained the contents. Setting the empty glass down, I carefully lean a hip against the side of the desk and look at her. She’s watching me, waiting for me to react. I see the parallels between my dad and Maddie, and Ember and me, but we aren’t the same people. Ember is not like her mother.
“I sent your father there because it was the right thing to do. When I heard about Maddie, I knew he’d want the chance to see her. Not because he still loves her, but because I love him. When you love someone, you try to do what’s right for them.”
