Worse, though?
They reach into their pocket and slide my phone across the table to me. “Can’t help but wonder what she’d think of this place. Bet she’d love it. We all know how much she loves a good lemon muffin.”
I look down at a preview of a text from Mimi.
When I swipe it open, I get a full-screen view of her life-weathered face grimacing over a bowl of something gray and lumpy, accompanied by a message.
Enjoying my oatmeal like a good girl. I know you’re tired of everyone asking you for things, but if you could invent a way for sugar and fat and donuts to be good for an old lady’s cholesterol level, I promise I’ll live forever and tell you you’re handsome every day.
Zen’s right.
She’d love the atmosphere in this place.
But as far as she knows, I’m still nursing my wounds from having all of my research sold out from underneath me in San Diego and the contract I accidentally signed barring me from doing further research in apiology unless it’s for Vince’s buddy’s company.
She has no idea I’m in a little mountain town righting the only wrong I can fix right now. And she won’t either.
Not until I’ve made it better and I can look her in the eye and tell her I did this for any reason other than to destroy someone.
Just because vengeance is necessary doesn’t mean it’s not ugly.
I’m keeping Mimi out of it.
6
Sabrina
I spend halfmy day wanting to breathe into a paper bag. The mad dash that I made to see Laney between dropping Jitter at doggy daycare and reporting back for work helped. As did the fact that Theo gave me multiple paper bags so Icouldbreathe into them.
Laney’s opinion on what I need to do, while right, is sitting heavy.
When my shift is over, there’s no small part of me that wants to go find a blanket fort and camp there forever with my dog, no matter how much I love people. Eight hours of forced proximity with Greyson Cartwright and his massive size taking up every square inch of Bean & Nugget and his growing beard making him look like he belongs in the Tooth and hisyou betrayed mewounded blue eyes have done me in.
I cannot believe he’s my new boss, and I would very much like to wake up from this nightmare and discover that it’s still early January. That I told Emma about Chandler letting Theo take the fall for the damage to the statue of Ol’ Snaggletooth that winter after we all graduated high school, that she called off the wedding before it happened. And then that I’d gone to the bank to get a loan and enlisted the help of everyone in my life to convince Chandler to sell Bean & Nugget to me.
But since this isn’t just a nightmare, I reach deep for someI can do this, go get my dog, peek in on my grandpa at his retirement community, and pretend everything’s fine while somehow finding things to talk about with everyone that don’t make me feel like I’m only asking about what’s up to refill my gossip well, which is most definitely emptier than it would be if I’d spent the day working the dining room instead of the kitchen.
“How’s the new owner?” Grandpa asks me as he studies the chessboard in the brightly lit community center in the middle of his retirement home complex.
I wince. Grumpy? Stone-cold? Vengeful? Yes, I did, in fact, get an email from a friend in construction who got a request for a quote to gut and re-imagine the entire interior of the building right as I pulled up at the senior center. “I’m saving my opinion for later.”
“That’s not like you,” his friend, Pearl, says. She’s in her seventies and retired from being the secretary to the mayor for fifty years, so she knows as much as I do about town.
I hitch a shoulder up. “Everyone else in town loves him so far.”
Pearl squints at me like she can ferret out that I slept with him in Hawaii, he’s pissed at me for ghosting him, and I noticed today that every time anyone said Chandler’s name, Grey would clench his fist and get thislookon his face.
I actively ignore the squint and stare at the chessboard. Not really my game, but I can kind of tell that Grandpa’s losing.
“It’s hard to see Bean & Nugget in someone else’s hands,” I acknowledge. “I’m not exactly impartial here.”
“Should’ve come to me for money,” Grandpa says while he moves one of his pieces.
“I didn’t know until too late.”
“Heshould’ve come to me for money.”
Hebeing Chandler.
