Margot pulls herself out of her seat and joins me in mine, hugging me tight. “I missed you,” she tells me while she presses a kiss to my forehead. “You make life the best kind of interesting.”
“You’re sure you aren’t mad at me? Not even the littlest bit?”
“Daph. He’sbossyand arrogant now.Andhe punches people? You know that’d never work with what I’d accept in a man. If I ever get back in the dating game, I want meek and subservient.”
“You are the very best sister in the entire universe.”
“Not even close.” She nudges my phone. “Call Bea. She’s worried, and she needs to hear from you that you’re okay.”
So I do.
I call my best friend, my bonus sister, and I repeat my story all over again.
And then I somehow sleep the rest of the flight.
Margot’s pilot delivers us to Albany instead of the city, and Bea picks me up in Simon’s car. Well, the car that his security people have been driving him around in.
Not like she was driving her burger bus out here, and she apparently hasn’t replaced her own car yet after an incident with a tree a month or so ago.
She crushes me in a hug, her curly brown hair wild like she’s been running her fingers through it. She smells a little like cooking oil and a lot like some new kind of shampoo, and I swear I’ve never had a better hug from her.
She hugs Margot too, and the two of them have a quick whispered conversation that I don’t even attempt to overhearbefore Margot hugs me one last time and then gets into a car that’s waiting for her at the airport.
Bea gets me buckled in like I’m a little kid again, and I can’t argue with that either. I’m tired, and I’m worried about Oliver, and I could sleep for four days.
That would make a lot of the next week pass by quicker.
And that’s when I realize I don’t have Oliver’s phone number.
And he doesn’t have mine.
We never traded numbers.
We didn’t have to.
“Daph?” Bea says softly. “You okay?”
Everything around me is familiar. It’s home.
And I feel upside down and inside out. “I forgot to get his phone number,” I whisper.
She squeezes my hand as she steers us out of the parking lot of the private airfield. “The guy I saw on that video last night? He won’t let something like not having your phone number stop him.”
“I left him in jail, Bea.”
She grins. “Then you’llreallyknow he loves you when he shows up like he said he would next week.”
I’m tired of crying.
Sotired of crying.
“Tell me everything about you and Simon and the burger bus,” I say to her.
“Everything?”
“Everything. And please don’t get mad if I fall asleep while you’re talking. I missed your voice so much, and I miss Oliver, but also—I’m so glad to be home. I’m so gladyou’remy home.”
“Do you want me to start at the part where you were right that what he did was a forgivable offense and I’d already decided to see if we could work things out when I found out he bought the drive-in and was showing my favorite movie, or do you needa refresher on why we were temporarily mad at him in the first place?”
