“Oh? Do tell.”
She sat cross-legged on the sofa, curling one of her bare feet under her.
I told her about Malcom, Ben, and the projects they had in mind for me.
Her smile was radiant. “This is fantastic news, Jess. It sounds like a lot of work, but I know you’ll love it.”
“I think so too.” My mood had lifted again. “I’m a little nervous about what Ben wants, but also excited. I’ve never had a project requiring such diverse artwork. Still, I don’t want to get carried away. Let’s see what he has to say, what the house is like, and the money he’s offering. It has to be an exceptional deal for me to take on such a monumental project. It’s going to take me weeks, and I have no idea what I’ll do about the hardware store during that time.”
Lily cocked her head. “Isn’t it time to hire some help? You could try a part-timer at first.”
“Maybe. But I don’t want to think about it until I sign the deal with Ben.”
“Fair enough.” Lily sipped her water. “I met Sebastian earlier. He carried some of my suitcases upstairs.”
My expression soured. “I’m surprised he had the time to carry your stuff while preparing for his date. How old do you have to be to be considered a cougar?”
Lily arched her eyebrows. “What are you talking about?”
“I saw a woman going into his apartment a few minutes ago. She looked considerably older than he is.”
“Oh, that’s his sister, Janine. He said he was expecting her for dinner. I think that’s so sweet.”
There was a long beat of silence.
“His sister, huh?” It was hard to talk with my foot in my mouth.
Lily didn’t miss a thing. “You thought she was a lover, didn’t you? Do I sense jealousy?”
“Ha!” My voice was falser than a broken trombone. “Me? Jealous of Sebastian? That’s absurd.”
Lily gave me her shrink face.
“If you played poker, you’d clean out everyone,” I mumbled.
“I do like a game now and again.”
“You play poker? You never told me that.”
She tugged her hair out of an elastic and wrapped it into a messy bun. “You never asked.”
“I didn’t know I had to. Do you play often? When did you start playing?” I lowered my voice. “Are you a gambling addict?”
She laughed. “No, Mother. I learned to play a long time ago. From my ex-husband.”
Wow. That was an unforeseen bomb. I had no idea Lily had been married.
“You have an ex-husband? You never mentioned that—not to me.”
She sighed, her gaze turning introspective. “It was a very long time ago.”
I let a minute pass. “Do you want to talk about it, or is it too dark a secret?”
She smiled faintly. “It’s no dark secret. It’s been so long now that it feels like another lifetime. It was very brief, hardly what you could call a marriage. His name was Joe. My high school boyfriend, my first love, my first lover. He rode a motorcycle, smoked weed, was all wild edges and danger. Textbook ‘good-girl-meets-bad-boy’ romance. My parents hated him, but I was blinded. And when I got pregnant he asked me to marry him. We ran away and got married the day I turned eighteen.”
My jaw dropped. “You had a baby?”
She shook her head with a small, sorrowful smile. “I lost it a few days later. It saved me from more heartbreak, I suppose. We didn’t have anything figured out. We were both about to finish high school, I didn’t have a job, and he worked part-time as a mechanic. We didn’t even have a place to live. After we gotmarried, we crashed at a friend’s house for a few days, and then reality started to sink in. Three days later, I miscarried.”
