A moment ago, she was just a woman who I met at my first catered event when I first moved here. She stepped into the kitchen as the event was winding down and I was cleaning up. Sometimes guests come into the back to ask for recipes. Often enough those conversations turn into new jobs, and Deanna had been thrilled to learn I lived nearby, and wouldn’t I love to partner with a small, local brewery for regular events?
And now she was the woman who would have disowned her son for having married me.
“You two know each other?” Logan supplies as the silence in the room stretches uncomfortably long; that is the understatement of the century.
My mouth opens to try to form some kind of answer, but words don’t work.
I swallow. My heart is thundering in my chest. I don’t know how to answer that question.
I know every freckle on that man’s ass. I know he thinks he doesn’t snore when he sleeps, but he does, and he gives himself the hiccups if he tries to rush through his morning routine, and if you tickle the spot just above his left hip, he will drop whatever he’s holding.
With every growing second, I feel like the floor is dropping out beneath me and hope it will just swallow me up and get me out of here. Simultaneously I’m sweaty, hot, cold, and clammy.
I meet Shawn’s eyes, and mentally beg him, pleading with my eyes,do not, do not, DO NOT tell them.I live here. I need this job. I need everything to stay as it is.
He has never been particularly good at receiving my messages.
“That’s—” he stammers, his voice coming out a little strangled, “Elise.”
Deanna’s brow wrinkles in confusion. “Yes, this is Elise.”
“She works at the brewery,” Aiden puts in, unhelpfully.
“Partners with,” I correct, almost out of rote memory. “I cater some events.”
“She makes these AMAZING stuffed mushrooms bites—” Aiden starts to say, because he has eaten entire trays of those, when Logan cuts him off with a hand on his shoulder.
Shawn takes in a sharp breath, his shoulders relaxing the slightest bit. What did he think I was doing here?
It only digs in a little that apparently his mother doesn’t even remember my name from when he tried to introduce me to the family all those years ago. Then again, why would she?
But wouldn’t Deanna remember me? She remembers everything when she talks to me.
After the amount of hurt these people caused me, the hours of therapy I spent sobbing over the fact that somehow, without meeting me, they had decided I wasn’t good enough for them.
It made me pick myself apart, looking for what was so wrong with me—I couldn’t just suddenly reconcile it all with the completely normal and nice and warm people I’d been cooking for and working with for years.
A sort of numb apathy rolls over me. I want so badly to exit this moment that I decide actually, yeah, I’m just going to leave.
“I left my oven on at home,” I say to no one in particular, and I don’t care that it’s obviously a lie. As if I’d come back after they’re all done realizing who we are to each other.
I take a few steps out of the kitchen, brushing past all of them with as little eye contact as possible.
The moment I’m out of sight I break into a jog, the anxious awkwardness seeping into my every movement, especially when I hear raised voices escape the dining room.
I push out the front door and down the long driveway, past my car, and I’m down the street. I can’t stop. I wave my arms around like it can burn off the sheer amount of ick I’m feeling. I make some truly bizarre noises trying to let that awfulness outof my chest—something between hysterical laughter and choked horror.
I think I would take being chased by a wolf over this, honestly. Now that I think about it, that dream was not nearly as bad as this.
There’s the sound of a door slamming and when I look back, there he is again, back to haunt me. Like the first time I saw him today wasn’t enough.
“Elise! Elise, wait,” Shawn calls after me, and my entire body stiffens.
I hold still, not for him, but the sound of his breathing, shaky and hard, reaches me before he does. I close my eyes. Even if I hadn’t seen him in the house, I would know him by the sound of his breathing, even a decade unheard. I can pick it out from anyone else’s by the barest trace of voice that rides in each breath.
I turn around and look at Shawn. Really look at him.
Time has really done a number on my memory of him, turned him shorter and scrawnier and just...less. Because I couldn’t have married a man that dreamy, that just didn’t seem realistic. But he’s tall with a head full of chin-length dark curls; those round tortoiseshell glasses don’t make him look nearly as dorky as I remember.
