The text appeared on my screen without warning, and I stared at it for a moment in shocked silence. It was from Sabrina, the first time I’d heard from her since she walked out on me two weeks ago.
Yeswas the first word that came to mind. I wanted to reply that I’d be happy to meet her whenever and wherever she wanted, because maybe she’d had a change of heart. Maybe she realized she’d made a mistake.
But as I began to text her back, tears filled my eyes.Dammit. What could Sabrina possibly say to make this right? How could I ever trust her again? The truth was, I hadn’t spent nearly as much time here in Vermont pining over her as I’d thought I would. I was lonely, sure. But I had a sneaking suspicion that I was missing the rest of my friends and family in Boston more than I was missing Sabrina.
Tears spilled over my cheeks, and I wiped them away as I finished my coffee. On the dog bed, Violet whined.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “People cry sometimes. Didn’t your owner ever cry, or was she one of those eternally happy people?”
Violet just stared.
“Well, I cry,” I said. “Sometimes, I cry a lot, because I miss my friends and my condo in Boston. I had a whole life there, you know? And some random asshole took a picture of me without my permission and ruined my life with it.”
Silence from the dog bed.
“Anyway, if you and I are going to sleep in my grandma’s old bedroom, we need to pack up her things and make it ours. Hopefully, you’ll like it better tonight than you did last night.” I picked up my phone and deleted my half-formed response to Sabrina. She didn’t deserve a reply, at least not yet. For all I knew, she just wanted to ask for that sweatshirt of hers that I’d found in the laundry last week.
“All right, you,” I said to the dog. “Let’s go pack up my grandma’s bedroom.”
10
Taylor
I pulled into Phoebe’s driveway and parked in my usual spot behind the purple Nissan. I wasn’t sure when I’d started thinking of this as Phoebe’s driveway, though, because it wasn’t. Phoebe had never lived here. She’d visited as a child, and she was visiting now. And I needed to remember that distinction.
“I’ll be right back, you two,” I told the dogs in the backseat. “I just have something to give Phoebe, and then we’ll go on our hike.”
I cracked the windows before I shut off the car, laughing at the horrified look on Minnie’s face as she realized I was leaving her behind. This wasn’t part of our routine. Minnie had always been welcome at Margery’s house, but Violet needed time to settle in, which meant not introducing her to any new dogs at the moment.
I carried a stack of blankets and towels with me as I walked toward the front door, but when I knocked, there was no answer. Phoebe’s car was in the driveway, though, so she must be around somewhere. I knocked again, peering through the window, but I couldn’t see any sign of her or Violet inside.
I turned around to find Minnie with her fluffy nose stuck through the crack in the window, watching. “You’re ridiculous, you know that? I’ll be right back.”
I walked around behind the house, and the sight that greeted me sent a warm zing through my system. Phoebe lay on her stomach on a pink blanket beneath Margery’s rosebushes with her feet kicked up behind her and a paperback in her hands. Violet lay on the blanket beside her, fast asleep in the sunshine.
I pressed a hand against my chest, becauseoof, my heart. There was nothing sexier to me than a woman with a dog, and this woman with this dog had just put a serious dent in the armor I’d spent so many years strengthening. I couldn’t fall for Phoebe again, not unless I wanted to get my heart broken a second time.
I cleared my throat. “Hey.”
Phoebe looked over her shoulder with a smile as the sun cast golden highlights through her brown curls. “Hi.”
“I brought some new bedding for you to try in Violet’s whelping box.”
“Good, because she hates everything I’ve put in there so far,” Phoebe said as she rolled over and sat up, leaving her book face down on the blanket to keep her place. “But what makes you think she’ll like these blankets better?”
“Because they came from her owner’s house.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s sweet…or morbid, depending.”
“Comforting is what I was going for,” I said. “Hopefully, they’ll smell like home to her.”
“It’s certainly worth a shot, but…are they clean? Because you’ve just brought me a dead woman’s blankets.”
I laughed. “Yes. These things all came out of her linen closet.”
“How did you get them?”
“Her sister came to the shelter to pick up Dexter today, so I asked her to bring a few things that smelled like home for Violet.”
