“Here here? Like in Liam’s house?”
“No. Obviously not.” Liam and Frankie were newlyweds, he wasn’t about to show up as a houseguest. “I booked the Airbnb until the first week in January.”
“And after that?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you are going to be here from Thanksgiving through Christmas, and New Year’s?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Fuck,” he complained. “I have to fly back because I have six more weeks of PT, but maybe I’ll come stay here for Thanksgiving through Christmas. How big is your Airbnb?”
AJ wanted to say it was a studio, he did not want to have his brother moving in, especially with Poppy next door. But he wasn’t going to lie to him, especially since Niko would discover since he was staying there tonight. If Niko actually did end up spending that much time in Hope Falls, he’d just tell him thetruth if he needed space and didn’t want him crashing for five weeks. “Three bedrooms.”
“Sweet! It’ll be just like old times.”
“Oh shit,” Liam cursed across the room as he patted his pockets.
“What?” Liam’s brother-in-law Duane asked, “What is it?”
“I don’t have the ring. I left it upstairs.”
“Where upstairs?” BIL Roger asked.
“It’s in the library. Desk, top drawer.”
“I can go—” Tristan offered.
“AJ, will you go get it?” Liam spoke over his twin.
AJ blinked, caught off guard by the sudden assignment. He’d never quite figured out how to react in these moments, the unscripted, emotional in-between spaces where everyone else seemed to understand exactly what was expected and he was left guessing at the subtext.
“Just go get it.” Niko nudged him with his elbow.
AJ was halfway up the stairs when the world above the basement dissolved into a wash of sunlight and unfamiliar noise. When he reached the top, his first thought was whether or not he would see Poppy on his ring-finding excursion. He hadn’t seen her since she’d fallen asleep in his arms, in his bed. When he woke up, she was gone. She left him a note saying that she had to go meet Frankie for pre-wedding glam, and she would see him later that day, signed with three xs.
He wondered how their interaction would be with an audience of people around. Would she have the same mixture of vulnerability and mischief she’d had in private, or would her walls be back up? Would she be distant around him, or would he be in the friend-zone? Would she act as if they barely knew one another, like she had at the hospital?
Several people had told him that they’d worried about his behavior sometimes, that it was unpredictable, but never beforehad he worried about someone else’s behavior towards him. He wasn’t a huge fan of the shoe being on the other foot. He’d never questioned how someone was going to treat him. Which meant he needed to try and show up and be consistent with people so they never had to guess which version of him they got.
AJ had heard that when you find ‘the one,’ it’s like holding up a mirror to yourself. You see everything—the good, the bad, and the ugly—and that causes you to grow as a person. He’d only known Poppy a short time, but he was already growing, learning, seeing himself in a more honest way.
If he’d had doubts before whether or not she was his soulmate, his twin flame, the love of his life, or whatever the term was for his person, now…he had none. She was his ‘the one.”
Poppy inhaled slowly through her nose and exhaled through her mouth as it filled with saliva. Of course it would be her luck that her immune system would work just fine and dandy when she was going into a cesspool of germs every day at the hospital, but four days after she quits, on her brother’s wedding day, that’s when it decides to go on vacation and she gets the flu.Cool, cool, cool.
She leaned her head against the cool windowpane and watched the setting sun casting latticework shadows over the patio where linen-wrapped tables had been set for the cocktail hour. When that didn’t give her any relief, she tried to focus on the art hanging in the sunroom, an explosion of oil colors, vintage frames, watercolors, and shadowboxed collages arranged in a kind of joyful clutter on the walls. It still amazed her that her brother had bought this house, for this room, purelybecause growing up, Frankie declared she wanted to have an art room in her house with these exact dimensions. But that was Liam, if he loved you, he built your dream from the ground up and then handed you the key.
The sunroom was packed with women, and the energy was so electric she could taste it even with the heavy, syrupy aftertaste of nausea coating the back of Poppy’s throat. Cora, Frankie’s mom, was at the makeup station, and Jenna was waving a mascara wand with the solemn concentration of a surgeon. Yaya lounged in a peacock wicker chair next to Frankie’s aunts, commanding the room with her razor-sharp wit and her unrelenting commentary about everyone’s hair. Frankie sat cross-legged on the floor, alternately texting and dabbing at her own teary eyes, acting like she wasn’t the most stunning woman in the room in her silk kimono. The trio of legitimate Davies sisters, Pippa, Lina, and Phoebe, were in the center of the room with their daughters, each more glamorous than the last. Their mom, Teresa, and Poppy’s mom, Kerri, were in the corner discussing something, if she had to venture a guess, she would say world domination.
The conversation tumbled around the room, spanning from wedding dresses of yore, “remember when” stories, and the occasional jokes about which of the nurses from the hospital that had been Liam’s long-time admirers—bordering-on-stalkers—might make an uninvited appearance. There was a lot of laughter, and Poppy normally would have been in the thick of it, the shameless ringmaster of all things ridiculous and off-color, but today she just wanted to crawl back into bed and disappear beneath the covers. The sense of dread and queasiness didn’t feel like nerves, it felt like a bad omen. Or maybe, she thought, it was just the Caesar salad from last night at The Castaway.
At six this morning she’d been woken by her queasy stomach. Thankfully, her walk of shame was only about twenty feet, soshe’d been able to make it back to the ADU before she’d been sick. She thought that she’d gotten it all out of her system by ten, but it was after four in the afternoon now and she was still feeling like she had on her high school graduation cruise to Cancun when she suffered from horrible seasickness and spent three days praying to the porcelain god.
Which was why she was blaming the Caeser salad for food poisoning. Poppy glanced around, wondering if anyone else was feeling any sort of effect since they’d all consumed the food from the same eatery. Everyone looked not only healthy, but also they appeared in peak physical condition.
Thankfully, no one had picked up on her being under the weather—well, no one but Yaya. That woman might be ninety, but she did not miss a beat. She had eyes like a hawk, ears like a bat, and the memory of an elephant.
