“I think they would,” Trish says.“Or at least if they already are traveling, they could come here for the Thanksgiving dinner, surely.”
“But then we’ll spend our Thanksgiving working.”Vanessa’s frowning even more.“I thought we had a reserve built up just for this, because we were getting started in the off-season.”She looks up at me.
“We do have a reserve,” I say.
But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized that our reserve is basically all our savings.And if we spend it over the next year trying to get this business off the ground and then we fail, we’re all dead in the water.
And it’ll be all my fault.
4
Vanessa
There’s always that one moment youdreadin your life.
When I was a kid, it was the moment when my mom finally stopped telling me to clean my room and actuallymade meclean my room.As an adult, it’s when I have to sit down and go through all my paperwork to do my taxes.
Ugh.
But for me, in my relationship with Jack?
I know that at some point, I’ll have to meet his friends.Like, duh.It’s a thing you do when you’re part of someone’s life, and he’s clearly part of mine.
But he’s so much younger than me, and as the older person, a woman at that, I’m pretty sure his friends will have opinions.Now that the cat’s out of the proverbial bag, I’m worried.He probably has friends who are all ten years younger than me too, and I doubt they’ll all take our age gap in stride.
My friends—Natalie and Sam—will be amazing.They always are.They’ll tease us, and they’ll make a lot of jokes that Jack won’t even get about shows he never watched, but they’ll be happy for us, and they’ll never try to make him feel bad about being too young or me about being too old.They might even secretly wish they were dating someone younger.
Because Jackissuper hot.And he’ll stay super hot longer than I will, even if I were as good-looking as he was at the start.
So when Jack texts me, his words cause a sort of existential dread.
Are you free for dinner tonight?I have some friends who are dying to meet you.
After I’m able to breathe again, I call.
He picks right up.“Hello, beautiful.I hope your morning’s going well.”
“Do you consider having a huge pile of numbers to plow through good?”
He laughs.“Well,Idon’t, but I know you do accounting stuff, so maybe you do.”
“Natalie’s freaking out, because our brand-new business we’re starting in the off-season of a completely different country where we have no connections has been a little slow to start.”I chuckle.“Sam and I both assumed it would be a slow start, but we’re not natural worriers either.”
“I’d like to meet your friends too, you know,” he says.“I think it’s time.”
Back to that again.He’s like a squirrel with a nut.“I guess.”
He’s laughing now.“So I wasn’t imagining it.You have been putting me off.”
“I’m old,” I moan.“They’re not going to like me.”
“You’renotold,” Jack says.“And you’re like wine.You’re for sure improving with age.”
I roll my eyes.“That’s something people say to make themselves feel better about crow’s feet.The reality is, my collagen stores are giving out, and my hair’s starting to quit making the right ink, and my knees complain whenever it rains, and in Ireland, that’s all the time.”
“Do your knees really hurt?”He sounds concerned.
“Not usually, or at least, not if I take my collagen supplement in my coffee every morning, but that’s not the point.”
