"What makes you the know-it-all about this?"
He ran his hand through his hair before he spoke. "Because I watched a woman I love die. It changes you. In ways you cannot imagine."
"I'm sorry," I said.
Is that what he was looking for? A new wife?
Which was exactly what I didn't want to be.
"I'm not. I'm a better person."
"What do you mean?"
"I savor everything now. Even how mad I was when I heard you blowing me off to your sisters."
"You saw them. They lose their mind over how the petals flutter to the ground. I tell them I'm seeing someone? They're going to go bananas."
"So, you were lying to them?"
"No."
"Then you're lying to me."
"No."
"It can't be true both ways, Winter. Either you see something between us or you don't."
"I don't know what this is. And after the shit I've seen, if I'm a bit pragmatic and pessimistic, then that's what I am."
"Well, maybe that's it then."
"What is?"
"I don't need someone who's so pragmatic they can't be hopeful."
"What good is hope in a relationship?" I muttered.
His expression turned as icy as the roads. "Hope is everything."
16
Sunday
"And that's the count," I said, closing my ledger.
Mom nodded. "Good. It seems we're down to the penny this week."
"For once," I muttered.
Mom shrugged. "Not everything is messed up all the time, Winter."
I snorted.
“You got the website fixed pretty quickly, and I think that newsletter you sent out to clients about the online reviews has helped too.”
I nodded. I hadn’t even thought about the website getting hacked. “Our clients have been wonderful about putting up more positive reviews where we couldn’t delete the comments.” Some sites would let us remove some of the negative stuff, but not everyone. Autumn and I had been doing damage control all week to get it cleaned up.
She’d been surprisingly astute about a lot of that stuff.
