“Delilah Grace Smart, you helpedthat boy write a love song while sitting in the golden hour light with your dogs at your feet. That’s not a conversation. That’s a scene from a movie I’d watch on the Hallmark channel while crying into my wine.”
I drop my head into my free hand. “This is a disaster.”
“This is a rom-com.”
I pace the kitchen while Ruffy watches from his post by the back door, still monitoring the fence for Rex’s triumphant return.
“This is going to be a problem,” I tell Mom. “He’s going to be at Dean’s constantly. I’m going to see him every time I take out the trash or check my mail or breathe near a window. And now the dogs are apparently best of friends, which means?—”
“Which means you’ll have the perfect excuse to spend time together.”
“Which means I can’t avoid him! Avoiding was my whole plan, Mom. Avoiding has worked great for ten years.”
“Has it, though?”
“Yes!”
“You’ve moved six times.”
“...Yes.”
“You’ve never stayed anywhere longer than two years.”
“That’s...a lifestyle choice.”
“You once broke up with a perfectly nice accountant because he mentioned wanting to visit you in the same city twice.”
“Kevin was clingy.”
“Kevin brought you soup when you were sick.”
“Aggressively clingy soup!”
Mom sighs. “Sweetheart. Can I tell you something?”
“Can I stop you?”
“Absolutely not.” She pauses. “When you were seventeen and came home from that summer, I told you Levi wasn’t going anywhere. That he was a small-town boy with small-town dreams, and you were meant for bigger things.”
The memory surfaces—Mom in the kitchen, me crying at the table, her voice so certain.
“I remember.”
“I was wrong.”
I stop pacing. “What?”
“I was wrong, Delilah. I was scared. You were so young, and you looked at that boy like he hung the moon and installed the stars and personally supervised the sunrise.” She laughs softly. “I thought if I didn’t intervene, you’d throw your whole future away for a summerromance.”
“Mom...”
“So I said things I shouldn’t have. Made you doubt something that was probably real.” Her voice cracks slightly. “And then you came back at twenty-seven, fresh off your divorce, and I saw it happening again. That same look. Like he was oxygen, and you’d been holding your breath for years.”
My chest tightens. “So you told me to take the job in Asheville.”
“I told you to start fresh. Move forward. Stop looking backward.” She pauses. “I thought I was protecting you. Turns out I was just terrified of watching my daughter be braver than I ever was.”
I sink into a kitchen chair. Ruffy abandons his surveillance mission and rests his head on my knee, offering comfort he doesn’t fully understand.
