“Liar,” Michelle says mildly.
“I didn’t. I wanted to...help him with his song. That’s all.”
“That’s not all.” Jessica leans forward. “Scott told me something interesting. Apparently Levi’s been blocked for months. Couldn’t write anything. Andthen he came back from your house and wrote for three hours straight.”
The room goes quiet.
“He wrote for three hours?” I ask.
“Three hours. First real writing he’s done since he got here.” Jessica’s watching me carefully. “Scott says he keeps mentioning your name.”
Something flutters in my chest. I squash it immediately.
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“It means everything,” Jo says. “You’re his muse. You unstuck him. That means?—”
“That means we had one conversation, and he happened to have a creative breakthrough afterward. Correlation isn’t causation.”
“Correlation is absolutely causation when it involves ex-boyfriends and love songs,” Amber says through a mouthful of pie.
Michelle reaches over to scratch Ruffy’s ears. “What did you talk about? On the porch?”
“His brother’s wedding. The song he’s writing for the ceremony. He was stuck, and I just...suggested he write about what makes Dean and Jo work. Two people who are brave enough to let each other in.”
The silence that follows is deafening.
“What?” I ask.
Jo sets down her wine glass carefully. “You told him to write about being brave enough to let someone in.”
“For Dean and Jo. Not for—it wasn’t about us.”
“Sweetie.” Michelle’s voice is gentle. “Everything is about you two. You just haven’t admitted it yet.”
I look at Ruffy, hoping for backup. He’s too busy accepting belly rubs from Michelle to offer any support.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I finally admit. “He’s going to be here for two months. Dean lives one street over. The dogs are apparently soulmates now. I’m going to see him constantly, and I don’t know if that’s a disaster or...” I trail off.
“Or what?” Jo prompts.
“Or exactly what I’ve been running from for ten years.”
The women exchange looks. The kind of looks that suggest they’ve been waiting for me to say this.
“Running from something doesn’t make it go away. It just means you’re tired and lost and still thinking about the thing you ran from,” Jessica says.
“Speaking from experience?”
“Speaking from watching Scott run from hisfeelings for an entire book’s worth of plot.” She smiles. “He figured it out eventually. You will too.”
Jo raises her glass. “To figuring it out. Eventually. Preferably before the wedding, because I need my florist emotionally stable.”
“Thanks for the support.”
“Always.”
We drink. We eat Amber’s pie, which is excellent. We talk about things that aren’t Levi—Jo’s venue drama, Michelle’s new espresso machine, Amber’s ongoing war with a food critic who called her shrimp “adequate.”
