Besides, who didn’t love a fruit kebab? They were delicious and fun.
The gleam in the older lady’s eye had said that he would be paying for these snacks with stories about childhood Eleanor but that was frankly a delight for Shane too, so it was a price that he was more than willing to pay.
From his place in the kitchen, he watched happily as his sister smiled and laughed with her friends, the group of them animatedly discussing whatever book was the topic for this week’s meeting. Eleanor looked as light and carefree as he had ever seen her, and it warmed his heart to see it.
It was a wonderful life, this place that his sister had built for herself. He couldn’t think of a single person who deserved it more.
Not even if it did remind him of how his own supposedly wonderful life had soured, turned into something that made him feel so burned out that every day felt like a trial.
He didn’t want to take every example of his sister’s happiness and turn it into a “what about me” thought pattern in his mind, but his own problems seemed so consuming that it was really hard, at least for now, to see much of anything else.
He ate another bite of pineapple. No matter how tough things got, at least there was pineapple.
And books, he thought cheerfully when he saw the tall, dark-haired friend wave around her copy enthusiastically, apparently to punctuate a point.
Speaking of that, where had his book gone to?
After deciding that the volume that he had snagged from Eleanor’s bookstore wasn’t quite for him, Shane had borrowed his sister’s library card to try out a few things before committing to anything. Eleanor had assured him that he could borrow and try whatever he pleased, but he hadn’t wanted to risk creasing the spines of a copy Eleanor could later sell. So he’d headed to the Magnolia Shores library, which he’d found to be surprisingly well-stocked for such a small town. He’d grabbed half a dozen options to check out.
And then, he realized, he’d promptly left them in his sister’s car, which she had lent him for the day while she worked at the store.
He grabbed the keyring off the kitchen counter and headed back outside, trying not to shiver. He might have been living in California for a while, but it was only October, darn it! And hewasfrom Indiana!
He shivered all the way to the car, grabbed his books, and headed back toward the house, only to pause when he saw that the blonde woman, the one he had startled, was still sitting in thedriveway, even though she had left the house at least ten minutes prior.
Concerned, he headed in the direction of her car.
As soon as he knocked lightly on the window though, he worried that he’d made a mistake. The woman jolted, her eyes wide and her face white as she wheeled to look at Shane.
Her eyes wideandred, he realized uneasily.
“Hey, I’m sorry,” he said when she rolled down her window. “I didn’t mean to…”
He trailed off, making an already awkward situation worse.
The woman let out a watery laugh. “No, I’m sorry,” she said. “Sitting here, alone, in the dark? It’s objectively weird behavior.” Another damp chuckle. “Do you ever just have something happen that tips you right over the edge?”
Given that Shane had basically run away from his life to hide in his big sister’s house because his job was stressing him out too much… Yeah, he understood that.
“Totally,” he said. “I feel like it’s not even the big thing that gets me either. It’s the small one that seems determined to make me feel like a dope for being so upset.”
“Yes,” she said emphatically. Shane was relieved to see that no new tears seemed to be appearing. She waved in the direction of her steering wheel. “This time, it was that my car wouldn’t start.”
His sympathetic wince was not at all feigned. There was something about car troubles that just felt so unbearable.
“The worst,” he said in commiseration. “And you didn’t want to come inside to ask for help? Nope, sorry, that was a dumb question,” he added when the woman’s face immediately screwed up in distaste. “Want me to see if I can give you a jump?”
Her shoulders slumped in relief. “Really, would you?”
“Yeah, of course,” he said, feeling his own sense of marked relief that he had finally managed to say something that helped. “Let me just pull the car around and you pop the hood.”
He hurried back to Eleanor’s car, which he knew had a set of jumper cables in the trunk. There was no way that Ellie had put them there herself, so Shane had to assume that this was another sign of how good this Garrett fellow was for her.
When Shane finally met the guy, he was going to shake his hand.
Shane pulled the car up next to the blonde woman’s sensible little sedan, realizing, only in that moment, that he didn’t even know her name. He grabbed the cables and hurried over to where she stood by the open hood of her car.
“Hey, sorry,” he said, shifting the bundle to one arm so he could stick out a hand. “I didn’t even introduce myself. I’m Shane Ridley. Eleanor’s brother.”
