Shane blinked.
“Um. Me?” He pointed at himself.
She narrowed her eyes.
“Yes, you,” she snapped, feeling her temper get the better of her. “Why did you have to go and open your big trap to Garrett, huh?”
Shane looked understandably confused. But then he blinked, and his eyes went wide.
“Oh,” he said. “Ohno. Oh, Ellie, I amsosorry.”
This threatened to take the wind out of Eleanor’s sails, but she’d built up a big enough head of steam over the past few days that she managed to cling to her ire by her fingernails.
“Why did you have to say something?” she lamented, feeling herself grow closer to tears. “You said something, and now everything is spoiled.”
Shane looked genuinely alarmed as he put an arm around her shoulder and pulled her toward one of the comfortable chairs that she’d put around her store. He gestured her into the seat, then knelt at her side in a mirror of the way she’d sat at his side when he was a very little boy and needed comforting after some small child disaster or other.
The thought made the tears start to fall, because Eleanor was amessof feelings.
“Okay,” Shane said in a calm, reasonable voice that did not make Eleanor feel at all calm and reasonable. “Tell me what’s happening.”
The words fell out of Eleanor like a flood.
“You told Garrett that I want to marry him, and then he told me that you told him that I want to marry him, and then I ran away like a chicken, and now he’s going to leave me all becauseyouhave loose lips!”
There were a great number of ways in which her tirade was confusing, unfair, or confusingly unfair, but Shane seemed to take it all in stride.
“Okay,” he said, then paused. “Okay. So. Point one. I would like to reiterate that I’m sorry that I spilled your secret. I assumed that you guys had talked about it, but that was wrong of me. I really am very, very sorry.”
“I know,” she said… a touch sulkily, because it was hard to be immature when the other person was determined to be adult and cool about things.
“Point two,” her brother went on, still in that maddeningly level voice, “I don’t think that Garrett is upset about you feeling the way you feel, Ellie. He seemed… happy about it.” Shane paused. “And he’s not exactly a guy who wears his happiness on his sleeve, you know?”
Despite everything, Eleanor felt her lips twitch at that. That was putting things mildly.
“Which brings me to point three… or I suppose it’s really more of question one, not that it really matters how we want to count it. But what happened? He mentioned to you that I let it slip and then you… did you say ‘ran away like a chicken?’”
Any humor Eleanor might have felt vanished in a flash.
“Um, yes,” she admitted, and then confessed the whole ridiculous thing. And itdidsound ridiculous when she was saying it out loud. Shane also looked like he was trying very hard not to find it ridiculous, as penance for being the unwitting catalyst for all this strife.
“I’m sorry,” he said when she gave him a narrow-eyed look. “I just can’t stop picturing you fleeing the grocery store like it’s on fire while Garrett stands there holding a fish.”
“It wasn’t awholefish,” she protested. “It was wrapped in brown paper. It was totally normal.”
Shane tapped himself on the temple. “Not up here. Anyway, I agree with you that running away wasn’t yourmostsuave move ever. And dodging his calls is also less than ideal. But I very strongly suspect that if you pick up your phone, or better yet, meet up with him, and talk about this like adults, that you’ll find that things get sorted out very quickly.”
Eleanor wanted to believe that quite a bit. But she felt hesitant to do so.
“I don’t know…” she hedged. “We haven’t even been together a year. Is it nuts to be thinking about the future so quickly?”
“So, my boss in San Francisco is this guy named Ewan. He’s a bigwig in the company now, because he was an early adopter of tech way back when. He’s in his mid-seventies now. And he and his wife met when they were nineteen years old, didn’t have a penny to their names. They got married six weeks after they met.” He shrugged a shoulder. “And you can say that they were swept up in the folly of youth or whatever, but they’ve also been married for something like fifty-seven years. Extremely happily so, I might add. And while the tech guy in me feels beholden to point out that anecdotes aren’t the same as data, the romantic in me wants to say that sometimes, when you know, you just know.”
For a moment, he got an even softer look on his face that made Eleanor wonder if Shane wasn’t thinking aboutknowingabout someone in particular. He kept talking before she could inquire, however.
“And besides, I’m your brother. You know I think the world of you. So, if you ask me, if anyone can be that exceptional story,it’s you.” He shrugged again. “Besides, it’s completely obvious that guy is head over heels in love with you.”
“Well, we haven’t exactly used the ‘L word’ yet…”
