“Not bad. Only like half an hour away.” She bats her long lashes and shoots a smirk my way. “What’s he look like? I bet he has the whole scholar vibe on lock. Show me.”
I have no choice. Tabitha has lived through my various failed relationships since high school. Her crush on Simon began when he moved to her street sometime in early elementary school, and by the time we were fourteen and he was sixteen, they’d already locked it down. While I’ve flirted my way through the limited pool in Beaver Creek for the last fifteen years, Tabitha’s been in relationship bliss.
So I don’t protest too much and turn my phone her way. The only photos I have access to are from his author Instagram. It’s limited; mostly of him at events, interspersed between book promo. But there’s one photo—one glorious photo—of him beaming in a bookstore. His dimples kill me.
“Addie, he’scute.” She steals my phone and zooms in on the picture, holds a finger up when I begin protesting.Do not like it, Tabitha. I don’t say it, but she hears it telepathically. “Shut up. I was right. He has hot professor written all over him. It’s like he’s worn, all edges and lines. He’s been through life. He’s got experience. What does he write? Something hot, I bet? It’s giving murder with a literary edge.”
I let out a giggle. “You’re somehow not wrong. Thrillers, but they feel kind of upmarket.”
“Oh my god, are you guys flirting through books?”
“We traded books at the festival. I fear he thinks I’m much cooler than I actually am.”
“You?” Tabitha tilts her head, gives me an unsubtle once-over. My hair is up in a messy ponytail and I’m wearing a patchwork dress I hobbled together out of scrap fabric. “Someone thinksyou’recool?”
“I could go tell Patti you’re not working, if you’d like.”
I eye the doorway into the kitchen, off-white, swinging pantry doors, wooden borders carved with swirls and, obviously, beavers. Patti starts on dinner around now. I can smell the garlic permeating the air. Tabitha ticks up an eyebrow, daring me.
“What’d you do to make him think you were cool?”
“I’m apparently really good at flirting through text and book inscriptions. I believe I told him in slightly different words that he’s mine now.”
Tabitha pauses on her scroll through his page. “Excuse me? Look at you go, Adelaide.”
“I had a brain fart as I was signing his book.”
“No, that’s hot. Go with it.” She looks down at my phone again, taps a manicured nail against the screen. “Why does he look so familiar?”
“Assuming you’ve never read him...” She shakes her head. She reads one book a year: mine. “It’s probably because he used to live here as a kid. His grandma still does.”
“No way! Did we go to school with him? How old is he? He looks older than us. Maybe Simon would know him? I’ll ask when I get home.”
“I actually don’t know. He’s got a few more books than I do, so potentially a few years older, yeah. I don’t remember him, but I could have been totally oblivious. Going by what he’s said, I think he left town around when my mom left, as well.”
Tabitha cringes. We don’t talk about the dark years when my mom ran off with her lover and never came back. I was twelve.Haven’t heard a single word from her since and, frankly, I wouldn’t want to.
“Interesting. He just sent you a picture of a dog.” Tabitha slides my phone across the table. She shifts off her chair and appears by my side, leans close to my ear. “It looks like he’s in town. I bet you could catch him if you left now.”
Sure enough, Zander’s dog Lucy is having a staring contest with a duck right next to the Beverly Beaver statue. Lucy lies flat in the grass, ready to pounce, while the duck just stands there, oblivious. I sigh and make a show of packing up.
“Well, if you’re banishing me,I guessI’ll go accidentally on purpose run into him.”
“That’s my girl!”
Chapter Five
Zander
Lucy grumbles out an unimpressed, disjointed bark. Her nose is in the grass, eyes focused on the green head of the mallard who pays her no mind. She prefers a more layered response to her stare downs and loves a good squirrel chase, but there’s something about the ducks in Beaver Creek that fascinate her.
“You know, I really did think she’d grow out of the duck obsession,” Gran says, thin lips in a smile.
“Never. Besides, she loves the duck stuffie you got for her. If she grew out of the obsession, that would be a waste.”
“Well, now that is true.” She glances up at the sun making its slow, summer descent into dusk. “Would you mind taking me to the pharmacy, darling?”
I straighten from my crouch next to my dog and brush grass from my gym shorts. Gran called as I was leaving the gym, asking if I could help her fix her back deck. I figured since I was sweaty already, might as well stay in my gym clothes and get even stinkier working outside in this heat. So I grabbed Lucy and my old carpentry tools from my former job, before I quit to writefulltime, and headed to Beaver Creek. The whole time I was in the car, my fingers itched to type out a message to Adelaide.
