“That was under duress.”
“That was under the influence.” Jo Ellen cracked up. “And then he bailed you out of jail, Maggie! With homemade cheesecake.”
Maggie inhaled sharply, loathing the thought of her cell with a toilet in the corner. “Can
we forget that particular humiliation?”
“And he’s still texting you. That’s called true love, baby.”
“That’s calledbad judgment.”
Maggie stood, because she could not sit still another minute, and walked to the kitchen to refill her coffee, mostly so she would have something to do with her hands.
“I can tell you like him,” Jo Ellen called from the couch, infuriating Maggie because…because…oh, darn it all. Shedidlike him. And she’d take that secret to the grave.
“Jo.” Maggie set her mug down on the counter hard enough that it sloshed. “I am seventy-eight. He is in a motorcycle gang.”
“They’re not a gang!” Jo Ellen insisted. “They’re a riding group of veterans who help stranded ladies on the highway and bail them out of jail.”
“And I find the idea of being with a man—kind or bearded or otherwise—unseemly.” She stepped toward the open door of the balcony to look down on the side yard.
From here, they had a glimpse of the Gulf, which was remarkably still, with no sign of the hurricane hundreds of miles to the south. The sky above it was cloudless, the color of a robin’s egg…the color of Brick Collins’s eyes.
She tried to bury the thought, listening to…a click. Instantly, she whipped around and marched back into the kitchen to see Jo Ellen on the sofa, Maggie’s phone in her hand.
“Jo Ellen Wylie!”
She tossed it on the coffee table and gave the guiltiest smile Maggie had ever seen. “What?”
“What? What did you do?”
She shrugged. “I answered him.”
“You didnot.”
“Mags. Honey.” Jo Ellen stood slowly. “We’re roommates. We’re best friends. We are—what is that phrase the young people use? Ride or die.”
“I don’t want to rideordie. Which is exactly why I am not getting back on that motorcycle ever again.”
“The phrase means I have your back. Which…” She glanced at the phone. “I just demonstrated.”
“You are unwell,” Maggie snapped.
“I amthriving.”
Pinching the bridge of her nose, Maggie felt, very distinctly, her old self rising up—the Maggie from before Jo Ellen had come back into her life, the one with the set jaw and the short answers, the one who had clung to control tighter than ever after Roger was arrested.
“Jo,” she said evenly. “I love you. I am glad you live here. I am glad we are roommates and best friends and whatever other greeting-card nonsense you want to call it. But I am not going on a date with a motorcycle gang.”
“Double date,” she corrected. “And it’s a riding group.”
“Double…” She marched to the phone and picked it up, reading what Jo Ellen had written—had forged, more like.
Maggie:Yes! Bring Randy and I’ll bring Jo and we’ll make it a double. Date, that is! Ha!
“Oh, my…you…I…you…aheart?”
“A little one.”
