“I can’t even divorce him.” It was the first thing she’d said out loud since Elliot left. “Not only would I lose my insurance, but he could take everything.”
“He won’t,” Bree interjected. “Elliot’s not capable of something like that.”
Days ago, she would’ve sworn on her life that Elliot Hodges was incapable of deceit. That he couldn’t have stood in front of her dining table, confessing in one breath and declaring his lovein the other. But she was beginning to realize she didn’t know him at all.
“I don’t know what he’s capable of anymore,” she argued, her voice empty.
She also realized that they were pulling into Bauer’s for gas. Her stomach rattled, suddenly desperate for a box of day-old donuts. And inside the gas station, between the lobster tank and the dairy case, was Tobin Collier. Her stomach plummeted, and faster than you can sayMamma Mia! Here We Go Again, her maybe-father—a virtual stranger—spotted her.
“Nee-Nee,” he said softly, like she was a bubble he was worried would pop.
“Don’t call me that,” she muttered.
“I’m sorry. Lainey. Of course.” He closed his eyes like he was sifting through boxes in his brain in search of the one that contained what he wanted to say next. “Since you came into my bar, I’ve been thinking a lot about you. How it—”
“Can you move?” she asked, cutting him off. This was not the time for whatever reconciliation this man was looking to have. She suspected there would never be a time for it, but if there was, it certainly wasn’t now. “You’re blocking the glazed ones.”
He sidestepped out of her way, revealing a stack of grease-soaked boxes.
“Are you busy? Can I take you out for a beer?”
She scowled, grabbing a box. “It’s eleven. And no, I don’t drink.”
“Is that a ‘lifestyle thing’ or—”
“It’s a health thing, and you don’t get to do this, you know. You don’t get to dig up ancient history now that I’m an adult who’s conveniently standing in front of you, trying to buy a boxof donuts in peace. I don’t know you. I don’t remember you, because years ago you decided I wasn’t worth the trouble. And I get that you were young, and I get that Camille was…Camille, but you made a choice, and now you have to live with the consequences of that, because I already have. Whether I wanted to or not.”
His mouth didn’t move. It stayed frozen mid–vowel sound, like a beached lake trout. She shoved the box into his chest before walking out the door empty-handed.
“Are you okay?” Bree asked, her tone teetering between wary and concerned. “What happened in there? Who was that guy?”
“Literally no one. Can we just go to your house? I don’t want to see any more people today.” Lainey climbed into Bree’s car and slammed the door shut.
“Yeah. Of course.” Bree pushed the button to start the ignition, and the car quietly rumbled to life. They were silent for a while until Bree cleared her throat to say, “I should probably tell you that, at present, ‘my home’ is the spare bedroom in your grandmother’s condo.”
“At the retirement community?” Lainey asked. Bree’s profile gave up nothing. She checked her blind spot and turned onto the highway as though she hadn’t just said the second-craziest thing Lainey’d heard today. “Bree?”
“Colin and I are no longer”—she moved her hand over the steering wheel as if attempting to conjure words from the air—“a romantic pairing. We’re working on establishing our boundaries as we transition into a platonic partnership and prepare to become co-parents—which is very healthy of us—but we’re no longer seeking a…traditional marriage.”
Lainey shook her head. “What do you mean?”
Bree stepped on the gas and cut over in front of a tractor. “Oh my god. We broke up. Are you happy?”
“What?” Lainey understood everything, and then promptly nothing again. “What happened? What did he do? Do we have to kill him?”
Bree let out a short burst of laughter, her eyes going wide, like the joy had taken her by surprise. “No. Nothing happened. We weren’t right from the start. We were this vacation fling that was never going to last in the real world. When I found out I was pregnant, he said he wanted to be in the baby’s life, but we lived in different countries so…” She tilted her head side to side, likeyou know the rest. “The other night I asked him if he thought we’d still be together if we weren’t having a baby—like, I didn’t even ask if we’d be married, just if we’d still be making a go of it.”
Lainey had that stomach-twisting feeling of staring at a slow-motion car wreck. “What did he say?”
Bree took a deep breath, as though preparing for battle. “He said he wasn’t sure ‘we’d even be in touch.’ ”
“Wow.” Lainey couldn’t imagine letting loose that kind of brutal honesty on anyone, particularly a pregnant woman who’d recently reported crying over a discontinued shade of undereye concealer. “That’s a strong statement!”
“Very. Then he tried to make it better—”
Lainey sucked in a breath. “Oh boy.”
“—by telling me it was only because he was still seeing other people up until I got pregnant since he hadn’t realized we were ‘closed off.’ ”
