Page 33 of Not Home Alone

“I told my dad you groveled.”

I bark out a laugh.

She plops down on the sofa with her beer and arranges herself in a casual cross-legged position. “You got a problem with that, Squishy Bear? You humiliated me on my big night. I couldn’t look people in the eye for the rest of the school year. Everyone in Holly Grove felt secondhand embarrassment for me. Except of course for Quinn Whitmore and her friends. She was delighted. So, for me to give you another chance—you would have had to do some world-class groveling.”

Taking a seat in an armchair, I say, “Except that I would never.”

“Then I would never forgive you.”

“Too late. You already told people you did.”

She shrugs. “I’ll just tell people we broke up. When are we going to fake break up, anyway?”

“When you leave. You’re going back to…” I pretend to have no idea where she’s been living ever since she went to college.

She rolls her eyes. “Ann Arbor.”

“Right.” She doesn’t need to know what I know about her. “When you go back to Ann Arbor. I’ll have to go back to New York at the beginning of January. Either to get back to work or⁠—”

“Where’s work again?” She arches an eyebrow. I can tell she knows. I invented that move.

“Sterling and Co. Global business consulting.”

“Right. And you’re—what? Junior vice president of adult trust fund baby operations?”

Cute. “I’m a project leader at Sterling. My title at The Moody Group is senior vice president.”

“That sounds vague.”

“It’s all-encompassing. What’s your job again? Junior executive manager of being happy all the time and babysitting Brock?”

“Close. I’m an event manager at a corporate event planning company. Brock is a member of the team I manage. So it is, in fact, my job to manage him.”

“Even while you’re on vacation?”

She sputters for a few seconds and then snaps, “Is my job description going to come up when we’re pretending to like each other at a holiday party?”

“No. But someone might ask if you like your job or how you got into that line of work. It’s certainly something I would ask you if we were dating.”

“It’s a practical application of my theater degree. I get a 401k and health insurance—with dental.”

I pull at my phone and pretend to type out an email.

“Excuse me,” she says, clearing her throat. “Would you like me to leave?”

“No, I’m emailing my physician to see if I can get a prescription for an antidepressant because that is the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard.”

She glowers at me. “For your information, my boss is considering a proposal I pitched, and it would mean I get to use more of my creative talents. If she lets me. You may not be aware of this, but we can’t all live off our trust funds.”

“As per our earlier conversation, Tucker, I have a full-time job that I’m very good at. I do not, in fact, live off my trust fund.”

“Well, I don’t even have a trust fund.”

“Fair enough. Let’s come up with a story about how and when we got back in touch with each other. I’ll go first—you got home from yet another bad date one night about a month ago, had a glass or two of wine, thought to yourself: How hard could it be to find one guy as hot as Grant Moody? Impossible, you correctly assessed. And then you slid into my DMs on Instagram. I just happened to be home from a mediocre date with yet another supermodel, and I was like—who is Merrily Tucker and why is she so into me? Eventually I remembered because you apologized for being so mad at me for an entire decade. You said you realized I was just an eighteen-year-old guy who was trying to act cool. You forgave me. And you were hoping I would forgive you too, because you wanted a second chance.”

“And you said you’d think about it, but when I didn’t hear from you for three days, I moved on,” Merrily adds. “You kept DMing me, and I didn’t read the messages. Too late. Next thing I know, I’m driving to work, and I pass by a billboard with your sad face on it and it says, ‘Merrily, please give me another chance.’ When I was at the office, I got called to reception to pick up an edible arrangement in the shape of a giant nutcracker prince. I ate his face and then sent it back. One morning I’m in bed and I hear ‘In Your Eyes’ by Peter Gabriel playing outside my apartment window, and there you are on the lawn beneath my window, wearing a beige trench coat, holding up a sign that says, ‘I never stopped loving you.’”

She pauses long enough for me to get the story back on track. “Except, you didn’t get the Say Anything reference, because you only watch Christmas movies. So I rang the doorbell and when you came to the door, I switched the boombox song to ‘Silent Night’ and held up a poster board that said, ‘I would never go to Ann Arbor, Merrily.’ Then I’d hold up another card that said, ‘I would get your number and text you.’ Then I’d hold up one that says, ‘To me, you are perfect… ly insane. I don’t think I can do this. Buh-bye.’”