Page 85
“Honestly? More times than I think is healthy,” Matt says. When I give him a look, he adds, “Oh. Rhetorical again, sorry.”
“Remember two weeks ago when I was helping you set up your stand for the Autumn Festival?” I ask Matt, and he nods. “I was trying to write a letter to her, and I couldn’t come up with anything to say. You told me at that moment that I should let go, and I remember thinking that you were right.”
“But then?”
“But then, a week later, I’m meeting her in the flesh for the first time in my life, and it’s like everything clicked into place. Everything in me went so calm, so still, for that brief second before I freaked out, that I just knew. What were the odds, right? What were the odds that I’d finally come face-to-face with the woman I’d thought about for years? If this wasn’t a sign that I should not give up on her, then I don’t know what is.”
Matt lets out a long whistle. “I don’t know if I believe in signs, but I’ll agree that it’s a pretty wild coincidence. And for what it’s worth, I’m happy you hung on to her, even if I thought you were crazy at times and hated watching you be so miserable.” He and James exchange a look. “Seeing you pining over a woman for years when we didn’t know anything about her, except for how disastrously it ended between you guys? It wasn’t always easy to accept. But now we understand why. We’ve never seen you like this, Oli.”
“Your whole face lights up when you look at her,” James adds as he nods. “Hers too, for that matter.”
I try not to let his read of Charlee settle too deep within me. He doesn’t know her, not really. Not like I do. If only things were that easy.
I shake my head. “I’m not sure where to go from here. You should have seen how angry she was when she first saw me. I thought she was gonna rip my head off.”
Matt snorts. “She sure does look feisty.” He elbows James. “Don’t you always say he needs someone to shake him up?”
“Sure do,” James agrees. “Well, she might have been angry at first, but I’m sure she’s okay now, right?”
I concentrate on slicing the potatoes just right before dumping them into a pot of boiling water.
“Oli?” James insists. “Tell me you guys had a talk about it. She knows what happened, right?”
He doesn’t need to say it for me to understand. They were all there when it happened. They all waited with me for days, taking turns on Oliver watch.
I brace my hands on the counter and let out a defeated sigh. “We haven’t talked yet, no.”
“What?” The chair creaks under Matt’s weight. Next to him, James frowns but stays silent. “How has it never come up? Weren’t you together twenty-four seven?”
“We were, but she deliberately said at the beginning that she didn’t want to talk about it, and I respected her choice. And we were just about to broach the subject when Lola banged on the door earlier.”
James and Matt exchange a look before he says, “Oli. You have to tell her.”
Charlee
How did that happen?” Lola asks, nodding toward my ankle.
It’s just the two of us sitting in the red Muskoka Chairs on Oliver’s deck, sipping our beers while watching the sun set on the lake. I could get used to this view. I could get used to a lot of things here, I realize.
“Fell into the river.” I grimace. “Oliver pulled me out.”
She hums as if to say “Doesn’t surprise me.”
“What?”
I whirl toward the booming male voice coming from inside the house.
Lola snorts and shakes her head as she brings the bottle to her lips. “Ignore Matt. He can be a bit over-the-top sometimes.”
“I noticed. Quite the opposite of Oliver.”
“True. But they love each other the most. Oli helped Matt through his first heartbreak a few years ago. They, uh . . .” She glances at me furtively. “They both dealt with it at the same time and got through it together.”
Unease claws at me. I don’t want to know that. I don’t want to know that Oliver fell in love with someone else and had his heart broken.
“That’s good that they had each other, then,” I say, a bit more harshly than I intended.
“Yeah, it was. Matt decided after that disaster that he’d throw himself into what he loves. He quit his job and opened a flower shop. Took us all by surprise, but damn if it’s not the best thing that happened to him. And Oli was there almost every day. He made all the stands for the flowers in the store.”
