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Unless of course it was her.

I could love Larissa no matter what. That was out of my control.

We watched each other. Her leaning on the counter and me standing by the table.

I could swear for a split second that her eyes dropped to my mouth.

Maybe they did.

I would have been happier with you.

She turned and went to serve herself breakfast and the moment passed. I sat down to eat, pretending I was fine. But I wasn’t. Not really.

I meant what I said: I didn’t want her to need me. I wanted her to want me. It wasn’t the same thing.

But even if she did, it wouldn’t matter.

46

LARISSA

This looks badass,” Lexi said, scrolling through the pictures of the graze tables on my phone. We were at a boba place in Brooklyn Park. It was the first time I’d seen my best friend in over a month. I’d been busy and she got two new jobs on the other side of town.

Lexi walked out of Donna’s about three minutes after I did and the cook she was dating went with her. Donna and Janessa had to start waiting tables again since they were down half their staff. It made me feel vindicated every time I thought about it.

“Thanks. So do you like the new restaurants?” I asked, sipping my boba.

She gave me a one-shoulder shrug. “My morning job is Pancake Disco. Closer to my house at least. And the night one has a bar. Tips are better. To be honest, I only stayed at Donna’s as long as I did because you worked there.”

I gave her a soft smile.

“Chris did this with you?” she asked, zooming in on a graze board photo.

“He did.”

Chris poured every moment he had into helping me with this right up until his vacation was over and he had to go back to work. Then he helped me when he got home and on his days off.

I got business cards made to leave on the tables for any event I might get to do. And I came up with a name: Board & Sweet, nut-free grazing by Larissa.

We made six graze tables. We reused the same meat and cheese on all of them to save money. It was almost rancid by the time we got all the pictures we needed, as the whole photo staging took a week to pull off.

We did the tables in different locations. One on Chris’s neighbor’s marble kitchen countertop, another one in an event room in a hotel that one of my old customers worked at. We had to set it up at 9:00 p.m. after their last event had cleared out, which sucked because Chris and I didn’t get home that night until after midnight, but it was worth it. The chairs in the background still had the fancy covers on them from the wedding, which made it look like I’d catered a real event. The last three we did in the living room and took tight shots so you couldn’t tell where we were.

I styled them all differently. Used different flowers, different colored cupcakes. And I paper quilled something for each of them. The quilling was an extra step. It took me hours to do each one, but it made my tables special and different from anything else that was out there. I’d charge extra for it, but it could be personalized to the event and they got to keep the decoration.

I priced out each table for twenty-five, fifty, and seventy-five people, with a contact option to message me for a quote for larger parties.

This morning I’d emailed all my previous graze board and snackle box customers a link to the new website. All the people who’d bought things from me over the years who would hopefully consider me for their next special event.

Now I waited.

And the waiting was terrible.

The cost of everything came in at twice what I thought it would. Almost two thousand dollars—and Chris co-signed for all of it.

The dessert and sandwich tables were not in my original plans, but when I told Chris my ideas and showed him the tiered sandwich setups from my vision board, he wanted me to have it. He said if we were going to do it, we should do it right and that more options meant more orders. Then, like he wasn’t already doing enough, I came home from doing deliveries a few weeks ago to find a wall of wire racks off the kitchen. He’d filled the living room with folding tables for graze table production and bought two extra fridges for the garage. I didn’t even want to think about how much he’d spent and of course he wouldn’t tell me. But it changed everything.

Now that I had what I needed, I was able to do graze boards full-time out of the house—and I could barely keep up with the demand. Since I didn’t have to pay rent, I was finally paying off my bills. My dad’s bills, but still.