She hadn’t run. Not right away. She’d lingered. And then we’d almost kissed. What would have happened if we had?
God, I was in trouble.
I took a sip of the latte she brought me, the one with the extra shots, because she knew I hated sweet drinks unless they had enough caffeine to cause heart palpitations. It tasted perfect. And somehow worse than anything I’d ever had.
Because now I wanted more.
More than coffee. More than a shared history and inside jokes and late-night repair calls. I wanted mornings like this, minus the awkward exits. Maybe I wanted to wake up next to her instead of watching her walk out the door with muffin crumbs on her sweatshirt and a joke stuck in her throat. Or maybe not. I’d just turned forty. Perhaps it really was a midlife crisis and nothing more.
Ozzy jumped on the counter and pawed at the empty muffin wrapper.
I picked it up and held it just out of reach. “Nope. It’s evidence now. Something happened here, Ozzy, and I need to figure it out.”
He meowed in protest. I sighed, grabbed my phone, and opened our text thread like a glutton for punishment. There was her last message from last night, a sarcastic ‘happy birthday,’ followed by a winking emoji that she would absolutely deny using.
No new texts. And no clue to help me figure this out.
I tossed the stupid wrapper in the trash and went to get ready for the barbecue. I lingered in the shower, took my time getting dressed, all the while thinking about Paige and the confusing swirl of feelings flooding my mind.
I arrived late, which in Cassidy terms meant “just in time to get heckled.” The Cassidy property spread out like a patchwork of memories around an old, rambling farmhouse. It felt homey and cozy, shaded by a wide scattering of mature trees. The massive sycamore tree in one corner was my favorite; growing up, I’d climbed to its top more times than I could count. That’s where we built tree forts as kids and camped out under the stars. The grass was patchy from years of games and roughhousing, and the flower beds along the edges had clearly been trampled by children or animals—or both.
The backyard was already full—what used to be just my father and siblings had expanded to include my niece and nephew, my baby sister’s husband, Cade, Spencer’s girlfriend, Lucy, and Larry the Llama, Lucy’s odd pet, who was also the star of her best-selling children’s book series.
Larry was wearing a red bandana and was currently being fed carrots by Tucker’s kids, while Lucy narrated his backstory as if it were an epic fantasy tale. She waved a half-eaten cupcake for emphasis as she explained that Larry had recently made peace with his rival, a goat named Deborah. Spencer stood behind her, grinning like he’d already decided he was never letting her go.
Brody was playing DJ, toggling between outlaw country and 80s power ballads like his life depended on the playlist. Deacon was overseeing the drink cooler with all the seriousness of a man guarding nuclear codes, and Cade—Charlotte’s husband-slash-police-chief in Sweetbriar, the next town over—was running crowd control and passing out jalapeño poppers while wearing aviators and an apron that saidGrill Sergeant, like this was just another Sweetbriar crime scene. And then there was my father, manning the grill with Tucker and smiling like the happiest man in the world to be surrounded by his family.
I met eyes with Spencer, who was holding a beer and wearing a grin that said, “I know things.”He clocked me, turned to Charlotte, and said something I couldn’t hear—but she turned toward me like a heat-seeking missile the second she did.
“You’re late,” she said, handing off a stack of paper plates to Cade like a general distributing orders.
“I’m thirty minutes behind. That’s not late. That’s fashionably overwhelmed.”
“You smell like cinnamon,” she said pointedly as she brushed my shirt with a knowing grin.
My mouth opened in surprise. “That’s extremely specific.”
“Paige brought you muffins, don’t bother denying it. We already know.”
I sighed. “Are you psychic now?”
She wasn’t psychic. I knew this bit of information had come from Eliza. She told Lucy. Lucy told Spencer—big mouth Spencer—who couldn’t keep a secret if you paid him to or even if you taped his mouth shut. Yeah, we’d been doing birthday coffee every year, but this year had included muffins and weirdness, and it was hard to hide the weird vibes from people who knew you well.
She turned to my brothers with a satisfied smile. “That’s a yes. Itwasmore than birthday coffee. Confirmed.” She held her fist out for a bump.
Spencer strolled over, can of Coke in hand, grinning as he bumped it. “Was itbirthday muffinsorI-want-to-kiss-you muffins?”
“I hate all of you,” I muttered.
Tucker popped his head up from behind the grill. “So youdidkiss her. Really?”
“I said no such thing.”
Brody leaned over the cooler. “You didn’tnotsay it, either.”
I glanced toward the llama—the llama—as if Larry could save me from the trainwreck that was my family’s emotional meddling. Larry stared back, unimpressed.
“Can’t a man show up to his birthday party without being emotionally dissected by his siblings and a barn animal?”
