“Can’t believe your tenants left before New Year’s,” Riley said, scrubbing the steam wand with practiced vengeance. “That place of yours books like a fever.”
Sawyer’s smile sharpened. “They’d been… messy. I was ready to reclaim it. Reset. Fresh paint, fresh linens. Maybe I’ll stop by the Stag after I check in. We’ll see.”
We’ll see.
My brain lined the words up next tofriendlyand started doing math. I refused to show my face.
Riley slid a napkin across the counter. “I’ll tell him you’re back.”
“Don’t you dare,” Sawyer said, laughing as she tucked the napkin into the sleeve like a secret invitation. “If he wants to know where I am, he knows where to find me.”
My thoughts lodged themselves like a piece of popcorn I couldn’t dislodge with water or prayer.
This was stupid. I had no claim. I had a night and a morning and a promise we’d try, that I would stay through the holidaysand he would stop looking at me like I was already choosing goodbye.
We hadn’t defined anything; we’d barely named the shape of what we were building. But jealousy didn’t care about definitions. It was a blunt instrument…heavy, dumb, accurate enough to bruise.
I took another sip of gingerbread and tried to focus on the window. A man in a red knit hat struggled heroically with a twelve-foot tree and an economy car. A golden retriever wore a scarf and supreme self-satisfaction. The world continued to be adorable. I continued to feel like I’d swallowed a snowglobe whole and the glitter had lodged in my throat.
“Who’s your friend?” Sawyer asked, and the words weren’t unkind.
Just curious. Practiced. Like she always knew the room.
Riley didn’t miss a beat. “That’s Melanie.”
I forced my mouth into something polite and looked over. “Hi.”
Sawyer’s smile was immediate, unthreatening. She was older than me by a handful of years, or maybe she just wore confidence like a moisturizer.
“Hi,” she said. “Visiting or freezing with the rest of us?”
“Visiting,” I said, because I didn’t have a better verb for what I was doing here besidestrying.“From Seattle.”
“Ah.” A small, knowing ah that said a thousand things about how people leave and how some come back and how some don’t.
Riley, determined to be Switzerland and also diplomatically nosy, slid in cheerfully, “Mel’s Lydia’s bestie.”
Sawyer brightened. “Well, that’s practically a golden ticket. Lydia’s running half the town and mothering the other half.”
“Accurate,” I said, managing a laugh.
“Welcome to Reckless River, Melanie.”
“Thanks,” I said, not liking the fact that it already sounded like she was welcomed back, and I was just visiting.
She turned to go, but paused at the door and pushed her knit headband up an inch.
“So…how’s Drew?” she tossed over her shoulder, light as a snowflake, not looking at either of us long enough to watch it land.
Riley’s smile flickered like a candle in a draft.
“He’s… Drew,” she said. “Working too much, pretending he isn’t.”
Sawyer’s mouth curved. “Some things don’t change.”
She went out into the snow then, the bell chiming behind her, the cold uncurling into the shop before the door thunked shut. For a second, the room held still, like the scene wanted to see what I would do with it.
I stared at the swirl of white outside, trying to swallow down the nausea that rose with stupid, humiliating predictability.
