The pain was familiar. All at once, I was seven years younger and seven times more naive, standing in the freezing winds on Bluebell Point as Teddy Bowman shattered my dreams. He must’ve seen the light die in my eyes because I took a step back just as he shifted forward, arms reaching—I didn’t know for what. They dropped to his sides.
“I’m happy for you,” I muttered.
The feelings that had been steadily mounting in my throat, forming words ready to spew from my lips, were resolutely tamped back down. I heard his scruff as he rubbed his jaw.
“Margot, you might be—”
A bell chimed, rescuing me from any further humiliation. Georgie’s eyes danced between us as she hurried inside with a cup of coffee for Teddy. Her nose tinged pink, she seemed to be shivering in her dress and sweater.
“Sorry,” she said with a grimace. “I would’ve waited outside, but it’sinsanelycold today—”
“No need,” I interrupted.
Teddy accepted his coffee with a small smile. “Your stuff is beautiful, Georgie. I can get to work right away.”
She stared at my profile as he unpacked his camera bag and began drifting through the shop. He looked stiff and mechanical, jaw tense while he moved a few items to better light and snapped a few photos. I tried not to watch him too long, focused on the edge of my lid that I’d unconsciously mangled instead of the strange mood that passed over him.
Georgie, never known for her patience, grabbed my wrist and hauled me into the back room. It was tiny—it used to be a storage closet before Rhett converted it to a mini pottery room—and there was hardly any space between her wheel and the precariously stacked ceramics two inches from my backside.
I wrenched my arm away with a glare.
“Whathappened?” she yell-whispered.
“Nothing,” I said with an attempt at a casual shrug. “What did you expect to happen? That we’d get eloped and have babies in the five minutes you were gone?”
“Well, I wouldn’t have been mad!” She threw her arms up as best she could with another shelf right overhead. It ended up looking more like both of them had been broken and put in casts.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “It’s been seven years. He’s over it, and—and so am I.”
“You sound so convincing,” Georgie replied with a snort.
“He said—verbatim—that he isn’t here for me.” A pathetic wobble stretched through my words.
“Really?”
“Yes,” I muttered. It wasn’t technically true, but I knew it to be true in my heart.
Her eyebrows drew together and her lips pressed into a thin line, her shoulders slumping like a deflating balloon. She looked as if someone told her that Easton had died.
“It’ll be okay,” I said, not really believing it. “I’ve survived worse.”Thatwas true. “We have Serena’s rehearsal dinner, the wedding, and Fallfest. Let’s focus on that, okay?” The words tilted awkwardly on my tongue, an unnatural distraction from the thing I really didn’t want to discuss.
Teddy was gone when we resurfaced.
It stung a little. The air still smelled faintly like his cologne—proof he’d been here, proof he was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Icurled up on my mother’s couch, a steaming mug of tea cupped in my palms.
I’d written for hours all afternoon—but not about what I thought. Instead of ripping my manuscript apart or mining for gold with a new idea, I read it again, with fresh eyes.
The words flowed effortlessly afterward. I didn’t touch the core of my novel, which immortalized our community and the special kind of magic found in Bluebell Cove. My main character, however, needed some work. It was cathartic in a way. The stupid things I’d done and said were no longer justified—they wereflaws.
She’d grow eventually. The reader would just have to give her time.
I was about to call Priscilla, an agent I got along well with, when the apartment door unexpectedly swung open. My mother moseyed inside, a wide grin on her face and a huge paper bag in her arms.
“The diner’s not closed yet,” I said, watching curiously as she set it down on the coffee table with a crinkle and a dull thunk.
