“Exactly. Lady lumps looky-loo.”
I’d laugh about that later, right now I had more important things to deal with. “Okay, right, well, he’s here.”
She gasped. “No!”
“Yes!” I turned my sister around and pointed her body in the direction where he was, which is when I noticed he was standing with…Jeremiah’s mom, Stacy. “Holy shit, he’s talking to Stacy, Jeremiah’s mom.”
“The only person with Stacy is Jeremiah’s dad, Tanner.” Bailey sounded confused.
My stomach dropped. “Pinstripe suit?”
“Yeah.” Bailey nodded.
“Holding champagne?” I double-confirmed.
She turned back to me. “Yes, that’s Tanner, Jeremiah’s dad.”
“No, that’sRonan. I mean, I’m sure itisTanner, but when I met him, he said his name was Ronan.”
Bailey’s eyes narrowed. “Are you sure it’s him? Maybe this guy Ronan just looks like him. They’ve been working so hard on their marriage.”
“It’s him. I just talked to him. He asked if I wanted to play carnival and sit on his face so he could guess my weight.”
Her face scrunched in an appropriately horrified expression. “Ew, gross.”
“I know. I don’t think he recognized me, and when I said,noRonan I’ll pass, he got all weird and said I had the wrong guy.”
Her eyes widened. “Seriously?”
“Yes.” I got out my phone and pulled up my app. I scrolled through to get to the messages he’d left me and clicked on his profile, then turned it around to show her. “He’s one of those married sleazeballs that goes on dating apps.”
She gasped again. “Oh no. Are you going to tell Stacy?”
Before I could respond, my internal Adam Knight Early Detection System went DEFCON 1. I didn’t need to look, I could feel him somewhere, his presence was like a gravitational force,a tectonic shift in the room’s emotional air pressure. My Adam senses were not wrong. My eyes lifted, and the entire party seemed to snap into sharper focus.
He was easy to spot, he always had been, even twenty years ago when he was just a kid with too-short jeans and a shy, lopsided smile. Now he looked as if he belonged in a cologne ad: tall, wide-shouldered, with that same unshowy confidence that made him seem both approachable and untouchable. His suit was perfectly tailored, but he wore it as if he’d just thrown it on like regular clothes, and his hair was artfully mussed in a way that suggested he’d barely run his hands through it once before walking in. And he was alone. At least for now. No Genesis in sight.
I hadn’t seen him since I moved out, and I felt my entire body go rigid. I’d spent the past week and a half missing him so badly it reminded me of the time I had walking pneumonia. I felt physically ill.
Now, watching him cross the room, I was acutely aware of every single person, including me, in our vicinity—who was looking, who wasn’t, whether my hair was still in place after my blowout this afternoon. I tried to steel myself, but it was like my body had its own muscle memory and was already reacting to his presence, every nerve ending sparking to life as if I’d just eaten an entire pack of Pop Rocks.
He didn’t see me at first, he’d been intercepted by Trevor, who gave him a gentle nod in my direction. Adam said something in return, nodded, and then he was walking toward me, threading the crowd with the casual confidence of someone who’d spent a decade navigating rooms just like this one, except probably in uniform.
He looked at me, directly, eyes crinkling at the corners, mouth pulled in a half-grin like he was about to say something clever. He made it hard to pretend I was the cool, slightly boredobserver I’d tried to be all night. He slid into our little huddle, standing so close I could count the flecks of gold in his eyes. I felt at once exposed and tethered, like he was the only real thing in a room full of holograms.
“What’s going on over here?” He sounded amused, but there was that familiar edge of protectiveness that made my insides do something resembling a triple axel.
“Billie is debating whether to drop a bombshell on Stacy,” Bailey said, never one to let sleeping scandals lie. “Apparently Jeremiah’s dad has been living a double life as—” she paused for dramatic effect—“a Ronan.”
Adam raised an eyebrow, glanced at me for confirmation. “A Ronan?”
Bailey, unfortunately, felt the need to fill Adam in on my date. I was sure she thought he would find it amusing. Spoiler alert: he did not. In fact, the look in his eyes by the time she was finished talking about what a creep he was made me wonder if “Ronan” was going to leave this venue with all his teeth.
Just as she wrapped up by sharing Ronan’s circus comment, an urgent voice called Bailey’s name from across the room. She squeezed my arm and, in her best impression of a CIA handler, hissed, “This isn’t over!” before melting away into the crowd.
That left Adam and me in a bubble of happily accidental seclusion, surrounded by three hundred people and yet suddenly alone. He didn’t move to fill the silence, he just stood there, presence heavy, hands in his pockets, eyes doing that patient, searching thing that made me want to run away and cling to him in the same moment. I concentrated on not visibly trembling, which was only semi-successful.
“Ten days,” he said quietly. Just that. A simple reminder of time elapsed, and the fact that he’d been counting, too.
