Noah barked out a laugh. “By five days.”
“Tell that to my mother.” With her gaze focused straight ahead so she wouldn’t see his reaction, she continued. “She wants to move to Ohio to be near my Aunt Shirley.”
“She’s been talking about that for half our lives,” he scoffed, dismissing the idea.
“Yeah.”
“What’s stopping her?”
“She says she can’t go and leave me with no one to take care of me. She’s afraid I’ll end up…” She stopped herself. Noah didn’t need the whole sob story. “Anyway, she says she won’t go without me and I refuse to move.” Callie shrugged.
“And if you were married, she’d move on her own?”
“Pretty much,” Callie said. “She says that if I had a husband—or even the prospect of one—then she’d know I was going to be taken care of. She’s been talking about moving back to Ohio for as long as I can remember. Unless something changes, she’ll just stay in Jersey forever and blame me for her unhappiness the same way she blames my dad for bringing her to Jersey in the first place.”
“That’s fucked up,” Noah said, his voice hard and his jaw tight.
“That’s Mom.”
She knew her mother meant well, but Callie was not about to give up her entire life to move halfway across the country because of her mother’s fears. So instead she lived with the guilt of being the reason her mother was miserable.
“Let’s talk about something else,” Callie said. “Liv says you’re writing the score for a new documentary.”
Noah scowled. “How about we don’t talk for a while. Drink your kombucha,” he said, gesturing with his chin to the drink in the cupholder.
“Overbearing,” she mumbled, but she didn’t miss the way the corner of his lips turned up.
Chapter 3
Another hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic and still only halfway to their destination, Noah pulled off at an exit in the middle-of-nowhere Connecticut. He was all too aware of the increasing frequency with which Callie squirmed in her seat, each new position causing a momentary flash of pain to cross her face before she shifted and tried again. He couldn’t just ignore her discomfort, even if she was hell bent on trying to hide it from him.
“There’s a great diner up ahead,” he said.
“Perfect. I’m starving.”
The diner was a sprawling maze of mostly empty chrome and cobalt blue vinyl booths. The gray-speckled linoleum squeaked beneath their feet as they followed the hostess to a booth in the back corner of the massive building. The menus were so large they barely fit on the table, their laminated surfaces giving off the smell of lemon disinfectant.
“How did you find this place?” Callie asked.
“I used to stop here when I’d drive to Boston to visit Liam. Now that he and Min are moving to Providence, it’ll probably become my regular pit stop again.”
Until recently, Noah’s best friend Liam had worked with him at Burnett University on Long Island. He’d only lasted a little over a year before he fell in love with Min, who was his student at the time. Min had graduated two months ago, and she and Liam were starting over in her home state of Rhode Island while she pursued her master’s degree and he figured out his next move.
It was hard for Noah to imagine wanting the kind of love that Liam and Min had—a love that pushed them both to completely re-evaluate what they wanted out of life, to risk everything for each other. A love that had the power to destroy a person.Fuck that.There were enough ways to be destroyed by life without adding another person into the equation.
The waitress appeared and Noah placed his usual diner order: a burger, medium, no onions, no pickles, and a Coke. Safe. Uncomplicated.
“What about you, honey?” the waitress asked Callie.
Callie’s eyes lit up as she swept them over the menu, pointing at the items as she ordered. “I’ll have the veggie omelet, and can I get an order of curly fries and a side of Thousand Island dressing? Oh, and a strawberry milkshake.”
Noah knew he was staring, but he couldn’t help it. When the waitress left, Callie called him on it. “What?”
“What you just ordered…that’s chaos.”
She threw her head back and laughed. “No, that’s delicious. I would have thought you’d be over your whole food deal by now.”
“Myfood deal?” he asked, incredulous.
