“You were hooked.”
“Completely.” She glances at me. “I looked like someone else. Someone who had her life together. Someone who mattered.”
“You were seven.”
“I was seven and already desperate to be more than what I was.” I recognize that feeling. The drive to be someone who can’t be hurt. Someone untouchable. We’re more alike than I thought. Her jaw tightens slightly. “My dad had left the year before. My mom was barely functional. I wanted to be someone who couldn’t be abandoned.”
The confession hangs between us. I’ve known pieces of this story—everyone in Sorrowville knows the broad strokes—but hearing her say it like this, casual and raw, feels different.
“Did it work?”
“What?”
“Becoming someone who couldn’t be abandoned.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. “No. But it gave me something to aim for.”
The highway stretches ahead, and I find myself watching her profile instead of the road. The determined set of her jaw. The way her fingers grip the steering wheel just slightly too tight.
She’s so beautiful it steals my next breath.
“Pull off at the next exit,” I hear myself say.
“Why?”
“There’s a diner I used to stop at when the team traveled through here. Best pancakes I’ve ever had.”
She glances at me, surprised. “We have supplies to get.”
“The supplies can wait.” The words surprise me as much as they surprise her. I don’t know where this is coming from, this impulse to extend our time together, but I’m not fighting it. “When’s the last time you ate?”
“I had coffee.”
“That’s not food.”
“It’s breakfast-adjacent.”
“Gisele.” I wait until she looks at me. “Pull off at the exit.”
She pulls off at the exit.
The diner is exactly how I remember it—a little run-down, a little too bright, staffed by a woman who looks like she’s been working there since the building was constructed. We slide into a booth near the window, and I watch Gisele take in the space with the same analytical eye she brings to everything.
“This is very... retro.”
“That’s one word for it.”
“Maybe kitschy works better.” She picks up the laminated menu, flips through it. “They have seventeen kinds of pancakes.”
“I told you.”
“Seventeen.” She shakes her head. “That’s a commitment to carbohydrates I have to respect.”
God, I like being with her.
The waitress appears—Carol, according to her nametag—and takes our order with the kind of efficiency that suggests she’s done this approximately ten million times. When she leaves, Gisele turns her attention back to me.
“So. Exercises.”
