“How’s your little shop doing?” The question arrived wrapped in a smile, offered like a kindness but delivered like condescension.
I took a sip of wine. “Really well, actually. We just wrapped a reading series that brought in people from both Willowmist Falls and Sweetbriar. Sales have been strong. I’m in the middle of planning an event I’m pretty excited about.” I heard myself starting to lean forward, then caught myself and made a conscious effort to be more boring. “It’s good. Really good.”
“That’s fantastic.” He nodded expectantly. “Do you ever think about expanding? Doing something more ambitious with it? Because I feel like with the right backing, the right approach, you could turn it into something real. More than just a small town?—”
“It’s already something real,” I interrupted, pleasantly, trying not to start something that would be decidedly the opposite of boring.
He laughed, hands up. “Of course it is, I just mean—you’re one of the smartest people I knew in school, Cara. I guessI always figured you’d end up doing something bigger. More ambitious.”
“I don’t really want to be big,” I said. “I want to sell books.”
“Sure, sure.” He picked up his glass and smiled at me over the rim, unbothered. “It suits you, actually. I can picture you in there. Very you.”
I couldn’t tell if that was a compliment or a verdict, so I let it go, which was what I did with most statements I couldn’t figure out.
We drifted into high school territory after that. Who’d gotten married, who’d moved away, who’d come back looking exactly the same, and who’d come back looking like a different person entirely. Eric had opinions about all of it, delivered with the easy authority of someone who’d kept better tabs on everyone than I had, which wasn’t hard—I’d spent most of high school inside the library or behind the Pine & Pages counter with my grandfather. My working knowledge of what our classmates were doing with their lives was very little.
It was somewhere after the entrees arrived that Eric leaned back in his chair with the ease of a man completely at home in his own company and said, “Hey—isn’t Jasper Dean back in town? I heard he’s working over at Twilight Tavern now.”
Something dropped through my chest, clean and fast, and I looked at my plate for a half-second before I looked back up.
“He is,” I said. “I’ve seen him around.”
“Huh.” Eric tilted his head, something moving behind his expression that I didn’t especially like. “Didn’t you tutor him?”
“For a semester, yeah. When he was a senior.”
“Right, right.” He speared a piece of asparagus on his plate, unhurried. “A sophomore tutoring a senior.” He shook his head with a short laugh. “Must’ve been humbling for him.”
I kept my face where it was. The comment hit the way those types of comments do—small enough to seem offhand,shaped precisely enough to sting. There was nothing to say to it that wouldn’t make me look like I was overreacting, which I suspected Eric understood perfectly well. I picked up my fork. “He did fine,” I said, and the evenness in my own voice cost me something I didn’t examine.
“I’m sure he did.” Eric smiled. “Seemed like the type who was always about to do something you couldn’t quite predict. Your sister Lucy was in his year, right? Did they know each other?”
“Lucy and I are the same age,” I said. “Different mothers. She was in our class. You have to remember that.” I said it evenly because the alternative was to make it into something that would require a reaction from whoever I was talking to, and I had never wanted to do that. But for just a moment, I turned the comment over quietly—how he’d said it, the timing, whether he’d known exactly what he was bringing up and said it anyway to get a reaction out of me. That was the thing about Eric. He was smooth enough that I could never quite tell where careless ended and deliberate began, and that uncertainty was its own type of exhausting.
He raised his eyebrows in surprise, or the performance of it—and he said, “Right, of course,” without a trace of embarrassment. “I went to a party once. Homecoming, I think. She was there,” he continued, easy as anything. “She never liked me.” He laughed, genuinely, as if the memory delighted him. “Tough girl.”
She was. Lucy had always had excellent instincts and had never once bothered to hide them, which was one of the many reasons I loved her so much. We’d grown up with the same story trailing behind us—our father had been married to Lucy’s mother when he’d started something with mine, and Honeybrook Hollow being the size that it was, nobody had ever really forgotten it. The small-town arithmetic that people felt entitled to do out loud, usually in front of the children mostaffected by it. We’d handled it completely differently. Lucy had come out swinging. Literally, more than once. She’d gotten into fights in the Sweetbriar High parking lot over things people said, had never once backed down, and had worn the whole complicated truth of who we were like it was nobody’s business but ours. I’d gone quiet instead. Kept my head down and learned early that if you didn’t react, people eventually lost interest. It had worked, mostly. It had also cost me things I didn’t always let myself think about. I hadn’t been at that party Eric mentioned—I hadn’t been at most parties—and that was a distinction that would have required more explanation than I wanted to give Eric Michaelson over a candlelight dinner—or ever.
“Anyway.” He turned his glass by the stem. “Good for Jasper, I guess, if he’s finally figured out where to settle. Some people just take longer to figure out that running doesn’t actually get you anywhere.”
“Joining the Marines isn’t exactly running away,” I pointed out. It came out before I’d decided to say it.
Eric looked at me for a beat, mildly surprised, and I looked back at him with an expression I kept carefully neutral. He recovered smoothly and moved on. And I let him. It was easier to let it go rather than start an argument with someone I didn’t have anything to prove to.
The presumptions started arriving shortly after that, slipped between other sentences the way you slide something under a door—small enough to seem incidental, deliberate enough to mean something.
“This place is great, right?” Eric said, looking around the room with the satisfaction of a man who’d made a good decision and knew it. “I knew you’d like it.”
“It’s really lovely,” I said, and cut into my steak.
“There’s a place in Sweetbriar I’ve been wanting to try. Farm-to-table, very low-key, but the reviews are incredible. I think you’d love it.”
“Mm.” I speared a piece of asparagus. “The steak here is really good.”
“We could drive up to the lake sometime, too. There’s a place up there that does a great Sunday brunch. Better in the evening, though, honestly. The light off the water is something else.” He picked up his glass. “Have you been up there recently?”
“Not in a while,” I said. I reached for my wine. The steak really was good. I focused on that—and the mashed potatoes, which were my second favorite food.
