“That too,” Paige added.
“He is one of the good ones,” Lucy said. She picked up her cup and held it with both hands. “He watched the whole room last night. Every time Eric got near you, he noticed. I was watching him watch you, and he was—” She paused, choosing her words. “Careful. Present. Like he’d decided something and wasn’t making a production of it.” She looked at me. “That is huge, Cara.”
“I know.”
I tried to focus on the present. But I found myself thinking about the reading nook, the two mugs on the table between us, the way he’d looked at me when he saidit was real,like he needed me to actually believe it. I’d spent all these years talking myself out of something that had apparently been true the whole time, and now I was standing here in the morning light, trying to act like that information was sitting quietly inside me and not doing what it was actually doing, which was making it very difficult to think about anything else.
An involuntary shiver moved through me.
“And then he just—did it,” Lucy continued. “Stepped in, like it was nothing. Like doing the right thing was just something he regularly does.” She looked at me. “That is huge, Cara.”
I knew. I did know. What I couldn’t tell her, what I couldn’t tell any of them without opening a door I wasn’t sure I was ready to open, was that it wasn’t just the stepping in that had gotten to me. It was the way he’d asked before he touched my wrist, then held it as if it were something worth being careful with, and how he’d stayed close for just a second after to make sure I was okay.
I was trying very hard not to hope too much. I knew what happened when I hoped too much where Jasper Dean was concerned—I’d spent the better part of a decade on the other side of that particular lesson. But last night he’d said things I hadn’t let myself imagine him saying, and now I was standing here in the morning with my sisters watching my face like it was a text they were trying to decode, and the hope was there anyway, quiet and stubborn and refusing to be sensible.
“I know,” I said again, because it was the truest thing I could say without saying everything.
Lucy studied me for a long moment with the focused patience of someone who already knew more than she was letting on. Then she picked up her cup and looked back out at the parking lot. “Okay,” she said simply.
I looked at her. “That’s it?”
“For now.” She took a sip. “I’ve said what I needed to say. The rest is yours.”
Piper patted my hand once and said nothing, which from her meant everything.
I wrapped both hands around my cup and looked out at the street, at Honeybrook Hollow going about its morning like nothing had changed, and thought about a man waiting on a sidewalk in the dark to make sure I got upstairs safe. The hope didn’t go anywhere. I stopped asking it to.
She rolled her eyes. “So stop calling him nice like he’s a golden retriever.”
Piper pressed her lips together. Eliza, from behind the counter, made a sound that was definitely a laugh disguised as clearing her throat.
“He’s—” I stopped. “Okay, yeah. He’s something,” I said finally. “But I don’t want to talk about it now. Not yet.”
Lucy’s expression was satisfied and carefully restrained. “Yes,” she said. “He is definitely something.”
Piper’s hand brushed lightly against my arm, warm and brief. “You deservesomething,” she said quietly. “Just so you know.”
I didn’t answer. I looked down at my coffee and thought about the light in the upstairs window, and the figure on the sidewalk below, and the way I’d stepped back from the glass and still known he was there.
Movement at the edge of the parking lot pulled me out of it.
Eric.
He stepped out of his car and started across the lot, his gaze sweeping the area until it landed on me. His steps slowed for just a fraction of a second, then continued with purpose.
Lucy noticed him a second after I did. “Of course,” she said under her breath, quiet enough that only I could hear it. “Of course he’s here. He can’t take a damn hint.”
My shoulders tightened. I set my cup down and pressed my palms flat against my thighs, feeling the denim rough beneath them. I didn’t want another conversation. I didn’t want the careful dance, the exhaustion of trying to be kind and clear at the same time in a town where everyone knew everyone and nothing stayed private for long. But the alternative was letting it sit. Letting him continue to interpret my silence as something it wasn’t.
Better to handle it now. Make a clean break. Before it got worse.
“I need to talk to him,” I said quietly, already sliding off the stool.
Lucy’s hand brushed my arm. “You don’t have to?—”
“I know.” I looked at her once. “But I need to. This has to be done.”
I crossed the lot before he reached the window, meeting him halfway, far enough from the counter that my sisters couldn’t hear. Gravel shifted under my boots as I stopped, leaving enough space between us that I didn’t have to step back to hold his gaze. The cool air pressed against my face. My pulse was a little faster than I’d like.
