“All right. Go drink your coffee.”
“It’s cold,” I joked.
“Go talk to her.” He hung up.
I stood at the railing for a long time after, phone against my thigh, looking at the river. The mallards had worked their way almost out of sight around the bend. The light was fully up now, the pale gold gone to something warmer. I picked up the cold coffee and drank the rest of it anyway.
The job was something I’d enjoy doing. I’d known that the entire time. The partnership was the kind of work I’d been missing without knowing I’d been missing it—I could see myself in the office above the feed store, could see myself on a long surveillance with a thermos and a camera on the passenger seat; I knew working with Emmett would fulfill me the same way it had overseas, purposeful and clear. I was good at it. I’d been good at it since I was eighteen years old.
But the rest of my life was Cara. I wanted to create something with her. I wanted it with my whole heart.
The rest of my life was a bookshop with three cats and a woman I could fall in love with. The rest of my life was Friday dinner, and whatever came after. It was the stack of books on my dresser that kept growing, and text messages late at night, and her voice on the phone after my shift. The rest of my life was a woman who had saidI read everything thinking about you latelyout loud in the middle of her shop, and then lifted her chin and owned it.
Emmett was right. The Marines hadn’t broken those other relationships by themselves. Those women hadn’t been the right women. Cara was different. Everything in me had been saying sofor weeks, and I’d been listening to it and trying not to listen to it in equal measure, and I was tired of the second part.
I was going to take the job. I’d known that before Emmett had laid it out this morning. The question was never really whether I was going to say yes. The question was whether I could keep Cara if I did.
And Emmett had just told me that the only way to find out was to go to her and ask.
I went inside, put the mug in the sink, and stood in the kitchen for a moment thinking about Friday. About the restaurant. About flowers. About the conversation I needed to have before we had dinner, and kept finding reasons to push past it.
I was going to tell her after our date.
I knew while I was deciding it that Emmett would not be happy with it—he’d said this week, and this week meant before Friday, and I was moving it to after, and I was telling myself it was a small adjustment when it was exactly the thing he’d just told me not to do. But I couldn’t bring myself to complicate our date with it. Not this dinner. Not the first real one. I wanted one night that wasn’t already weighed down by something else. I picked up my phone and texted her.
Me: Good morning. I’ve been thinking about Friday.
Her reply came back within a minute.
CARA: Good morning. I’ve been thinking about you.
Me: Yeah?
CARA: Since Tuesday, if we’re being honest and real. Which I think we are now.
Me: I think we are too.
CARA: Good. Then—I’m glad it’s almost Friday. I keep waking up and counting the days and feeling ridiculous about it.
Me: Don’t. I’m counting too.
I smiled at my phone in the cold kitchen with the river outside and Emmett’s voice still in my head and the two-week clock on the offer ticking quietly in the back of my mind, and I told myself I would tell her after Friday, and I knew while I was telling myself that I was probably going to find a reason not to.
I shoved it all out of my mind. Today I was just going to think about Friday.
Chapter 20
Cara
The days moved slowly. Like the world knew I was waiting for something. I’d checked my phone more times than I was willing to admit, reread the last few messages with the kind of attention usually reserved for documents requiring a signature. Friday couldn’t come fast enough.
But tonight was the Darlington weenie roast night, our family tradition—the loud, smoky, unavoidable kind, with my sisters asking too many questions and my grandmother hovering over me, waiting for me to tell her everything first. I loved my family. I loved them completely. But I was going to spend the entire evening sitting by the fire with a paper plate, nodding at the right moments, and thinking about my date with Jasper.
I drove the short distance from my apartment to the Honeybrook Inn with a tin of shortbread on the passenger seat and the windows cracked just enough to let in the cool early-evening air. The shortbread was wrapped in wax paper and tied with kitchen twine, the way Grandma had always wrapped baked goods. I had doubled the recipe this afternoon because once I’d started baking, I hadn’t been able to stop, and the tin in the passenger seat was warm against the seat belt, and the smellof butter and vanilla and a faint whisper of almond had been filling the cab the entire way.
My hands were restless on the wheel. I had been thinking about Friday for two days, in the careful, slightly stunned way you think about a thing that has not yet happened but has already started rearranging the structure of your mind. I had thought about it while stocking shelves, making tea, brushing my teeth, and lying in bed at three in the morning, staring at the ceiling. I had thought about it enough that it had started to feel like I was going to have to admit it to my sisters tonight, whether I wanted to or not, because my face was going to give it away the second I walked through the back gate, and there was nothing I could do about it.
I turned off the main road and onto the long gravel drive that led back to the inn, and the warmth of the place settled in my chest as I drove. The trees lining the drive had gone full autumn—maples blazing orange and red against the gray afternoon sky, a few leaves letting go and drifting across the windshield as I passed. The smell of smoke from the grill was already in the air, faint but unmistakable.
