JASPER: Friday. Can’t wait.
Me: Same.
I pressed the phone against my chest for a second before I put it back in my pocket. Larry huffed at me through the fence in mild disapproval at being used as a prop and then forgiven again, and I scratched the spot on his neck he liked.
“He says hi,” I told him, low and private.
Larry blinked at me.
“I’m going to introduce him to you eventually.”
Larry blinked again, and I chose to interpret it as approval.
When I turned around, my grandmother was standing on the back porch watching me, holding a dish towel in one hand. She didn’t say anything. She just lifted her eyebrow approximately a quarter of an inch, which, on Grandma, was the equivalent of a whole speech. I looked down at my shoes and walked back across the lawn, smiling and trying to hide it at the same time, and I am sure I did not pull it off.
After dinner, while Grandma was bringing out the rest of the desserts she’d made—a peach cobbler, an apple crumble, and my cookies, the beautiful culinary overkill she was famous for—the kids slowly drifted off in different directions. Noah and Lark went out on the lawn to throw a ball for Lois. Briar went back to the rescue enclosure. Tilly fell asleep on Nate’s shoulder somewhere between the cobbler and the crumble, and Eliza and Nate took her inside to settle her on the couch in the living room with one of Grandma’s quilts over her. The boyfriends and fiancés gradually drifted toward the fire pit Grandpa had built years ago, where the men in this family always ended up at the end of the night after they helped clean up. Grandma went inside to make tea, ignoring everyone’s offers to help, because making tea after a family meal was Grandma’s particular meditation, and we had all learned years ago not to interfere with it.
I ended up at the porch railing by myself with a slice of cobbler, watching the fire pit and the kids on the lawn and the slow, soft settling of the evening into its quietest hour.
Paige walked over and joined me at the railing without saying anything for a minute. Just leaned her elbows on the wood.
“Hi,” she said eventually. “I heard you have a date on Friday.”
“From Lucy. Am I right?”
“Of course, Lucy. But also Jasper. He told me tonight at work—finally. I’ve known something was up with him all week. I’ve been waiting for you to be free of the others so I could have my turn.”
“Jasper told you? I suspected he wouldn’t keep it from you. Glad I was right.”
“Yeah. He did. He’s going to be good to you, Cara. Not because I threatened him,” she joked. “Because he’s into you.”
I looked sideways at her. There was something else in her voice tonight. Not just the warm, supportive sister voice she always used. Something that sounded like she actually knewthings. And I suppose she did. Paige had worked with him for almost a year. Paige saw him five days a week. Paige had been watching him watch me from across her bar for a long time before I had let myself look back.
“How can you be sure?”
“I just know. I see him at the bar. I see how he is with everyone. I see how he’s been since you came back into focus for him. He’s a good man, Cara. He is being very intentional about you. I wanted you to know that I see it, because I think it might help you to hear it from somebody who’s been watching from the side of the room.”
“Paige…”
“I’m telling you because nobody told me, during all that time I wasted with my stupid ex-husband, that I should have been with Hunter all along. I had to figure out for myself that he was a good man, and it took me longer than it should have. We had a head start as friends, and I still almost missed him. I’m not going to make my little sister figure something out on her own when I can just tell her.”
I inhaled a sharp breath. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” A pause. “I want you to enjoy Friday. I want you to walk into it like a woman who knows she deserves a nice dinner with a man who is choosing her. Can you do that for me?”
“I’ll try.”
“I’m not letting you off the hook. Promise me you’ll let yourself have it.”
I looked down at my cobbler. “I promise.”
“Good.”
We stood there at the railing for a minute without saying anything. The fire pit threw a warm orange flicker across the lawn, and I could hear the low murmur of the men talking at the fire, and Lois, was lying at Nate’s feet with her chin on his boot,and somewhere out near the rescue enclosure, Briar was still talking quietly to Larry. The night had gotten properly dark now. The stars were starting to come out over the trees behind the inn.
I thought about Lucy’s offhand comment from earlier, about the Coffee Cabin being creep-free, and the small, loose thread it had left in me. I almost let it stay loose. Then I decided, for no reason I could articulate at the time, to pull on it.
“Lucy mentioned earlier that the Coffee Cabin has been creep-free this week,” I said, casually, into my cobbler. “I noticed that too. Eric hasn’t been around at all. It’s been a relief.”
