“Good. Tell him when you aren’t freaked and do it face-to-face.” She shifted Knightley over and lifted her arm, and I settled back into my spot beside her, and she let the arm come down around my shoulders the way she had been doing since I was a little kid. The lamp threw its soft yellow pool across the two of us. She turned back to her book without moving her arm.
I closed my eyes.
I was still happy. Even now, with Eric in the middle of the day behind me, I was still running on that same low, warm current. I had not expected that. I had expected today to take something from me, and instead I was sitting in my apartment with my sister’s arm around me and a plan for tomorrow that felt like a door left open—light coming through the crack of it.
I fell asleep on Paige’s shoulder somewhere in the middle of the next hour, between one thought and the next.
When I surfaced briefly much later, the lamp was still on, and Paige was still reading, and Darcy had migrated to my lap. Paige looked down when I stirred.
“Still on guard duty,” she said quietly. “Go back to sleep.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too. Even though you’re crushing my arm. Sleep. You’re safe. I’m here.”
I closed my eyes, and the last thing I was aware of before I went under properly was the feeling of the kiss still in my mouth—and the thought of the cabin, and the river, and tomorrow. And how lucky I was to have a big sister like Paige.
Chapter 26
Cara
Iwoke up on Sunday morning with Paige’s elbow in my ribs.
We had migrated at some point from the couch to my bed—I had a vague memory of Paige announcing that her back was not going to survive another hour on those cushions and pulling me up by the wrist—and now she was on her stomach with one arm flung across my side and her hair in her mouth and the cats arranged around us like a small smug audience.
Knightley was between us. Wentworth was at my back. Darcy was at the foot of the bed, watching me with the composure of someone who had predicted all of this.
I lay still for a moment and looked at the ceiling.
Paige had stayed. Not because I’d asked her to—I hadn’t—but because she’d looked at me at some point in the evening, after the phone call, after I’d come back out of the bedroom with my face doing whatever my face had been doing, and she’d simply decided she wasn’t going anywhere. She hadn’t made a thing of it. She’d just refilled her wine and asked if I had a spare toothbrush, and that had been that. That was Paige. That had always been Paige—showing up without announcement,staying without being asked, loving people in the practical and unglamorous ways that actually mattered.
I looked at her now, hair everywhere, elbow still in my ribs, deeply unconscious, and felt a wave of affection for her so strong it was almost uncomfortable.
The whole day was mine. The shop was closed on Sundays, no obligations, nowhere to be, no one to perform functionality for. Which meant I was going to have to actually think about everything that had happened in the last forty-eight hours. The dinner. The stairwell. What he’d said after.
I want you to know exactly what you have done to me.
I pressed my face briefly into the pillow.
I was going to the cabin today. I wanted to see where he lived. I wanted to sit at the kitchen table where he drank his coffee, look out the window at the river, and understand the place that had given him back to himself, because understanding that felt like understanding something essential about him, and I wanted that. I wanted all of it.
Paige stirred beside me, made a sound that was not a word, and pulled her elbow back without waking up. I lay there in the Sunday morning quiet with the cats and my sleeping sister and let myself feel the warmth of having her here. Then the excitement of what was to come. And I didn’t try to talk myself into a more manageable version of how I felt. Some things deserve to be felt at full size.
Paige made a sound into her pillow that was not a word. Then she lifted her head, squinted at the window, and put her head back down. “What time is it?” she said, into the pillow.
“Early enough that you can go back to sleep if you want to.”
She considered this with the seriousness it deserved. “Is there going to be coffee at some point in the near future?”
“Give me five minutes.”
Another sound, this one more satisfied, and she closed her eyes again. I extracted myself carefully from under her arm—Knightley protesting, Wentworth not moving an inch, Darcy watching from the foot of the bed with the expression of someone above such things—and went to the kitchen and started the coffee.
I poured two cups and brought one back to the bedroom and set it on the nightstand, and Paige was already sitting up against the headboard with her hair everywhere, and her mascara migrated south, and both hands extended, and I put the mug into them and she held it under her chin and looked at me with the focus of someone not yet fully awake but paying attention anyway.
“You’re going to Jasper’s cabin today,” she said.
“Yes.”
