“Clay,” Maggie says, warning in her tone.
“What?” He shrugs. “It is. Doing something just ’cause it makes somebody else feel big? That’s stupid.”
“Language,” she snaps.
“Stupid’ isn’t…”
She gives him The Look. The one that could make grown men shut up at fifty paces.
He subsides, stabbing a green bean.
“I’m just saying,” he mutters.
“It’s okay,” I say. And weirdly, it is. “He’s not wrong. It is dumb. Or it was. I am learning from my mistakes.”
“Anyway,” Rose says, as if sensing I’m two seconds away from either crying or throwing myself under the table, “I vote you should come help me at the school when the weather clears. Miss Millie always needs volunteers. You’d be great at organizing the Christmas play.”
“Oh my gosh, yes,” Ellie gasps. “You could help with the costumes. Last year mine was itchy.”
“And you could take pictures,” Nash says. “Your Insta stories were always better than mine.”
I blink. “You follow my Insta?”
“Obviously,” he says, like I just asked if the sky is still up. “You post pictures of donuts and Christmas lights. That’s my entire personality.”
Dallas’s fork scrapes once against his plate. I glance at him, startled. He looks… not mad, exactly. Just kind of stunned.
“You saw that stuff?” I ask Nash.
“Yeah.” He shrugs. “You think Boone’s the only one who knows how to use a phone? We’re not Amish.”
Boone smirks. “I knew about the donuts. Clay showed me.”
Clay lifts his hands. “Don’t drag me into your weird dessert stalker vibe.”
“You were the one who went ‘dang, that’s a good glaze,’” Nash throws back.
“I said the glaze looked good,” Clay says. “Not in a creepy way. In a ‘I respect pastry’ way.”
“Oh, my Lord,” Maggie mutters. “I’m going to die listening to this conversation.”
“You started making more cinnamon rolls after she left,” Nash points out to his mother. “Tell me that wasn’t donut-inspired.”
Maggie ignores him and reaches for the salt.
My pulse is jittering again, but for a different reason now. Maybe not everyone in this room forgot about me when I left. Maybe they did wonder, sometimes, where I was, what I was posting, if I was happy.
“What do you want to do now?” Ellie asks, back on task, because kids are relentless that way. “Now you’re not doing the fancy parties?”
The question lands right in the softest, most unprotected part of me.
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes out.
I don’t know.
I could say it. I could admit in front of this entire table that I have no idea what I want to be, that everything that’s happened the last few years was me riding my father’s tide, that the minute I stepped out of that hotel, I stepped off a map.
