Gabby stepped fully onto the lawn mid-conversation, then stopped the moment she noticed me. Her face broke into a smile almost instantly.
“There you are!”
The wedding planner was immediately demoted to someone else’s problem as Gabby turned sharply and pointed at Glen.
“You. Go help your cousin figure out why the welcome gift bags are in the wrong room.”
Glen blinked in offended disbelief. “How do you know I wasn’t already doing something important?”
“Because you’re just standing here.”
He let out a long-suffering sigh. Before Glen left, he glanced between me and Dane once more, as if weighing something he ultimately decided not to say, and then disappeared into the crowd.
The moment he was gone, Gabby crossed the space between us and pulled me into a hug.
It was the kind I remembered from when I was younger. Too tight to politely endure, impossible to breathe through properly, and somehow completely wonderful.
“Oh, sweetheart.”
For a moment, I was too surprised to react properly, my arms hanging awkwardly before I finally wrapped them around her.
“I’ve missed you,” I said quietly.
“I’ve missed you too.”
When she finally pulled back, her hands stayed on my shoulders as if she wasn’t quite ready to let go of me yet.
She studied my face for a long moment, her expression soft but attentive in a way that made me suddenly aware of how closely she was looking at me.
“You look well,” she said at last. “So much like your mother.”
Gabby had known my mom since they were in high school.
Some of my earliest memories were of the two of them sitting at our kitchen table or out on the back porch, coffee mugs in hand, talking for hours while I sat nearby drawing lopsided dinosaurs.
After my mom died, Gabby stayed in a way I didn’t know how to process back then.
She came by every week for months, sometimes with food, sometimes groceries, sometimes just sitting with me so I wasn’t alone.
“She’d be very proud of you,” she added more softly.
I looked away, my gaze drifting toward the ocean. The water caught the light in scattered flashes, and a warm breeze moved through the flowers, shifting ribbons and petals in soft motion.
“Thank you,” I said quietly.
When I looked back at her, I noticed something I hadn’t at first. Gabby was being careful. Not in an obvious way, but there was a cautiousness to her now that hadn’t existed before.
I had always assumed she was angry with me for disappearing from their lives so abruptly. She had every right to be.
Now I wasn’t so sure. Maybe she hadn’t been at all. Maybe she had spent the same years I spent avoiding them, except on the other side of it, trying not to make things worse.
The thought settled uncomfortably in my chest.
I wished she would stop being careful. I wished she would just act like she used to.
And, more than anything, I wished I hadn’t disappeared long enough for that kind of caution to exist between us.
As if she’d caught whatever direction my thoughts were taking, Gabby’s expression shifted, brightening again with sudden purpose.
