Page 36 of Spies Don’t Fall for Their Best Friend

Then we all start responding at once.

“What?”

“No way!”

“You are?”

“When?”

“For good?”

My mom has tears in her eyes, and she hugs Grandma again. This one is somehow even tighter. Everyone keeps throwing questions at my grandparents faster than they can answer them. Charlie is already asking if they’ve picked a house. (They have. It’s in Cloakwood, not too far from mine, and they close on it in a week.) Ledger wants to know when the moving truck arrives. (Their things are being shipped from Portugal and won’t arrive for a couple more weeks.)

Heidi decides “moving home” news requires jumping all around and on everyone. Blake lets out a low whistle. Charlie actually squeals. I can’t stop smiling. Reese doesn’t say anything—she’s just watching all of it.

I look at my eighty-something-year-old grandparents. My grandpa reaches a hand out, and my grandma’s is already there. Like it was automatic, from over fifty years of habit.

Still holding hands. Still choosing each other. Still choosing family. And for one dangerous second, I let myself imagine that same thing with Reese. Years from now, both of us gray-haired and wrinkled. With a lifetime of shared history and ordinary Tuesdays.

Reese’s eyes are on my grandparents, watching them.

More than anything, I wish I knew what was going through her mind right now. Because whatever it is, it looks bigger than this moment.

CHAPTER 9

MELTDOWN INTO MILES

REESE

Idon’t know what it is, but I woke up with—as my mom would put it—my emotional “check engine” light on. I don’t even know why. Seeing Miles’s grandparents again was great. The fact that they remembered things about me was beyond sweet.

So was seeing Arthur and Elizabeth together. That definitely wasn’t what my parents’ marriage was like. It’s what my mom’s relationship is like with Hammy, but they’ve only been married for nine months. It’s nothing like choosing each other for more than fifty years. Several times, I saw Miles looking at his grandparents, longing for exactly that.

So, yes, my check engine light was on even before Miles sent his first text of the day, which almost always comes after I’ve woken up but before I’ve rolled out of bed.

Miles: Good morning. My grandparents have officially decided you’re required for at least some of their ordinary Tuesdays.

I told them I’d check your availability.

His grandparents not only remember me, but they want me around. And I want to belong there more than I should. I stare at the message for a long time. Until the moment I realize I’m picturing myself folded into decades of Lancaster Tuesdays as if I belong in the family, and I shut that thought right down.

Reese: Tell them my ordinary Tuesdays have been previously engaged by overdue books and adolescent chaos, but I’ll see what I can do. [wink emoji]

When I get dressed, I choose my yellow cardigan that says I’m a competent, emotionally stable librarian who definitely did not almost cry over a bookmark. I think it’s really doing its job. I choose my glasses with the swirl of colors that loops beneath one lens and over the top of the other. They’re fun. Plus, my emotions kind of feel all over the place, so they fit today’s vibe.

When Charlie and I are both in the bathroom, getting ready, she pauses in the middle of putting on blush, glancing at me through the mirror. “You’re quiet today.”

“I’m brushing my teeth,” I mumble around my toothbrush.

“You were quiet before that.”

I spit into the sink, then say, “I’m conserving my words. Middle schoolers will require all of them, plus several I’ll have to invent.”

“Reese.”

Maybe my cardigan doesn’t say emotionally stable as much as I thought it did. “I’m fine,” I tell her. “Slightly under-caffeinated and emotionally vulnerable to elderly couples holding hands, but fine.”

By the time I finish getting ready and head downstairs, I’m running behind by a few minutes. So, I grab my lunch bag, toss some random things from the fridge into it, and call it good. I tell Charlie goodbye, put on my lanyard, grab my bag and keys, and stop to pull my phone from my pocket when I hear a text from Miles.