Page 59 of Seven Rules for Breaking Hearts

“There’s only four of us. And strawberry blond does not count as a redhead.”

“Whatever you say, Ronald.”

He shook his head, dimple indenting his cheek as he tried to hold back a smile. “I’m going to kill you.”

The Hummer was packed with passengers now, and with a lurch, it started up the hillside. The whole thing rocked on the unpaved road as our driver shouted over the engine to point out the Wrigley Memorial and Botanic Garden on our left, the Trans Catalina Trailhead on our right. Declan kept his arm around me, holding me close. The smell of fresh, woodsy soap mingled with his sunscreen.

“My parents divorced, right before graduation,” I admitted.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, maybe because he didn’t know what else to say.

But now that I’d brought it up, I felt the need to get it all out in the open. To explain why I saw things the way I did, why I’d spent my whole adult life dodging even the idea of commitment. “Apparently my dad was having an affair for years, but they stuck together and played pretend because they didn’t want me to deal with a move and a divorce before I’d finished school. I don’t know how she did it, honestly. When I was little, before the affair started, we used to come here to the island once every summer, just for a couple days. We stopped visiting after Mom found out about the affair, but I never even noticed. There was always some explanation. No vacation this year because Dad can’t get the time off work or we’re sleeping in separate rooms because your father snores and it’s keeping me up at night.” I shook my head, my eyes stinging not because I was sad when they finally split, but because to this day, I was embarrassed that I’d been so oblivious. “I don’t know how I didn’t see it. I should’ve noticed, should’ve told them they didn’t need to stay together just for me.”

“It wasn’t your job to tell them,” Declan pointed out. “If they chose to stay together, that’s on them. You can’t blame yourself because they chose to keep a secret.”

I stared out the other side of the Hummer and pretended to be interested in the sloping hills of Hermit Gulch as I dabbed my eyes on the back of my hand and sniffed. Wow, real solid start to a date, Margo. Dump all your baggage on him and cry.

He leaned over and pressed a kiss into my hair without saying a word, and somehow, it made me feel ten times more vulnerable than everything we’d done in the dressing room yesterday.

Within half an hour, the Hummer rumbled past the spot where Declan and I had given up on our hike. Another driver radioed in to provide updates on where the bison herd was grazing. Our own driver narrated the landscape for us, gesturing at this cactus or that leafless bush or somewhere out at the wide blue Pacific. At one point, there was a flurry of excitement as she tried to point out a pod of bottlenose dolphins on the horizon, but despite craning my neck and trying to follow Declan’s well-intentioned but confusing attempts at describing it to me (“Look, you can see where the water looks a bit different, over to the east”), I couldn’t make it out.

“Oh well,” I said as I gave up and stopped straining against my seat belt. “I’ve seen dolphins plenty of times on the ferry ride over. It’s not the end of the—”

POP.

The Hummer careened sideways. Dead trees and brush battered the side door as the driver came to a jerking stop, the whole vehicle enveloped in a cloud of dust.

“What happened?” Declan called up to the driver, as I wondered wildly whether someone had placed a curse on us. First the elevator and now this.

Without answering, the driver hopped out and marched around to the other side of the vehicle. The dust was beginning to settle, and I watched as she knelt, inspected something, then straightened up, shaking her head. She ushered for us all to hop out of the vehicle. We were near the crest of a small hill. The ocean was crystalline in the midday sun, but every other direction was dirt roads and grassy hills.

“Flat.” Our driver nudged a particularly jagged-looking rock with the toe of her boot. The passenger-side tire was mangled on its rim. “We’ll have to call the office. Have another driver come up to take you all back down.”

Declan bent to inspect it. “It looks like the rim got bent, too.” He turned to look at her, squinting in the bright sun. “Did you have a spare? I can swap it out.”

“For legal reasons, I really can’t—” she tried to protest.

But he was already walking to grab the spare and the toolkit from the back. “It’s fine, I’m not going to sue or anything. And besides.” He jerked his head in the direction of the other passengers, where a woman was shielding the top of her head with a magazine she’d grabbed from the door compartment, and another guy had impressive armpit stains. “I doubt the rest of your passengers want to wait around in this heat until whoever you call gets here.

The driver didn’t protest, but she looked on worriedly as Declan knelt by the front of the vehicle and positioned the jack. I stooped down beside him, ready to help. “What can I do?”

He was busy cranking the jack, but he still took the time to glance over at me with a skeptical eyebrow. “Oh, you’re going to help? With those …” His eyes darted to my hands, where I was making grabby motions for him to give me something to do. “Dainty fingers?”

“I’m sorry, what did you just call them?” I asked, stopping the grabby hands and inspecting my own fingers. My hands weren’t exactly small.

“They’re all girly. You have nail polish on them. It looks like you’ve never changed a tire in your life.”

They did indeed have polish—a coral pink gel manicure that was about a week-and-a-half’s worth of grown out. “For your information, I’ve changed two whole tires before,” I said, watching his muscular arms work the jack. “And you’re one to talk. It’s not like your hands are all calloused or anything.”

With a sigh, he stopped in the middle of his work to point out one of his own fingers. “Look, that’s a callous, right there.”

“A pencil callous,” I teased. “You probably do math all day at work.”

“For your information, my job is pretty hands-on. I help build stuff and everything.”

“Stuff?”

“It’s top secret.”