Page 51 of Worth the Trouble

Jason looked at the phone, then at the flyer. Wendy had moved on to the bench outside the bakery.

She spotted him before he could decide whether to wave. Wendy didn’t wave. She came across the square at a walk that dared traffic to try it, the stack of flyers riding on her hip.

“Jason Dennison. Standing in front of a flower shop with your hat off. I’m going to need an explanation.”

“Hat’s on.”

“Barely.” She peeled a flyer off the stack and held it out. “For the barn. Tate already took two, but he’ll lose one.”

He took it. The paper was warm from her arm.

“She paid for these, you know,” Wendy said, and she wasn’t teasing anymore. “Every one of them. The boutique took two. Girl in there about swallowed her gum when I told her whose check it was.”

“She take them?”

“Put one in the door.” Wendy looked past him at the Bloom Shop window, at the flyer, and then at the sign under it, and her eyebrows climbed. “Huh.”

He didn’t answer that either.

“Huh,” she said again, with a good deal more in it. “Well. I’m going to go tape a lamppost. You didn’t see me.”

“Never do.”

She got three steps and turned around. “We’re coming up to the lodge tomorrow night. All of us. Tell Cece to brace herself. Faith’s bringing licorice.”

He pulled up Cece’s name and sent a text that her dad had invited him to dinner tomorrow and that he’d give her all the details afterward. He sent it. Then he took a picture of the window, both signs in the frame, and sent that too.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The picture was up on her phone when she came up from the trail.

A flower shop window with two pieces of paper taped in it. Her flyer, orange and unmistakable, and above it a smaller sign she’d had to zoom in on to read. Office space. Second floor. By appointment.

Jason hadn’t said a word about it. He’d sent the dinner news, plain as a grocery list, and then the picture, and then nothing. That was Jason. He handed you a door and let you decide whether to walk through it.

Cecelia had looked at it eleven times on the trail and had not decided anything.

The elevator let her out on the third floor and she went down the hall past the suite she’d given up, past her father’s door, to the room at the end that the lodge had rented her at the corporate rate because the girl at the desk had read the paper and liked her for it. One bed. One window. A coffee table with a wobble. Her own card on file.

She was fitting her key into the lock when her father’s door opened.

He was in the charcoal suit, the one he wore when he wanted a room to know who’d paid for it. He had his phone in one hand and his reading glasses in the other. He looked at her as he had in the lobby yesterday, and the day before, and every hour since she’d walked out of his suite with her jacket over her arm.

“You’re going out,” she said.

“I have a dinner.”

“I know. He told me.”

That stopped him with one hand on the door. He looked at her for real then, the full appraisal, the one that used to find the wrinkle in a blouse from across a ballroom. “Did he.”

“He tells me things. I’m trying to pick up the habit.”

Her father put his glasses in his breast pocket. He straightened a cuff that didn’t need it. “Then you’ll understand this is between him and me.”

“Nothing about me is between you and anyone. Not anymore.”

The hall was quiet enough that the ice machine around the corner carried. He didn’t answer her. He never answered a sentence he couldn’t win. She’d learned that at nineteen, and she’d learned to stop handing him sentences he could, and it had taken her until this autumn to find out there was a third option.