Page 3

It was a good party, aside from the starving.

My phone vibrated with a text from my delivery driver. He said he was arriving with my order, which was weird because the app still showed him a few blocks away. Glitchy, I guess.

“Ooof.” I grimaced. “I think I need to run to the restroom again,” I said, getting up. “Play without me.”

“You can’t stop in the middle of it,” Jodie said.

“That sounds like a winning card,” I quipped.

Devon and Ivan laughed.

I made like I was heading for the bathroom, then cut across the kitchen instead and out the sliding glass door to the chilly backyard, wearing the enormous snow boots Ivan left by the door.

I’d put in the delivery instructions for the driver to park down the street and come in the side gate for an extra $10. It was like I was buying drugs, only it was buttermilk boogie cakes.

The roof of the house was hung with multicolored Christmas lights. I waited under those, rubbing my arms in the cold. I heard the footsteps of the delivery guy while I puffed warm air into my hands.

Then the gate opened. It was my food… and my ex-boyfriend.

2

JEREMY

AS IF TODAY COULD not get any fucking weirder.

“Anna?”

I stood there, holding a bag of pancakes, looking at the shocked face of my high school girlfriend.

“Jeremy?” She blinked at me. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“In your yard or in Minnesota?”

“Both?”

I shook my head in disbelief. “It’s a really long story…”

We stared at each other while heat crept up our cheeks, both of us shocked into silence.

It had been almost a decade since I’d seen her. It hadn’t ended well.

She looked great. Stunning, actually. I was still friends with her mom on socials. I never posted there, ever. I just kept the account to see what people were doing. The pictures of Anna were few and far between, but they weren’t as good as the real thing I was discovering.

I suddenly remembered what I was doing there and had to snap myself back from memory lane. I handed the bag to her. “This is yours I guess?”

“Thanks,” she said, taking it. “I’ll add the extra ten to the app.”

“Oh, I’m not your delivery guy. I mean, I am. I’m delivering your order. The original guy had an accident.”

“What? Oh my God, is he okay?”

“Yeah? I think so? Someone rear-ended him. I was the car next to his at the light. I pulled over to help, but emergency services got there almost immediately and he asked me to drop this off, said he needed the money. I figured he was already having a bad enough day. It was only a few blocks. I was on the way to my mom’s.”

She nodded slowly. “Thanks. That was nice of you.”

“Yeah.”

Then we just stood there.