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He’s still not over their fight in January—the yelling when he realized she took out thousands of dollars in credit card debt under my social security number. Her crying that she did it to survive, she did everything she could to survive. My frozen life-form in the corner of the room, Riley stroking my hair. “You’re just fine, all right? Don’t you worry about a thing, Flick.”

I’ve never seen anger like that in Knox’s eyes. Frustration, irritation, maybe. But to see him that upset, that furious? It was entirely new.

“First, you buy that damn car for her only for it to get repo’d, you steal her cash from her wallet, and then take out all this debt under her name without even telling her? And you come back, what? Begging for more? You make me sick.”

I shudder to myself on my bed, a sickly, nauseous feeling rising up in me. I guess from his point of view, I understand. He doesn’t know how great she is when she’s at her best.

If I flipped my phone around at the shelter and showed him how frequently I’ve been trying to talk to her, he would lose his mind. At the very least, he’d give her a call himself, and at the most…I don’t know what he’d do, honestly.

But I don’t want to find out.

And with all that in my head and the search for Jersey Guy still going on, I have yet to text Cal a simple, Hello, here is my number. I wish I could say it is due to some form of playing hard to get, but truthfully, it all comes down to: What do I even say?

After he left and I tried to get back to work, I kept wondering if this is really what I think it is?

I’ll never forget Drake Patten asking Katie Welch out on a dare freshman year and seeing how excited she got, just to find out it was never real; it quickly became the biggest rational fear of mine, and to this day, it haunts me at night.

This couldn’t be that, though. What would someone like Cal, who is completely new to town, get out of pulling something like that off?

The flip side of my brain says he really could have just wanted me to text him for animal emergencies, but like Knox said, that’s what his dad is for, right?

After leaving my shift in a blur of Rowen asking why I was blushing and Knox grumbling, the first call I make is Lottie.

Before Walker, Lottie didn’t have any boyfriends, but she definitely had her fair share of boys chasing her around. She never gave them much attention—I think likely due to her being caught up on Walker until he finally returned to town—but she easily could have entertained the idea of boys better than anyone else I know.

“Oh my gosh, Flick!” she squeals into the phone, and I can all but see her kicking her feet. “This is it, he is totally your guy.”

“I don’t know…”

“Is he not cute?”

“He’s very cute.”

“Well, go on, give me details.”

I hum. “He’s cute in a…put-together way. He’s tall.”

“Say less—how tall?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t have time to measure.”

“On a scale of Kit to Walker?”

“Hmm…a little shorter than Knox.” It was the first thing I noticed, I’m pretty sure.

“Noted.” There’s a shuffle in the speaker. “Keep going.”

“That’s kind of it? He bought my pizza the other night, and then he came to get one of the dog’s records from the shelter and gave me his number on the way out.”

“What did Knox say about it?” a voice much deeper and masculine than my best friend’s says across the line.

“Oh, hi, Walker.”

“Hi, Flick.”

“Have you been listening in?”

“Just taking in the odd note here and there. How did Knox react?”