Page 28

Hey, now, don’t you go lumping me in with those harpies. There’s a place and a time for making a well-timed, well-phrased request, and this may well be one of those situations, my grandmother said, her voice louder and clearer than the others echoing inside my head. That’s because I’m not in there. I’m out here, she snipped, sounding more than a little miffed.

“Meg,” Art said, grasping my chin between his thumb and index finger and pulling my face back to face his as I tried to turn my head to look in the direction I’d heard my grandmother’s voice. “I’m not going anywhere.”

My face warmed a few more degrees, but I forced myself to look up into his worried eyes. The butterflies in my belly had a field day with the tenderness in his gaze. “I know, but…”

“You have my word. I will make this work. Even if the only place I find for us to live is on the other side of Edinburgh.”

I pressed my lips together, suddenly overcome with the mortifying feeling that if I said anything, I’d burst into tears. It was an absurd reaction given that just that morning, I’d been okay with my decision to never see him again..

Not your finest moment, my grandmother quipped from the same corner of the room as she’d spoken from before.

Presumably because he thought I was trying to look away, Art’s fingers held tight to my chin.

“Meg, you think I’m going to let a little distance and a little work get in the way of whatever this is?” Art arched an imperious eyebrow at me.

My usually prickly and disdainful traitorous inner teen clutched her hands to her chest, swooning in the corner of my mind, while the wounded inner adult in me studied Art through wary eyes. I’d once believed a man who’d promised me the moon, and look where that had gotten me.

“Maybe we should take one day at a time,” I said, ignoring the way my stomach was turning itself inside out. “In the meantime, my offer stands. I have room for all of you. You wouldn’t have to scramble for a place to go, and Merry could start school on time tomorrow. There’s a second story to my apartment with enough room for all of you.”

“Are you sure?” he asked, meeting my gaze, his words loaded with meaning.

I blinked a few times as I tried to guess what he wanted me to answer. Then I shook my head and squared my shoulders. What he wanted was his problem. I’d spent far too long trying to anticipate what others wanted so I could keep them happy. I could no more control how he reacted than I could alter the trajectory of the moon. What I wanted, however…

Darn tooting, my grandmother crowed, her voice ringing with pride.

“I’m sure,” I blurted out, face fire-engine red as I realized what having him living so close would undoubtedly lead to.

Oh, child. Grandma snorted a laugh so hard she made herself sputter and cough. You were married for twenty years. You think anyone believes you’re still a virgin? Who cares who sleeps where at your age? It was all I could do to not look over at the corner where she sounded like she was dying. No need to look. Already dead. Nothing to see here.

Biting back a laugh and weirdly comforted and emboldened by my overactive imagination’s rendition of the woman who’d loomed larger than life over my childhood, I drew back my shoulders and lifted my chin. In a more confident voice, I repeated myself.

Art’s expression grew heavy again. “What if this is a terrible idea, Meg?”

Taking a deep breath, I forced myself to stay reasonable. “Why would it be?” I said as calmly as I could, holding my inner teen at bay with a steely glare.

“What if this,” he said, brushing the back of his hand tenderly against the apple of my cheek, “is too new? What if too much pressure too soon wrecks it all?”

I shrugged again. “Who knows what will happen if you move three towns over, and we only see each other every third Tuesday or whenever we find time for each other. Isn’t the whole point that we don’t know?”

Art cocked his head thoughtfully, waiting for me to finish my thought.

“I may not have gone through quite as much therapy as you, but we’ve both been through the wringer. We each have a failed marriage under our belts and have some sense of what works and what doesn’t, or, more important, what we want and what we don’t want. We’re hardly idealistic teens walking into a relationship with rose-colored glasses.”

He smiled at the visual but didn’t interrupt me.

“Obviously, it won’t be easy, but I think that if we promise to talk to each other as honestly as possible, I think we can make it work. And it’s not like we’re talking about moving in together forever. We’re just talking about a couple of weeks. Right?”

“Fair enough,” he replied with more than a hint of laughter in his voice. “But…”

“But?”

“We have a place to stay tonight. How about we both take the night to think it over and make sure this still feels right in the morning. I’ll swing by midmorning or so to check in.”

“Swing by?” I frowned, glancing at his phone.

“Well, I’d text, but you blocked me. Remember?” he teased with a wink.

I blushed. “Oh. Right. I should unblock you, huh?”