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Then he reached for my hand. He reached for my hand—his palm cupping my fingers, his fingers running through mine—like we were touching for the thousandth time—and he still had no intention of ever letting go.
How could I not be his after that? This was how he said hello.
It would be too simple to say that I never felt good about myself until Ben. And it wouldn’t be true. But everything I was trying to reconcile—who I’d been growing up in Sonoma County, who I was trying to be as a woman building a life in Los Angeles—he was my partner in it. Maybe it was that he grew up similarly to the way I did: in a small town outside London—his father a carpenter who worked around the clock, Ben helping his mother raise his little sisters. He’d received a scholarship to study architecture at the University of London, had built a career for himself there, and then in America.
I understood the thousand steps between where he’d started and where he’d ended up. And, more than that, I understood the versions of him he contended with along the way: the version of him that was proud of what he’d built and the version buried far beneath that still felt like an outsider. Which might have been why all the versions of me I’d ever been—all the versions of me that I hoped to be—made sense when I was with him.
Deep in my soul I felt we understood each other, we loved each other. So—despite all the reasons I maybe should have—I didn’t feel threatened by Michelle. I didn’t feel threatened by any of Ben’s previous girlfriends. The thing was, I was in. The first drink together establishing it for me, every day proving it. Ben was my yellow buggy.
Ben opened the refrigerator to get Maddie some milk. He handed me the bottle, trying to get me to talk to him. I couldn’t seem to meet his eyes.
Maddie was sitting at the kitchen table having an enormous piece of chocolate cake, her arm protectively blocking the plate as if she were afraid someone was going to take it away from her before she could finish.
Jacob sat across from her, his eyes focused on those bites. He didn’t look toward Ben and me, standing by the refrigerator, getting the milk. But I knew he was trying to listen.
“What happened to you not showing up here?” I said.
Ben poured the milk into three of the glasses. “We needed to talk,” he said.
“So you bring Maddie?”
“I also brought you a suitcase full of clothes including a dress for the harvest party, the purple one that looks so pretty. What about a thank-you for that?”
“I’m serious.”
“Yes, we needed to talk and we needed you not to kick me out.” He held up the empty glass. “I still can’t tell if you want the milk or not. The cake is going to be much better with it.”
He flashed those eyes at me, and I wanted more than anything to let it all go—to just decide that everything was okay.
And maybe I would have, but he headed back toward the kitchen table and took the seat next to Maddie, leaving me the one between him and Jacob.
“She’s serious about that cake,” Jacob said as we sat back down.
He wasn’t wrong. Maddie was precise in her bites, not like the twins, who would tear through that cake in the time it took Maddie to eat one bite. She moved slowly, savoring it.
Maddie felt my eyes on her and looked up. “Would you like some?” she said.
Her tiny, British accent could make you melt it was so cute. And there was this: She held out the fork to share, which looked like it pained her to do, to share anything with me—the cake or her father.
Who could blame her? She had just found him for herself. And now she was being forced to meet the woman he was going to marry? Who might want to take her father away from her. And her cake.
I smiled at her, anxious to relieve her anxiety. “That’s all for you, Maddie,” I said. “But thank you.”
She nodded, relieved. “You’re welcome.”
Then she turned back to her chocolate cake.
Ben looked between us. I kept my eyes on Maddie, avoiding looking at him or at Jacob, who watched me, amused.
Ben gave Jacob a look. “So catch me up. How do you know Jen and Dan?”
“I’m a local winemaker,” he said.
“Kind of,” I said.
Jacob gave me a smile. “I own Murray Grant Wines,” he said. “We’re based in Napa Valley.”
“I know Murray Grant Wines.” Ben smiled condescendingly. “Everyone near a grocery store knows it.”
