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The way he had pictured them growing closer, growing older, making the kind of decisions you only made when you were forty-something and had seen enough of the world to know what mattered most.
But Michael mattered more, right then.
Hurriedly, Wayne grabbed his jacket and hustled toward the back door. Cindy’s house was up on Pontiac Trail Head, just a few houses from her father’s. Wayne knew the route well. After all, Cindy had been forever-best-friends with his wife.
Tara and Wayne had spent endless alcohol-fueled afternoons and frantic nights up at Cindy’s.
Cindy and Fred were in the back of almost all of Wayne’s memories of his early years with Tara.
Even at his wedding, Cindy had shoved him drunkenly against the wall and said, “If you ever hurt my best friend, I swear to God above I’ll make sure you...” But she hadn’t been able to get through it. She had burst into laughter, so much so that tears fell from her eyes.
When Tara had found the two of them, both in outrageous giggle fits, Cindy had confessed, “I tried to threaten him, but he’s just so gosh-darn in love with you. He looks like a little puppy dog! Have you ever tried to threaten a puppy dog? I haven’t, until now, and it nearly destroyed me.”
“Gee. Thanks!” Wayne had cried.
Tara had rolled her eyes at them and said, “I don’t know what I just got myself into. My best friend and my husband are in cahoots. The world may never recover.”
Wayne hustled up to the Pontiac Trail Head. All the while, he stared at his phone as it trickled from seven in the evening to seven-o-three. Was Elise a punctual person? He didn’t know her enough to know. She had said that she was responsible and drama-free outside of the great state of Michigan. Obviously, the events of the recent weeks had made her the number-one biggest drama queen on all of Mackinac Island.
She was the source of so much gossip.
And now that she had been seen with Wayne so often, he’d been bundled up in that gossip, as well.
He tried his best to write up a text message.
There was so much he couldn’t fully explain.
He hadn’t even fully told her that his wife had died.
He hadn’t revealed so much of himself.
He had just been that flirty, bachelor-self—the character he knew could woo a woman, on-command.
But with Elise, he wanted to be real.
Finally, outside of Cindy’s enormous house, he forced his thumbs to draw up some kind of pathetic response.
If Michael had ruined his chances with Elise, then so be it, he guessed.
Michael had to come first.
Even if he had been gone, without a single word, for nearly three years.
