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He gasped in indignation. “You’re playing Calvinball, Rosenstein.”
She smirked. “You knew what you were getting into when you married me, Matthews.”
“You can count it as a date, if you want, but I’m not going to. I’m still taking you on three more.” He smirked back.
“Ugh.” She scrunched up her nose. “You’re the most infuriating person I’ve ever met.”
He nodded emphatically. “I’m the most infuriating personI’veever met as well. But I didn’t marry me.”
“I’m trying to divorce you,” she reminded him.
He raised an eyebrow. “Are you?”
She refused to engage with that question. “Okay, I’m going to leave with Miri, bye!”
“Did you know,” Levi said, throwing his arm around Hannah’s shoulder while she was trying to update guest contacts the next morning, “that New York State has a festival called RampFest that is all about the foraging and eating of ramps?”
“Why are you giving me this information, LB?” She looked over at him, then quickly looked away so she wouldn’t get mesmerized by wanting to touch his beard.
With her mouth.
“You run a farm. That makes you a farmer,” he pointed out, obviously thinking he sounded reasonable. His arm was still around her, and the feel of it was doing very fascinating things to the lower parts of her anatomy, which was probably inappropriate given they were at the registration desk in the front hallway. “There will be other local farmers there with whom you can network. Talk supplying local ingredients to the kitchen. Maybe meet some chefs who might want to do guest spots before you hire a full-time person.”
“Noelle runs a farm,” she countered, “and is a farmer. I run a hotel that sits on a farm. I am a hotel manager. I do not farm in any sense of the word.”
“Ah,” Levi said, waving a finger, “but I do not want to go on a date with Noelle, for a variety of reasons, not limited to the pertinent facts that she hates me, she’s in love with my best friend, I’m in love with her best friend, and she is a lesbian.”
“You want to go on a date to…forage for wild onions? Is that what you’re asking, here?” She pushed away from the desk so she could look at him.
“Doesn’t it sound thrilling?” he asked, without irony. Wild vegetables were genuinely thrilling to him.
She shook her head vehemently. “It does not. It sounds cold, and we could buy leeks at the store. Or ramps from the farmer’s market that someone else has already picked! I know, let’s go on a date to the farmer’s market. Where they have coffee. And sometimes cute puppies.”
He pouted. “Foraged ramps taste better.”
“Where is the RampFest,” she asked, “and when?”
“It’s in Hudson, in three days.”
Her stomach dropped, and her anxiety skyrocketed. “I can’t go to Hudson in three days.”
“You can! I checked your schedule.” He clapped.
She chewed on the end of her braid. “No, Levi, Ican’tgo to Hudson in three days. I can’t go farther than Lake Placid unless I meet with my therapist first and take a couple of Klonopin, and I need at least a week to prepare. It’s a whoooooole thing, as in, it’s new that I can even leave Advent without having panic attacks so bad I can’t move, but I still can’t do it without advance warning.”
He dropped heavily onto the stool next to her. “Oh.”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“This seems like, uh, critical information in the puzzle of why-you-couldn’t-travel-the-world-with-me,” he said quietly.
“I mean…yes and no.” She shrugged. “I wouldn’t have left, with Cass’s health unsteady, even without the anxiety, but I’d already been having panic attacks about travel and leaving Carrigan’s and excusing them with wanting to be where you were or needing to learn the business, or whatever.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” The way he said “me,” she knew he meantme, your best friend, your soulmate, the person you told everything.
“I…” She took a breath and prayed for courage. “I thought I could handle it, and then I was hurt that you didn’t somehow magically know? Like if you’d been paying enough attention to me, I wouldn’t have had to tell you? My brain was always looking for evidence that you didn’t love me as much as I loved you, and it would sometimes manufacture it. But then I thought I was letting you go to live the life you needed, so at least one of us could be free.”
“And then you stayed here and got madder and madder at me that I was free?” Levi asked. His voice wasn’t accusatory, just confused.
