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“I broke up with you by telephone,” he said.
She’d picked up her slice of pizza again, but now she froze, staring at him. It was clear that, like him, she was trying to gather her thoughts.
“You were seven hours away,” she said. “It wasn’t like you could just drop by my house to have that conversation.”
“It was only three weeks until Thanksgiving. I could have waited.” He took a deep breath and let it out. Truth time. “My friends talked me into it. They said I didn’t want to be tied down during all the parties coming up. I didn’t even care about that. Mostly, I just didn’t want to keep stringing you along. I wanted you to be able to go on with your life.”
Charity stared at him for a long, long while before finally lowering her gaze to her pizza and setting it down. Then she put both hands in her lap and sat back against the cushion again.
“I visited you with my sister,” she said.
“I guess we never really talked about that weekend you went to the homecoming game with me and my friends.”
It was actually just him and his roommate, a nice guy who’d dropped out of school at the end of freshman year and gone back home to work in the family business. He just hadn’t enjoyed college. But they’d met some of his other friends at the game, and those were the ones who’d asked him later what he was doing tied down to a girl who lived way back in Tennessee. “Tied down” were the exact two words they’d used.
“Peer pressure,” he said, trying to remember where he’d been in his confession. He quickly jumped back in again. “You just kept talking about all the great things going on here in Misty Mountain at the time. But I felt like I’d finally gotten away. Like there was a whole world out there, waiting for me to explore.”
“And that’s what you’re doing,” she said.
He laughed. “Hardly. I’ve traveled, sure, but…”
That was where his words broke off. Where was he going with this? He had no idea.
“I know it’s hard to believe, but I’ve traveled, too.” She sat forward and picked up her pizza slice again. “I spent two weeks in Europe with my sister, Faith, over the summer. She’s living over there right now.”
“Europe.”
He didn’t mean to sound so impressed, but her sisters were pretty accomplished. One had her own TV show and the other was living in Europe. Or maybe that didn’t count as an accomplishment. But he assumed whatever she was doing over there was impressive.
Not that Charity wasn’t impressive in her own right. She ran her own interior design business and appeared to have become a respected member of this community. That was just as impressive as someone who moved to Europe or had her own TV show.
After swallowing the bite of pizza she’d just taken, Charity continued. “Faith ran a museum for a while, and now she manages a boutique for her fiancé’s family. They’re pretty well known in their small town.”
“So, she moved from an American small town to a European one.”
She nodded. “In the English countryside. It’s beautiful, but—”
“It’s no Misty Mountain.”
He knew Charity all too well. She loved this place. She felt like it was part of her.
But she wasn’t answering right away. She looked thoughtful.
“It’s not the town itself.” She looked around. “It’s the people.” She gestured to indicate the teens seated at the tables nearby. “Even these kids. I don’t know who they are or who their parents are, but I guarantee if I saw their parents, I’d recognize them. There are familiar faces all over the place. And everyone looks out for each other. My sister has that, yes, but it’s not the same when you didn’t grow up there. You know?”
He knew. He totally got it. He was constantly telling people where he was from and explaining where Misty Mountain was located and what it was like. Nobody he’d dated—not even his wife—knew much about his childhood. The couple of times he visited his family with his wife in tow, she’d seemed bored with the place, mostly looking at her phone when she could be enjoying the passing scenery as he drove them in and out of town.
“You did me a favor,” Charity said. “Otherwise, I might’ve put my life on hold until you graduated. You gave me permission to move on with my life.”
That bugged him, and he had no right to be bugged about it. The eighteen-year-old version of him wanted freedom. At the time, he’d told himself she was just his high school sweetheart. He’d find that love again with someone else, no problem. But he was starting to wonder if he’d been wrong about that.
“This was great.” Charity sat back, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath. She then pressed her hand to her stomach. “I ate way too much, but I forgot how yummy this pizza was.”
Yummy. That was a word she’d used all the time when they were kids. He’d forgotten all about that. He’d also forgotten about the dimple in her right cheek when she smiled and the way her eyes seemed to sparkle when she looked at him.
At least they’d sparkled back then. Not anymore.
“You can have Cloudtop pizza any time,” he reminded her.
