Beg, Borrow, or Steal (When in Rome, #3)(91)

I wiggle for a little space but it’s no good. We’re all shoulder to shoulder. “I’m hiding from Jack,” I repeat for the hundredth time.

“I’m sorry,” Maddie says with regret in her tone. “This is my fault. I thought it was the right move to invite him.”

“Maybe you two should date instead. Clearly you’re two peas in a pod trying to force my hand on stuff.” Maddie has the audacity to look like she’s actually considering it. I level a finger to her chest. “Don’t you dare.”

“Why?” She grins and widens her eyes like a know-it-all. “I thought you said he didn’t steal your heart?”

“Yeah, well . . .” I toe a loose potato on the floor out of the way. “He might have borrowed it after all.”

They all three gasp.

“Do you want a relationship with him?” asks Annie, with enough tenderness it feels like a blanket wrapped around my shoulders. Bless her for not asking me outright if I love him.

“I don’t know what I want. I thought I was okay with giving up on having some big romance. I had my routine and my cat, and my career, and those things made me happy . . .” Yes, I was lonely too. But sometimes it’s easier to choose the pain you know than the pain you don’t. I can’t imagine how painful it would be to integrate my life with Jackson’s and then lose him. “But of course Jack had to be Jack and flip everything upside down because he delights in nothing more than ruining my perfect plans.”

“And now you’re thinking you might not want to give up on a big romance for yourself?” asks Amelia.

I scrub my hands over my face. “I’m thinking I wish someone would just tell me how to go back to normal.”

She shakes her head with a soft smile. “You know what I think? I think normal isn’t going to be enough for you anymore.”

“Same,” says Annie. “I’ve been in your shoes, Emily. And I know the look of a person who’s recognized that their needs have changed. And it’s scary as hell.”

My eyes prickle. “I don’t want to change.”

“It’s good to change. It hurts a little at first but then it starts to feel like stretching first thing in the morning. Like you don’t realize how badly your body needed the movement.”

Madison chimes in, talking in a robotic cadence, “And you know . . . just as iron rusts from disuse, and stagnant water putrefies, or when cold turns to ice, so our . . . intellect”—she pauses and then continues in a rush—“wastes unless it is kept in use.”

We all blink at her. She holds up her phone and the Google search engine. “I wanted to add something to the conversation, so I looked up quotes about change, but Leonardo da Vinci really let me down in the second half there.”

I pat her back. “It’s the thought that counts.”

Light floods the pantry again when the door yawns open. For half a second all I see is a male form and I’m terrified it belongs to Jack. I’m not ready to acknowledge his statement yet. And I don’t want him to know I’m hiding in a pantry to avoid my problems.

But it’s not Jack. It’s Noah.

“Okay,” he says in his gruff way. “Everyone except Emily, scram.”

Madison pouts. “What? Why? I want to hear what you are going to say.”

“Tough,” he says, crossing his arms in his trademarked Surly Pose as Amelia has always called it. “Out.”

Everyone goes, but Amelia is the last one to leave. He gives her a soft smile on her way out and pats her butt. Once they’re all gone, he closes the door behind us again. “It’s time we talked.”

“About the weather? It is unseasonably warm at the moment.”

He doesn’t acknowledge my quip. “Let’s talk about what happened with Liam all those years ago.”

The floor almost falls out from under me. Noah has never, not once, tried to press the topic of the breakup that changed the entire course of my life—and possibly even rewired my brain, even though he was witness to it. Everyone took my words at face value when I said it was a mutual breakup that hurt, but I’d get through it. Noah is the only one who knows the truth.

“I don’t want to talk about him.”

“We’re going to—because it’s important to this moment. Emily, you were always so tough and independent after Mom and Dad died, but never so closed off as you are now. It’s like that day froze a layer of ice over your heart so thick it stopped beating normally. And you know why I think it was? Because you’ve regretted not going with him.”

A record screeches in my mind. Because after Liam and I talked in my room, I had opened my bedroom door to find Noah standing there listening. I always assumed he knew exactly what was said. But it turns out he didn’t hear it all that well.

“You think. . . .” I laugh like a gust of wind. “You think I regret not going with Liam?”

“Yes. I think you chose to stay home with your family because you would sacrifice every bit of your happiness to make your siblings happy. I think you were worried to leave the girls without someone to take care of them. Because let’s face it, Grandma was sweet and tender, but she didn’t have that motherly edge that you do.”

“Well, you’re right about one thing—I was afraid to leave them. And you.” I pause and refuse to cry this time. “But the truth is, I would have. I loved him enough that I absolutely would have. But . . . he didn’t ask me to go.”