The Shippers(20)

My mom peered over her readers at Ashley like she was getting grandiose, but she let it all stand.

I let it stand, too.

And that’s how, by consent agenda, we wound up launching Operation Conquest.

Ashley went back to making notes on her pad. “We should switch Finn’s room, too,” she went on, “and put him near Harmony’s. So that JoJo has every opportunity to”—she wiggled her eyebrows a little—“upgrade roommates.”

“Ashley!” I said.

But her point was valid.

Even if Finn wasn’t my destiny, he was better—and I realized this could also be said of every other passenger on the ship—than rooming with Harmony.



* * *



WE WOUND UP talking so late into the night that I didn’t go home to my apartment and slept over at my parents’ house instead. Lying on my old bed in my old room, my personal Finn Turner wheels really did start turning. Had I imprinted on him? Was this the answer? Could I conquer him? He’d been quite the teenage heartthrob. The competition might be stiff. Wasn’t he a fancy lawyer now?

Flipping over onto my tummy on my hydrangea-print bedspread, I googled him.

Yes. Finn was a lawyer now—a young, hotshot, on-a-partner-track lawyer at a fancy law firm in Chicago. And there was only one current image of him online—his professional portrait in a suit on his law firm’s website. But it confirmed what was never in question: He was still handsome.

He didn’t look the same, of course. He’d filled out, and solidified, and lost the wiry vibes of a teenager. His tousled high school hair was replaced with a groomed, brushed-back cut with a fade. I have no idea how much time passed as I studied that one photo, but it was long enough to notice that his eyebrows were more groomed now, and he had a new little scar on his cheek, and his jaw was more defined.

Different, but good. Different, but maybe even better?

Wait. Had Finn Turner gotten better looking since high school?

Of course he had.

Maybe Ashley was right.

Maybe he was the reason I’d never been able to connect to somebody else. Fair or unfair, reasonable or unreasonable, maybe my heart had just decided that Finn was the one—and would accept no substitutes.

At least it had standards.

Maybe it was lucky that I’d left Pearce at the altar. Maybe fate was keeping my options open. Maybe this was the cure for my curse, at last.

When I got tired of staring at the internet’s only picture of Finn, I looked up “imprinting on a first kiss,” found several more articles, read them all, and came away convinced. This explained it. People did sometimes imprint on one other person. And as much as I would never recommend that course of action to anyone else … if it had already happened, then maybe I’d just stumbled on some very good intel. A chance to change my life—and get it right at last. Maybe all I had to do was force myself onto a cruise ship, make Finn Turner fall in love with me, and let my poor, forgotten heart have what it had always wanted.

That didn’t sound so hard. Did it?





Eight


ONE MORE LESS-THAN-GREAT thing happened before Ashley’s wedding.

The night before the cruise began, I overheard my mother having a fight.

There was a spot by the AC vent in the hallway where you could hear everything going on in the kitchen. And here’s what I heard: Apparently my dad had taken a job promotion without telling my mother. One that would require him—and by extension her—to move to Germany. And it had apparently seemed like such a no-brainer to my dad that he had said yes to it all without telling my mom.

I’d never heard her so angry.

“You didn’t even check in with me, Raleigh,” she kept saying. “You just accepted.”

“Because you had enough on your plate already! I was trying not to add stress to your life.”

“You accepted a job in another country without telling me”—my mom’s voice was actually trembling—“and then you put the home that we’ve lived in for thirty years up for sale—also without telling me—”

I put my hand over my mouth. Holy shit!

“—and you thought somehow that was not adding stress to my life?”

My dad didn’t even try to answer that question.

“I’m not going,” my mother said then. “I’m staying right here. You can go if you want to, but I’m not going.”

“You want to live apart?”

“We’re already living apart, Raleigh. You work all the time. You missed your own daughter’s wedding.”

“That was the airline—”

“No—you cut it too close and you missed your flight. It wasn’t the airline. It was you.”

“She didn’t even go through with it,” my dad pointed out, like that might help his case.

“And why do you think that is?” my mom snapped.

But my dad didn’t answer.

“Raleigh, please listen to me. You missed. Your own. Daughter’s. Wedding.”

Silence.

Next, she said, “Whatever you’re chasing, you’re chasing it too hard.”

“I’m sorry about the house,” he said. “I’ll make it right.”

“I think it’s too late to make it right.”