“So good to meet you,” Isabella says. She looks for a second like she wants to hug me again, but instead pats me on the shoulder. And then she pauses to shake Zen’s hand and thank them too.
While Isabella gathers her order, Zen slinks around the counter and down the row of tables to sit opposite me.
“Is that the twentieth person who’s treated you like a savior today, or did I lose track?” they ask.
I eye them.
They shrug. “Not judging what you’re doing here. Just wondering if you’re up for it.”
That sweet lemon smell is lingering, making my mouth water again. Sabrina strolls past the open kitchen door, which I don’t see so much as I feel. And Willa steps up next to our table. “We noticed you’re out of tea. Here. Sabrina made you another. This one’s hot. And I thought you might want to try one of Elsie’s scones.”
My eye twitches.
“Who’s Elsie?” Zen asks.
“Sabrina’s grandma. Our favorite Mrs. Sullivan, rest her soul.”
The guy on the laptop slides us a look, and I realize why he’s familiar.
He was in the video too.
One of the groomsmen.
That makes him one of Chandler Sullivan’s cousins as well. Also grandson to Mrs. Sullivan.
And the fact that Willa doesn’t point that out makes me suspicious all over again.
Is he spying on me?
Zen pulls their knees up to their chest in the chair and watches me without blinking while Willa strides back to the kitchen. “You’re in trouble, Uncle Grey. I don’t think you can do what we want to do and not make people upset. I didn’t count on that.”
They’re not wrong.
Worse, though?
They reach into their pocket and slide my phone across the table to me. “Can’t help but wonder what she’d think of this place. Bet she’d love it. We all know how much she loves a good lemon muffin.”
I look down at a preview of a text from Mimi.
When I swipe it open, I get a full-screen view of her life-weathered face grimacing over a bowl of something gray and lumpy, accompanied by a message.
Enjoying my oatmeal like a good girl. I know you’re tired of everyone asking you for things, but if you could invent a way for sugar and fat and donuts to be good for an old lady’s cholesterol level, I promise I’ll live forever and tell you you’re handsome every day.
Zen’s right.
She’d love the atmosphere in this place.
But as far as she knows, I’m still nursing my wounds from having all of my research sold out from underneath me in San Diego and the contract I accidentally signed barring me from doing further research in apiology unless it’s for Vince’s buddy’s company.
She has no idea I’m in a little mountain town righting the only wrong I can fix right now. And she won’t either.
Not until I’ve made it better and I can look her in the eye and tell her I did this for any reason other than to destroy someone.
Just because vengeance is necessary doesn’t mean it’s not ugly.
I’m keeping Mimi out of it.
6
Sabrina
I spend half my day wanting to breathe into a paper bag. The mad dash that I made to see Laney between dropping Jitter at doggy daycare and reporting back for work helped. As did the fact that Theo gave me multiple paper bags so I could breathe into them.
Laney’s opinion on what I need to do, while right, is sitting heavy.
When my shift is over, there’s no small part of me that wants to go find a blanket fort and camp there forever with my dog, no matter how much I love people. Eight hours of forced proximity with Greyson Cartwright and his massive size taking up every square inch of Bean & Nugget and his growing beard making him look like he belongs in the Tooth and his you betrayed me wounded blue eyes have done me in.
I cannot believe he’s my new boss, and I would very much like to wake up from this nightmare and discover that it’s still early January. That I told Emma about Chandler letting Theo take the fall for the damage to the statue of Ol’ Snaggletooth that winter after we all graduated high school, that she called off the wedding before it happened. And then that I’d gone to the bank to get a loan and enlisted the help of everyone in my life to convince Chandler to sell Bean & Nugget to me.
But since this isn’t just a nightmare, I reach deep for some I can do this, go get my dog, peek in on my grandpa at his retirement community, and pretend everything’s fine while somehow finding things to talk about with everyone that don’t make me feel like I’m only asking about what’s up to refill my gossip well, which is most definitely emptier than it would be if I’d spent the day working the dining room instead of the kitchen.