23. Chapter 23
Chapter 23
Marcy
“This meeting of the Midwest Mavens is now called to order,” Jillian spoke from her square on the laptop screen.
Noah groaned. “This isn’t Court TV .”
“And we aren’t in a courtroom,” she shot back, smiling. “This is formal business meeting structure.”
“I asked Jillian to take notes so Marcy doesn’t have to,” Hudson added. “Let her do her thing.”
Instead of beside me on the couch, Hudson also appeared on screen, logged in from the camp facility up north. Behind her, my cousin Lucas dipped into view. He waved. “Hey, cuz. You doing alright?”
“Peachy.” I stared back.
He squinted into the camera. “Is this about that secret thing I can’t talk about?”
Hudson whipped around, hitting mute as she did. We watched her arms flail as she gestured at Lucas, speaking unheard words.
“They’re so freaking cute,” said Jillian.
“He’s not supposed to know.” I sank my head into my hands. “This is all so weird and complicated.”
“Okay, I’m back. And shut the door!” Hudson called over her shoulder. “Now it’s just us.”
Jillian smoothed her blond hair. “Do we want to start with report outs of our current objectives or get right to Marcy?”
“I’m in crisis!” It came out more dramatic than I’d intended. “Ahem. Sorry. I am facing a crisis of sorts. That’s what the Mavens are for, right? Cri-ses? Multiple crisis points?”
We’d come up with our dorkily named group earlier this summer when Hudson had her own crisis, leading us to secretly descend on the summer camp she’d been working at as moral support. Turned out we all needed a little support and direction in our lives.
My friends already knew about the engagement from previous texts and conversations, but new developments were ripe for the picking: I had now fully fallen for Patrick, we were officially dating for real, and his political rival owned my dream bakery space. I shared my updates.
The impact of my news created a fair bit of chaos.
“You KISSED Patrick!” Hudson screeched. “And you’re DATING?!”
“Called it,” Noah said.
Jillian rolled her eyes. “We all called it. But this is new—you really have feelings for him. Like, beyond the kissing being great, right?”
“Of course she does,” Noah spoke for me. She winced. “Sorry, Marcy. But we all know you do.”
They’d known when I hadn’t known myself. Or at least, I hadn’t allowed myself to believe it. “Yes. It’s true.”
Hudson launched into how she’d observed how much Patrick had been in love with me in our time living together. I didn’t bother debating her. Jillian broke in, saying how romantic this all was given we were pretending to be engaged.
“Marriage is for suckers,” Noah interjected. “Right, Marcy? ”
I shrugged. We used to be on the same page, but now I wasn’t so sure. I hated the idea of having to settle down solely because someone else thought that was right for me. But I didn’t hate the idea of being married to Patrick.
Someday. When it wasn’t part of a master plan for power and money.
“Mavens!” I boomed, to cut through the overlapping chatter. “What do I do?”
“About Patrick or the bakery?” Noah asked.
“ Yes .”
“How about I contact Se?or Frog and ask about the vacant space?” Hudson offered. “I make business calls all day. It’s just one more to add in.”
My frustration took a pause. “What would you ask him?”
“If it’s for sale, how much, etcetera. How to get in and look around. You’ve only peeked in the window. The place could be coated in asbestos and slime.”
True, but I knew it wasn’t. I just knew. “Okay. So you call and get details, then what?”
“We take another step after we have more information.”
That didn’t sound so bad.
“Now about Patrick,” Jillian continued. “I’m going to take a stab at what you’re thinking. That you don’t want him to jeopardize his campaign trying to get you this bakery, but at the same time, this is why you’re even playing the senator’s wife role in the first place—”
“Small-town mayor,” I corrected.
“Come on, can’t you see Patrick as a senator some day? He has the look.”
“No, he doesn’t.” My words cut sharp. “He’s worried his family is steering him toward big-time politics, but he really cares about this community. He isn’t on some career-building power trip.”
Jillian chewed at her lip. “You’re right. I got carried away. Plus, you know Patrick better than us. Possibly better than anyone. ”
“Where’s this leading, do you think?” Noah asked. “Now that you two are dating, and you’re acting as if you’re engaged—”
“And actually planning a wedding,” Hudson added.
“Check that—my family is planning one without me.”
“Yeah, I got asked my shoe and dress size too,” Noah drolled. “You’re deep in it. So what do you want?”
They waited for my response. What did I want? “I don’t know how to answer that. The idea of getting married for real is new. The idea of being with Patrick is very new. I’m honestly terrified I’ll wreck everything and we’ll lose our friendship.”
“Won’t happen.” Hudson took a big crunchy bite of an apple. Didn’t bother to mute that .
“You don’t know that won’t happen,” I said. “No one does.”
“I do. You two have too long a history to make a mistake that will ruin what you’ve built.” She shrugged, like it was all simple and easy.
“Just because you’re in love doesn’t mean you understand my situation.” I couldn’t filter the irritation from my voice.
“Hey.” Jillian added a calming tone to the conversation. “This is big stuff here. Life-changing stuff. Let’s remember we’re all coming to this with our own perspectives and baggage.”
Dr. Jillian Levesque, at your service. Wrong type of doctor, but she offered good advice either way.
“I’m sorry that my over-confidence in your future success hit the wrong way,” Hudson said. “Okay, that didn’t sound like an apology. I wish you could see what I see. I’ve seen someone who adores you, who takes the most care for you every time he’s with you. I don’t think that kind of devotion disappears when life gets complicated. That’s when love thrives.”
As much as I told myself what she said was true, believing it was another matter. “And when you say complicated, you mean conspiring together to trick friends, family, campaign donors, and a voting public that we’re in a committed relationship headed toward marriage when we’d only kissed for the first time last week.”
“Was it the first time, though?” Hudson’s voice pitched unusually high.
A shock of cold hit. “What do you mean, was it the first time?” I’d never told anyone about that first kiss.
Hudson made a show of looking around the room and not at the screen.
“What does she mean? Jillian? Noah?”
Noah let out a loud sigh. “So, pretty sure Matteo knew you two kissed on prom night but never spoke about it.”
My mouth dropped open. “My own brother? But Patrick swore he never told!”
“I don’t think he did. Matteo’s sharper than you give him credit for. He told me about it in the woods.”
I had to have heard wrong. “The woods? What woods?”
“At camp this summer,” she said. “After running around playing Capture the Flag. I think he was trying to ask me out, honestly. I had him at a vulnerable moment, so I grilled him on some things I’d always been curious about. You and Patrick being one of them.”
“Noah!” Jillian gasped. “That’s a total invasion of privacy. Also smart. Really smart. I never considered questioning Matteo for dirt.”
Hudson giggled. “He’s actually a great target, now that I think of it.”
My face grew hot. “This is so freaking embarrassing. You’re all laughing about this like…like it wasn’t completely horrible carrying this secret. I didn’t talk about our kiss because I thought Patrick was disgusted by me. I thought he couldn’t stand me!”
“But somehow you became best friends for a decade,” Noah stated. “If he was disgusted by you, he wouldn’t hang out with you. Let alone ask you to get fake married. ”
“You weren’t there.” I could taste my own sour grapes in my words. “He ran away from me.”
“I will admit I feel for Junior Prom Marcy—that must have been really hard for her fragile sixteen-year-old existence.” Noah pushed her hair back. “But you’re an adult now. You’ve had ten years to deal with those feelings. Now you’re with this man who literally adores you, will do anything for you, and has declared he has always had feelings for you, and—lo and behold!—you also have feelings for him. Yet you’re telling us you’re not sure what to do. If you don’t want to get married, don’t. But if you do, even if it’s ten more years from now, don’t close that door on Patrick right now because of this other junk. The election and the money. Those are excuses to not deal with the emotional block you have going on. This fear of owning your truth.”
That murder list of mine? Did Noah need to go on it?
“Geez, Noh,” Hudson said. “Coming in hot, going out strong.”
I’d give it to Noah. She rarely minced words.
And ten years from now seemed entirely too long to wait to get married if I really wanted to get married. Which I wasn’t sure I did. But I did know I wanted to be with Patrick.
I let that sink in. I wanted to be with Patrick. Yes, that felt right.
“I’d like to see where this goes,” I told my friends. An odd sense of calm settled over me. Surprising given the rough chop from Noah. “Some of my resistance has nothing to do with Patrick—okay, a little to do with him and the whole not-ruining-what-we-had-as-friends thing. Everything, life, it’s all so unpredictable. But I keep coming back to my family. I did what they asked and…I’m not happy. I got the grades, I went to the good school, and I took their suggested career path. I checked all the boxes, but I don’t feel satisfied. And then they tell me there are more boxes to check. CPA. Marriage. Babies. But what if I do those things and I still feel unsatisfied?”
A beat of silence hit .
I filled it myself. “The thing that brings me joy is baking. I’m obsessed with it. It’s how I cope. It’s what energizes me. The baking, it’s in my blood. My blood runs dough , ladies.”
Jillian and Hudson snickered. Noah kept a steady gaze on the screen, nodding. “Keep going.”
“Look at Patrick,” I continued. “He broke free from his family’s expectations when he paid for his own law school. His parents were furious—now he has student loan debt. But he also broke free from the guilt of needing to follow their demands because they were paying for everything. He felt like he owed them. Now he doesn’t. He can just be their son and not some kind of performance. Now he’s doing what he loves and his parents came around and are supporting him.”
I wasn’t sure where this was headed, but talking through it helped. “I think I convinced myself Patrick was off-limits, because if I admitted to more, it would mean exactly what’s playing out right now. I know what this leads to. Saying yes to being with Patrick means I’m choosing him for good. We aren’t going to break up. Ever. That means my family gets their checkbox. And I don’t want to give it to them.”
“Ah, spite.” Noah sat back with a self-satisfied smirk. “The queen of all motivations.”
Possibly, my own spite would thwart my happy future with Patrick. I couldn’t let that happen. This wasn’t an entirely new revelation but seemed wholly new and different now that Patrick and I had told each other how we felt.
We were together, and I wanted to be. Now I had to sort out the rest. Maybe move past this idea that giving into my family meant losing something. Being with Patrick meant wins, not losses.
“That was still pretty harsh, Noah,” Hudson was saying, which snapped my attention back to the chat.
I took a breath. “It’s okay. Noah—we’re good. You said what needed to be said. ”
She nodded. “Copy.”
“How can we support you with the bakery?” Jillian asked. “Are you still looking at other properties? How about the grant? Did you send in the application?”
We chatted more about my plans. I mentioned meeting the cake baker at the wedding expo who offered help. But that step seemed further off. I needed to nail down a location. Looking at other bakery sites would be smart, but my gut told me the shop on Main Street was the one.
“So, uh,” I clapped my hands together. “Anyone else want to dish about their life?”
Jillian raised a tentative hand. “Adam and I are wedding planning. But that didn’t seem like the best topic for today… How about you, Noah?”
She snorted. “Don’t look at me. My life is a disaster.”
I eased back on the couch. “Do tell. I might have some advice.”
“Payback that quick?” She made a throat slitting motion. “No thanks.”
I couldn’t help it, I burst out laughing. Noah joined in and soon we were all laughing.
“I love you all,” I said through a light prick of emotional tears—happy, sad, stressed—all of it. “Never change.”
The Mavens worked quickly. Hudson contacted the Elder Ribben to inquire about the property.
“He acted kind of weird about it,” Hudson reported after the call. “He asked how I got his number, so I said I looked it up in the town directory. And then he said, ‘but yeah, why do you think I own that property, who told you?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, hmm, good question.’ And then I told him, ‘Word on the street is, you own it. Because I’m actively looking to buy, I asked around.’ So, crisis averted.”
I looked at my shredded thumbnail. Who knew stress made me a nail chewer? I thought I only baked. “What’s the rest?”
She told me the asking price. “He said his people would handle any negotiations. Then he asked my name, so I told him I was actually an assistant and I couldn’t disclose the buyer, but that I wanted to send a rep to check out the place. He didn’t like that so much so I went with flattery.”
“What do you mean, flattery?”
“I told him I looked him up and started listing his accomplishments. I basically talked back to him about his own career achievements, got him talking, and he said Thursday at nine a.m. So there you go.”
“Thursday at nine? Just like that? I can go see the property? Hudson, you’re a genius.”
“People like to talk about themselves. Egotistical men in particular. Anyway, your next decision is who you’ll send, because you can’t go yourself.”
“It’s my bakery. Of course I’m going.”
“Does he know what you look like?”
Shoot. “It’s not like there’s been a campaign debate where they’ve faced off in person. But yeah, I imagine he’s probably seen photos of us.” Hopefully, nothing of me near that horse.
“I’ll accept payment in the form of skincare products or owed favors,” Hudson said.
“You have a ton of skincare products. What are you talking about?”
“Favor it is.”
Great. I did owe her, though. And now my next step was how to get into this bakery without being recognized.