Chapter 1 #3
“You’re certainly not neat,” he says, wiping marinara sauce from my arm.
I pout.
“You own a bakery, Halston. You make half this city’s birthday cakes, emergency muffins, breakup cookies, apology croissants, and whatever that latte was last month with the blue whipped cream.”
“Cloud foam.”
“It looked radioactive.”
“It sold out.”
“That’s not the point. The point is that people don’t come to you because you’re a wife-shaped object. They come to you because you make things feel better.” He actually looks like he’s being serious.
I freeze.
He seems to regret saying something sincere, his shoulders tensing as if waiting for impact.
My eyes start to water.
“No, no,” he moans.
“That was nice.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“It was very nice.”
“I take it back.”
“You can’t.”
“I can, and I have.”
“Oliver.”
“No.”
“You love me.”
“I tolerate you for tax purposes.”
“We are not legally connected,” I remind him, a tear slipping out.
“Emotionally then, which is far worse.”
My laugh comes out wet, but it’s real. Oliver turns away quickly, as if my gratitude has become airborne and he’s desperate to avoid inhaling it.
My phone buzzes again, and this time, I don’t reach for it. Progress.
Oliver checks it anyway. “Marley says, I swear to God, if she cries into cheese again, take a picture.”
“Wow,” I mutter, biting my cheese stick.
“She also says she loves you.”
I wipe under my eye with the heel of my hand. “Tell her I love her.”
He shakes his head, placing the phone back in the cup. “You tell her tomorrow when your spelling returns.”
I gasp. “My spelling is fine.”
“You texted me earlier that you were ‘emotionally constipated by betryyil.’”
“Betrayal has an I in it somewhere.”
“No,” he shakes his head again, “it does not.”
I sit back, sighing.
The sadness in me keeps moving, changing shape. Sometimes it feels like humiliation. Sometimes grief. Sometimes a hollow ache that makes me miss the person I thought Grant was so badly I want to call him just to hear the lie again.
But tonight, under the warm lights of Oliver’s bar, with fries and cheese and my best friend guarding my phone like a holy relic, anger starts crawling up through the cracks.
It’s small, hot, and all mine. “I’m angry,” I say finally.
“Good.” Oliver starts drying more glasses.
“I wasted years.”
“Yes.”
“I let him make me feel like a cupcake with too much frosting.”
Oliver stares. “I’m not touching that.”
“I’m a cupcake with the correct amount of frosting.”
He nods. “You’re several cupcakes in a trench coat.”
“I’m serious, Oliver.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want to be sad and dignified.”
“Then don’t be.”
“I don’t want to become one of those women who finds herself through herbal tea and a capsule wardrobe.”
“No one who owns that many pink sweaters is at risk of a capsule wardrobe.”
“I want to be hot.”
Oliver closes his eyes.
“And reckless.”
“Less good,” he mutters.
“I want to be wanted.”
His eyes open, and the words sit between us.
They’re not funny. Not dramatic. They’re just simply true.
I want someone to look at me and not see a problem to manage. Not see someone who is too much. A woman who needs smoothing down before she can be loved properly. I want to feel like a person again. Not evidence. Not failure. Not an almost-wife. A woman. A wanted woman.
Oliver’s expression softens in the way it tends to when he’s about to say something he hates meaning. “You don’t need to prove that tonight.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“No,” I admit. “But I’d like to remember it.”
He looks at me for a long moment before reaching for my glass. He sniffs it, frowns at whatever remains, and pours it into the sink. “You’re done,” he says as I open my mouth.
“I’m in my healing era.”
“Your healing era can continue with water.”
“My healing era hates water.”
“Your healing era is one bad decision from crying in the alley.”
“I have dignity.”
“You asked whether an imaginary housewife got cheated on.”
I can’t argue that one.
He slides a tall glass of water toward me, and I drink it. Oliver is right, and I hate when he knows he’s right, which is, unfortunately, almost always.
A cheer erupts from the Vipers’ table. Oliver’s face pinches. “You know,” I say, “for someone who hates sports, you seem to profit a lot from large sweaty men.”
His eyes narrow. “Every day I wake up and carry that burden.”
“You’re so brave.”
I eye them a little more, noticing the blonde one with green eyes as he comes up to the bar and orders another beer.
I watch him go, and look at Oliver. “He’s cute.”
“No.”
“What?”
“No.”
“I didn’t ask anything.”
“You were about to.”
“I’m allowed to notice men who are cute.”
“Notice them silently.”
I frown. “I’m single now.”
“You’re wounded now,” he reminds me.
“I can be both.”
“You can be both tomorrow.”
“Okay, but I’m also wearing a good bra.”
His hand comes down on the bar, thundering around the room. “I am begging you to have one thought privately.”
“I have had too many private thoughts. That’s how I ended up engaged to a man who thought black pepper was adventurous.” What makes it worse is his father is a food critic.
Oliver grimaces. “That should have been the first red flag.”
“There were so many flags. A whole parade of them, actually.”
“With permits.”
“And I was standing there like, wow, look at all this color.”
I look at the mirror again. Maybe Grant hadn’t changed overnight.
Maybe the betrayal had not appeared out of nowhere like a crack in glass.
Maybe that crack had always been there, and I kept decorating around it.
A bow here, a bakery success there. And then a ring.
A wedding date. A future I could explain to people without sounding lonely.
The problem with being cheated on is that the cheating didn’t just ruin the relationship; it rewrote all the memories that went with it. Every sweet moment became suspicious, and every compliment evidence. Every time he called me too much, I heard the warning inside of it.
My chest tightens, and I reach for a mozzarella stick, only to find the basket empty. Devastating.
My phone buzzes again, and Oliver peeks at it. “Marley says she’s going to bed and if you do anything stupid, she wants plausible deniability.”
“Text her a heart.”
Oliver shakes his head.
“Text her a skull.”
He stares.
“It’s our thing.”
He types with two thumbs, slower than any person under fifty should legally text.
“What did you say?”
“Skull emoji.”
“You found the emoji keyboard?”
“I’m not ninety.”
“You print invoices.”
“I like paper.”
“You read newspapers, Oliver.”
“I like information that doesn’t yell at me and tell me I’m going to be murdered today.”
“You own a fax machine.”
“Maybe you should mind your business.”
“My business is closed for the night.”
“Then find a hobby.”
“I have hobbies.”
“Spiraling is not a hobby.”
“I draw fantasy maps.”
“I know.”
“I ask important cultural questions about Suzy Homemaker.”
“She’s not real.”
“Neither was my fiancé, apparently.”
Oliver goes still. The joke had come out fast and sharp, but the pain under it was real.
His voice lowers as he says, “he was real. He was just worse than you thought.”
I nod, and the lights crackle overhead.
Maybe if I were sober, I would think this was a warning—a storm brewing. Maybe, if my heart weren’t cracked open and stuffed full of vodka and marinara, I could hear the universe clearing its throat.
But I’m not completely sober. Not drunk, but not sober. And I’m definitely not wise.
I’m a woman one week out from detonating her life, sitting in her best friend’s bar with smudged mascara, a good bra, and a dangerous need to be wanted by someone who did not know enough to pity me.
The bar door opens, warm air pouring in, and I turn.
The door doesn’t slam against the wall, and no dramatic gusts of wind sweep through the building. The lights don’t flicker, and the music doesn’t stop. No one in the room gasps. But I can feel the shift anyway.
I turn on my stool, drink halfway to my mouth even though the glass only contains water and disappointment.
A man stands just inside the bar. Huge. Not tall, though he is that too.
Huge, broad shoulders under a dark Henley.
Thick arms, solid chest, and large hands.
His long black hair is pulled into a loose bun at the top of his head, and his facial hair is neat along his jaw like it had been carved there.
His gaze moves over everyone, lingering on me for just a second. But it’s enough.
Something in my stomach pulls.
He looks like a man who makes lists. Who wakes up too early and who sorts screws by size and never forgets to check the oil in his car. Like someone who has never talked themselves into a spontaneous road trip by his own emotional collapse.
He is, in other words, exactly the wrong kind of man to look at while drunk, heartbroken, and thinking too hard about being wanted.
Oliver reaches across the bar and takes my glass from my hand.
I blink. “Hey.”
“No,” he says firmly.
I look back at him. “I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
“I was going to say hello.”
“You were about to make a bad decision.”
“I’m allowed to say hello to people,” I scoff like he’s not absolutely correct.
“Not like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you just found a match and remember you’re flammable.”
I smile.
The stranger starts toward the bar, and Oliver’s expression turns grim.
But me? My pulse picks up.
Before him, there had been Grant.