Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
brIAR
“Oh, thank God you’re here,” Nora mutters when she answers the door to her mother’s house the next afternoon. It’s a tidy white Arts and Crafts bungalow with a bright-red door decked out with a fresh evergreen wreath.
Nora tugs me inside the house, which smells like warm spiced wine.
“Cormac is insufferable,” she hisses as she leads me past the beige couch, where her mother and Cormac’s father are cuddled together, whispering in undertones.
They don’t seem to notice we exist, let alone that we’re in the same room as them, but I slow my pace.
What is the etiquette for greeting someone who looks like they’re about to get ravaged?
“Oh, don’t mind them,” Nora continues as if I’d spoken. “They do that a lot. My mom will come up for air soon. We’re going to make gingerbread cookies before dinner, and Mom gets really into it. But first let’s grab some mulled wine. Everything’s better with mulled wine.”
“Yes, please.”
But when she leads me into the kitchen, a warm, cozy space painted sage green with a white-and-gray tile backsplash, she sighs heavily.
Cormac is standing at the stove in a Rudolph sweater, pouring himself mulled wine from an enormous pot.
He’s tall and lanky, with curly light-brown hair, glasses, and gray eyes.
Nora’s sigh turns to outrage when we reach the stove and she sees the container is nearly empty. “Cormac, if you finish it, you need to make more. It’s a house rule, even for guests.”
He huffs, adjusting his glasses, and takes a calculated sip of the wine. “Your mom offered it to me. We don’t have any more bottles of red.”
“You knew Briar was coming.”
“So take it.” He shoves the glass at her just as she extends her hand in a warding-off gesture, and the warm red wine splatters all over both of them.
Nora’s eyes widen. “You did that on purpose.”
“I don’t think he did,” I say. “It got on him too.”
There’s mulled wine spatter on his glasses, and he looks horrified.
“Don’t try reasoning with Nora,” he says darkly, grabbing a dish towel and swiping at the stains on his sweater, which have made it look like someone ax-murdered Rudolph. “She’s incapable of reason.”
Nora looks like she’s about to explode, so I lead her over to the marble counter and grab the roll of paper towels off its holder. “Do you know where your mom keeps the cleanser?”
She silently retrieves it from under the sink, handing it to me.
“Oh no,” Cormac says, still swiping ineffectually at his sweater. “That’s not the right cleanser for this mess at all.”
“Says the man who’s rubbing wine into his sweater,” Nora points out.
His eyes widen for a second, as if he didn’t realize what he was doing, but then he shrugs and uses the edge of the sweater to wipe off his glasses. “I must have been doing it subconsciously. I hate this sweater.”
“My mother gave it to you,” she hisses. “Have some respect.”
“And it was very sweet of her, but I don’t like it. I’m only wearing it because my dad said it would be nice.”
“Saying that takes away from the gesture.” She shakes the roll of paper towels at him. “Look, we’ll clean this up. Go do…whatever. Hang out with our parents while they make out.”
He gives her a sour look. “It’s my mess. Let me clean it the way it should be cleaned.”
“Fine,” she snaps, throwing the roll at him, and he fumbles it before wrapping his fingers firmly around the cylinder. She grabs a growler from the fridge while he lowers down to search the cabinet beneath the sink for something that might or might not be there.
Nora commandeers two glasses, then gestures for me to follow her. “Let’s hang out in my room.”
But before I can leave, Cormac calls out to me. “Hey, you’re running that brewery Liam Moroney works for, right?”
My heart throbs in my chest at the mention of Liam’s name, and I wonder for the thousandth time what he’s doing today. Drinking probably. Thinking of her.
I won’t lie. I spent an hour on social media this morning, trying to find his profiles (nonexistent) and then scrolling back through Hannah’s timeline in search of any photos of Liam and a mystery woman.
If there were, Hannah has deleted them.
I clear my throat. “Yup, that’s me.”
“We’re playing at your New Year’s party. Nora’s going to be there too. I’m looking forward to it, but it’ll be my first live performance, so I’m kind of nervous.”
“Don’t expect me to ask for an autograph,” she says with an eye roll.
“Autographs don’t make any sense,” he scoffs, still kneeling in front of the cabinet. “Who cares about having something with someone else’s name signed on it? I don’t like flowers either.”
“Wasn’t going to bring you any.”
He ignores her, keeping his focus on me. “Anyway, I actually just got a text from Liam.”
“You did?” I blurt.
“I’d asked him if he wanted to grab a drink, like, weeks ago, and he just now texted me back. I thought I was the only person who forgets about texts. Anyway, Liam’s cool. He offered to teach me how to make beer. I love learning how to do new things.”
“Consider some etiquette lessons,” Nora mutters.
“Did he sound drunk?” I ask before I can think better of it.
Cormac’s brow furrows. “How can a person sound drunk on a text?”
“I don’t know, forget it,” I say as Nora gives me a speculative look. “I was only curious.”
Nora angles her head toward the hallway. “Let’s go have that drink. Cormac has some work to do.”
“Oh, we won’t be brewing the beer today,” he replies. “It’s going to happen in a week or two, probably, because he says he has a lot of stuff leading up to—”
“I was talking about cleaning the kitchen,” Nora clarifies.
“Oh, right,” he says, and his head disappears back under the sink.
Nora tugs me out of the room, down the small, creaky hallway, past a bathroom, and to and through a door with a crystal doorknob. The room beyond it is small but neat, with a double bed covered by a purple comforter, a rolltop desk with a chair, and a beanbag chair.
“Let me just change my shirt,” she says and disappears into the closet, reemerging in a plain red sweater.
“Did you get a reindeer one too?” I ask.
“Yes, but I’m not a masochist. Cormac didn’t have to put it on.” She blows hair off her face with a puff of air. “I always feel like I’m walking back in time when I’m over here.”
I smile ruefully. “I know what you mean. I become a child as soon as I step into my parents’ house.”
“I claim the beanbag chair,” she says with a return smile, then plops down onto it and pours ginger beer into each of the glasses. One of them goes to me.
“Soooo…” she starts.
I get settled in the chair at the desk and take a sip of the ginger beer—the holiday variation we’ll have at the New Year’s party—because I have a feeling I might need it for whatever’s coming next.
“Why did you go out with Jonah?” she asks.
Not what I was expecting…
I study the glass in my hand, taking in the lovely caramel hue and the bubbles fizzing to the top. It smells like caramelized fruit. I take a sip, steeling myself for the Jonah talk, and nearly hum at the taste.
God, I love the transformation that’s at the center of brewing—how you can start with a few disparate ingredients and end up with something ambrosial. “This is delicious.”
“It is,” she agrees. “So is my question.”
“I think Jonah could tell I was lonely, and he took advantage of it,” I say, feeling the familiar weight of self-recrimination in my chest. But I fight it.
I’m sick of feeling guilty for wanting the world to be kinder than it is.
“He knew my dad had promised to give me the brewery. He said he’d help, and it made me feel less alone.
I…” The ache in my chest seems to speak the next words.
“I’ve always felt alone, for as long as I can remember. ”
She gives me a sad smile. “Guys like him look for weak spots to burrow into. Like worms. You shouldn’t blame yourself. Manipulation is literally their thing.”
“Why did you go for him? You’re not weak.”
She points a finger at my chest. “Neither are you. You thought you needed him, but you didn’t. Look at you, running off, making A-plans, B-plans, all kinds of plans. I don’t know many people who’ve done as much in as little time. You didn’t need Jonah to do any of that. You just thought you did.”
My grip on the cup tightens. “But I do need Liam.”
“You don’t need him any more than he needs you,” she says archly.
“Are you kidding? Anyone would be glad to have him. He’s insanely talented. You tasted his beer the other day.”
“I’ve tasted it at competitions too. He is crazy talented, but that’s not the only thing people care about.” She picks at the laundry tag on the beanbag chair. “Everyone knows he got arrested after beating up the owner of Mountain Morning so bad he had to be hospitalized overnight.”
Something sours in my stomach. I hadn’t realized it was that bad. “That happened a long time ago.”
“People remember. That’s one thing you can be sure of in places like this.
” She glowers at the door. “Like Cormac with his science project. It doesn’t matter that I knocked it over by accident, or that Liam had a good reason for what he did.
Those things still happened, and people still remember. They always remember the bad stuff.”
“He had a good reason?” I nearly fall off my chair in my eagerness to hear it.
“Look,” she says, setting her glass down. “Gossip is like that telephone game. You never know how much of the truth you’re getting.”
I should probably pretend my interest is solely professional—that I want to make sure Liam isn’t some raging psychopath who’s going to start punching rude tourists in the tasting room or drowning employees in our pale ale. But Nora has been good to me, and honesty should never be met with a lie.
“I really need to know.”