Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
RHETT
I ate a second cookie. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten a homemade cookie, and it conjured great memories of sitting in my mom’s kitchen doing homework while she baked. I’d come so close to opening the door, but my feet wouldn’t move downstairs. Instead, I watched, like a scowling curmudgeon, as the pretty little songbird with her buttermilk-colored hair skittered down the trail. She’d taken one last look back with those incredible almond-shaped brown eyes, the same eyes that had met mine with surprise when she realized the man she’d been talking about had just handed her the bag of pistachios she’d been working so hard to grab. She looked thoroughly embarrassed, but she shouldn’t have. Nothing she said was untrue. I’d bought a house that, upon further inspection, was not a great investment, no matter how I looked at it. Strange and grim—I couldn’t have come up with a more apt description of myself. The dark mood that had swallowed me in the past year seemed to be permanent. I was sure I would have gotten past it by now, but there was still too much raw pain sticking around.
And then, as if she knew I’d been thinking about her, Christine’s text popped through.
“I really want to see you,” she texted.
I wrote back. “That makes one of us.”
“Rhett, I think we just need to talk things through. We can’t ruin a good thing because of one mistake.”
“One big mistake,” I wrote back. “It’s over. Let the lawyers figure things out and then we never have to speak again.”
She didn’t respond. I dropped the phone onto the table. The kitchen table, along with a sofa, chair and guest room bed, were all I took with me when I left the house. I told Christine the rest was hers. I wanted nothing more to do with any of it.
I picked up a third cookie and let my mind wander back to the girl with the buttermilk hair.