Chapter 1 #2
Max had made himself good and angry by the time he pulled into the lot at the Grange, which was already packed with shiny sports cars, fancy SUVs and a couple of pickup trucks like his.
After flipping down the visor, he took a quick look at his appearance and decided he looked as good as he ever did—as good as he cared to look.
“Whatever,” he muttered under his breath before getting out of the truck and heading inside, prepared to cash in on the bet with his mother if it meant he could be home and in bed in two hours.
The buffet wasn’t bad. It even included some of his favorites, including pasta and fried chicken. Maybe he ate like a seven-year-old, but that was easier than making two dinners most nights. He added a salad to feel better about his diet and found a table with an open seat.
“Max Abbott,” one of the women said. “I heard you weren’t coming!” She was a heavy-set blonde who Max tried desperately to place. She was too far away for him to see her nametag. “It’s me, Mary Jane Connor, or, well, it’s Foster now. I married Gig Foster.”
“Ah, okay. Nice to see you again.”
“You look exactly the same,” Mary Jane said. “I’d know you anywhere.”
“Thanks, you, too.”
“Now that is just not true.” She cackled with laughter. “Three babies and thirty pounds later, I look nothing like I did in high school.”
The others at the table joined the discussion about the childbearing and weight gain and how hard it was to lose the pounds with kids underfoot.
He heard Mary Jane say she and Gig lived in Concord, New Hampshire, and rarely got back to Butler anymore.
That explained why he never saw them around town.
“You have a son, right, Max?” Mary Jane asked.
“I do. Caden will be seven this weekend.”
“You got an early start,” Mary Jane’s husband, Gig, said. He’d lost most of his hair in the last ten years.
“I did.” Max figured they had the full rundown of how he’d had a son right after he finished college and then had to raise him on his own—with a ton of help from his parents and family— after the baby’s mother decided parenthood wasn’t for her. He wasn’t about to fill in any gaps for them.
“I’m sure you have pictures,” another woman said.
Max didn’t recognize her either. If he hadn’t seen a few people he knew at the registration desk, he might’ve worried he was at the wrong event.
This was every bit as dreadful as he’d expected it to be.
He glanced at his watch. Seven twenty. No way. He should’ve gone with his initial impulse and skipped this stupid reunion with people he didn’t care about.
“Max?”
A jolt of shock zipped down his spine. He’d know that voice anywhere. As he spun around in his seat, he tried to brace himself to see her again. But all the time in the world couldn’t have prepared him for the rush of emotion that overtook him when he took in the sight of his first love.
Lexi Bradshaw.
He stood so quickly, he nearly knocked over his chair.
“Lexi.” God, she looked great. Her light brown hair was curly now, but everything else about her was just as he remembered, from the warm hazel eyes to the stunning smile to the button nose and rosy cheeks.
“When Dawn said you were here,” she said, “I didn’t believe her since I heard you didn’t come to the last one.”
“I’m here.”
She hugged him, and it took his brain five seconds to send the signal to his arms that he should hug her back.
Lexi.
“It’s so good to see you,” she said.
He quickly found that she smelled the same, too, like sweetness and sunshine and everything perfect. “You, too.”
Max had so many questions, such as where had she been for the last ten years?
He’d tried a few times to find her on social media, but she had no presence there or anywhere as far as he could tell.
A Google search had come up empty, too. How did a person not exist online in this day and age?
According to Max’s mother, her family had moved to Texas and only returned for an occasional visit or ski weekend.
Just as he was about to ask where she’d been, a woman with a camera came at them. “Our class couple back together again! Smile, you guys!”
Max leaned into Lexi and smiled for the camera, but he wished everyone else would go away and leave them alone so he could talk to the only person from high school he’d truly missed.
And yes, now that she was standing right next to him, he realized just how much he’d missed her, despite the hurt and confusion she’d caused him with her disappearance.
However, everyone else had missed her, too, so for the next hour, they were surrounded by old friends who’d missed them both.
He barely remembered some of them and had to laugh at how far removed his life was from who and what he’d been in high school.
Becoming a single father at twenty-two had sent him in a whole new direction, and even though he still lived in Butler, he felt like he’d traveled a million miles from the innocence of high school in the last ten years.
They talked about things he could barely recall—teachers, classes, specific football games, ski outings and the basketball team’s run for the state championship their senior year.
As one of the starting forwards on the team, that he remembered.
They’d come up one win short, and Max could still taste the bitter regret that had stayed with him and his teammates long after that final loss.
But that wasn’t something he dwelled on the way it seemed some of his teammates had. He’d had more important things to think about, such as first-grade homework, karate classes and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches made only on white bread with the crusts removed.
“You’re quiet,” Lexi said.
Most of the group moved to the dance floor when the DJ started playing songs from their graduation year.
“I don’t have much to add,” Max said. “I barely remember what the school looked like, let alone what table we sat at for lunch.”
She gave him a quizzical look that brought back so many memories of spending every possible minute with her once upon a time. “You really don’t remember what the school looked like?”
He shook his head. “It’s like a blank spot.”
“You ought to have that checked.”
Laughing, he said, “It’s because there’re so many things that’ve happened since then that take up the space in my brain.”
“Like what?”
“Did you hear I have a son?”
Her expression conveyed shock. “What? No! When did that happen?”
He told her about Chloe getting pregnant their senior year of college. “Caden is the best thing to ever happen to me. He’s… There’s not a word big enough to describe him.”
“That’s amazing, Max. I’m so happy for you. Let me see some pictures.”
Did she sound sad after learning he had a son? He pulled out the iPhone that was mostly useless to him in Butler, but it was full of photos of his blond little boy that he shared with Lexi.
“Oh, Max. He’s beautiful!”
“I’m completely biased, but I agree. He’s also sweet, kind, polite, funny as hell and a great athlete. We have so much fun together.”
“I can see why you’re madly in love with him.”
“I really am. He’s like the sun, blinding out everything that isn’t him.”
“It’s very sweet to hear you talk about him. What about his mother? Are you still together?”
Max was surprised she hadn’t heard about any of this.
Did that mean she’d never bothered to look him up online?
“Nope. She stepped out of the picture when he was a few weeks old. It’s just been me and Caden ever since.
I’m thankful for my huge family every day.
My parents and grandfather have been an incredible support to me, and my siblings have, too.
I haven’t been your typical single parent.
We lived with my parents until he was four, but we’re on our own now.
Mostly.” He laughed. “He’s with them now. ”
“I’m sure you’re a wonderful father, and Caden is lucky to have you.”
“I’m the lucky one. When it first happened… When I found out Chloe was pregnant… I panicked. The relationship had been rocky from the start, and I was just about to graduate from college. We were so not ready. Turns out she was more not ready than I was.”
“Do you ever hear from her?”
He shook his head. “Not in years.”
“God,” she said on a long sigh. “How can she bear not to see her own child?”
“I have no idea, but I almost feel sorry for what she’s missing, not that I want her back in our lives. I don’t. It’s just… He’s so amazing. Every day is like a new adventure.” Max caught himself and grimaced. “Sorry. Don’t mean to gush.”
“You’re not. You’re a proud dad and with good reason. Your little boy is adorable.”
“He really is. Anyway, enough about me. What’ve you been up to? You disappeared off the face of the earth. No one knew where you’d gone.”
She bit her lip, seeming to think about what she wanted to say. Then she looked at him with the big hazel eyes that used to wreck him back when she was his first love and he’d thought they’d be together forever. “Can we go somewhere else and talk?”
“Sure, let’s get out of here.”
Lexi had promised herself that if she saw Max and he asked where she’d been, she’d tell him the truth.
If he didn’t seem to care that he hadn’t heard from her or about her in years, then she would’ve left well enough alone.
But because he’d asked, she would fill him in, even if reliving the nightmare was the last thing she wanted to do.
As they made their escape, they put up with teasing comments about rekindling their high school romance. They laughed that off and said good night and thank you to the organizers.
“Phew,” Max said when they emerged into the chill of encroaching winter.
“Smells like snow,” Lexi replied.
“Spoken like a native Vermonter.”
“You can take the girl out of Vermont…”
“Did you drive?”
She pointed to a small white car. “That’s my rental.”
“Want to come with me, and then I’ll bring you back to your car later?”
“Sure. That’ll work.”
“Right this way.”
He led her to a shiny dark green pickup truck and held the passenger door for her.
“Nice ride.”
“Thanks. I got it a few years ago.”
As soon as he started the engine, he turned up the heat.
While they waited for the truck to warm up, Lexi burrowed deeper into the winter coat she’d bought for this trip. She was always cold these days, even when it wasn’t thirty degrees outside.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked.
“Is there still nothing open after nine o’clock in Butler?”
“Pretty much.”
“And it’s too cold to be outside.”
“We can go back to my place. Caden is spending the night at the barn.”
She didn’t want to be nervous about being alone with him, but her belly was full of the butterflies that reminded her of dating him in high school. “Sure, that’d work.”
“I can’t recall what condition we left it in. There’re probably Legos all over the place.”
“That’s fine,” she said, laughing at the face he made.
“We usually do cleanup before bedtime, but I was in a hurry tonight to get him packed up and over to my mom’s.” He glanced over at her. “Sorry. You don’t care about our routine.”
“Sure, I do.”
“Eh, it’s nothing special, same thing every day, but that’s my life.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“It’s not what I expected when we left high school.”
“You’d talked about wanting to travel.”
“Still do, but that’s not going to happen for a while.”
He took a series of turns that led to a familiar street.
“Do you live at your grandfather’s house?”
“I do. He moved in with my parents and offered me his place. Told me to make it my own, so that’s what I’m doing one room at a time. It’s slow going. It hadn’t been updated in decades.”
“I remember how cozy it was and how cute your grandparents were together.”
“They were so cute. My grandmother died quite some time ago. We still miss her.”
“I can’t imagine your grandpa without her.”
“It was rough at first, but he’s found a good groove as a widower. He’s not living with my parents because he needs to. My mom wanted to take care of him, and he finally decided to let her.”
“That’s very sweet. I’m sure she loves doting on him.”
“She does, and he enjoys having her cooking for him and doing his laundry. You’d never believe he’s going to be ninety-one soon. He’s going strong.”
“I’m so glad to hear that. I know how much you love him.”
“We all love him so, so much.”
After a pause in the conversation, Max said, “Where’ve you been, Lex, and what brought you back to Butler?”
“I live in Houston now,” she said, glancing at him. “And I came back for you.”