Chapter 5
Poppy sat beside her brother Liam as the engine idled in the Mountain Ridge parking lot. The sun was setting below the pine ridgeline. The wedding was starting in fifteen minutes, guests were arriving and the soft sound of violin music drifted into the cab of the SUV.
She wasn’t sure what was going on with the man next to her.
Liam, usually an unflappable force of steel, stared silently through the windshield at nothing.
Poppy watched the muscles in his jaw clench and unclench, a metronome of tension.
She couldn’t remember a time her brother had been so visibly off-kilter.
The day before, he’d been practically… buoyant.
It was the only word for it. He’d seemed happier, lighter, and freer than she’d ever witnessed in her life.
Now, less than twenty-four hours later, he was the very definition of brooding, and the silence was beginning to hurt her ears.
Trying to lighten the mood, she asked, “Sooooo, is the plan to just sit here until the engine runs out of gas?”
Her quip landed like a lead balloon.
“Okay, I tried to be jokey, but I’m just going to ask you, what is wrong?” She took the head-on approach. No reason to beat around the bush.
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
Bullshit, he was “fine.” She lifted her arm and tapped the end of his nose with her fingertip.
He recoiled.
“Just making sure it’s not growing, Pinocchio.”
His eyes sliced to hers, and if looks could kill, she would be fatally wounded.
“Okay, it wasn’t my most clever, but I’m trying here.
” Poppy lifted her arms in mock surrender.
She lowered her hands back down to her lap, then tried a softer approach.
“You know, you’re allowed to be not fine.
And I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you this, but not only can you have feelings, you can actually talk about them. ”
Liam had only been in Poppy’s life for eight years, but in that time, he’d been the definition of a lone wolf.
He’d been estranged from his family, who were now in town.
Or at least the man he thought was his father.
He hadn’t spoken to his little brother, Tristan, and if Poppy wasn’t mistaken, he was in love with Frankie, Tristan’s fiancée, so there was a lot going on that he never opened up about.
They would all be in attendance at his father’s wedding, which was probably why he hadn’t gotten out of the car.
When he didn’t respond, she exhaled as her head dropped back in exasperation.
Clearly she needed to take another tactic. “Okay, can I at least know what flavor of fine we’re dealing with?” She twisted so she was facing him, tucking her knees up under her. “Is it wedding fine, family fine, or is it—” She paused dramatically. “—Frankie fine?”
He flinched at the mention of Frankie’s name.
Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner.
“Okay, got it.” She snapped her fingers and pointed at him with finger guns.
He pretended to have no clue what she was talking about. “Got what?”
“Got that you are upset about Frankie.”
His head shook back and forth. “I’m not.”
“You do know you’re a terrible liar, right?” she asked rhetorically. “Like, epically abysmal.”
“It’s just…it’s complicated.”
“When is it not?!” Mark Zuckerberg didn’t create an entire category of relationship status under that for nothing.
“Okay, so what did you do?” she sing-songed.
“Me?” Liam shifted towards Poppy, his expression offended. “Why do you think I did something?”
“Because you have a penis,” she stated matter-of-factly.
He flinched in horror.
Her eyes rolled in the back of her head. “Grow up, you’re an ER doctor.”
“So?” he shot back defensively.
“So, what happened? Give it to me. My own love life is Shit City, but I’m actually scarily good at giving others relationship advice. Like, scarily good.”
“It doesn’t matter.” He shrugged.
“Of course it matters!” Men were such idiots. That was the only thing that mattered. She took a breath and tried to calm down, getting upset wouldn’t solve anything. “Can I ask you just one question?”
“Sure. You just did.”
“Ha, ha, ha.” She smacked his forearm before turning serious. “Have you talked to her about it…whatever it is?”
He remained quiet, which in itself was an answer.
“I knew it!” She clapped her hands together. “Why are men so stupid?!”
“I didn’t say anything,” he countered in a weak defense.
“You didn’t have to.” She took a deep breath in through her nose and exhaled through her mouth, trying to stay calm, cool, and collected. “Look, I don’t know what is going on, but I do know that you, my dear brother, live in your head. You are always thinking a gazillion—”
“That’s not a number,” he corrected her.
“Semantics,” she waved dismissively.
His expression turned smug, most likely over her incorrect use of the word “semantics,” but thankfully for him, he was smart enough not to point it out.
She continued, plowing ahead, “—a gazillion steps ahead, which is great when it’s just you. But this isn’t just you. You can’t decide things for her.”
“I didn’t I—”
She held up her hand. “If you haven’t spoken to her, then yes, you have. You’ve decided for her.” With that declaration, Poppy leaned down, grabbed her purse from the footwell, opened the door, and climbed out. “Oh, and don’t worry about giving me a ride home, I’ve got that covered.”
Poppy left Liam behind and walked alone in the gravel parking lot, her strappy heels sinking with every step, past a parade of gleaming rental SUVs and matte-black luxury sports cars.
The path forked at a wooden sign, “Sterling-Costas Wedding,” in a fanciful, swirling cursive, and she followed the arrows through an archway of wild wisteria, her breath caught as she glimpsed the view across the valley.
The grounds of Mountain Ridge Outdoor Adventure were almost aggressively beautiful, the kind of place that made you feel like you’d fallen into the set of a prestigious TV drama about impossibly attractive and rich people who drank limited-release small-batch gin and had suspiciously little cell service when one of them ended up mysteriously dead.
As Poppy approached the main lodge, she could feel the thrum of energy from the wedding, guests in cocktail dresses and black ties, servers in slacks and bow ties, the soothing and dulcet sounds of a master violinist, and the golden rays of sunset breaking through the high pine canopy as dusk crept in.
Every tree had been laced with micro-lights, turning the entire hillside into a galaxy of tiny stars. The effect was dizzying.
As she got closer to the deck where the cocktail hour was being held, she did spy with her little eye several children frolicking, but since they weren’t related to her, she figured she’d be able to handle it.
One of the saddest parts of her situation was that she was suffering in silence, and she knew she didn’t have to be.
If she told her sisters or her mom, Carmen, or Miss Carol, they’d rally around her.
They’d do whatever they needed to make sure she was emotionally, mentally, and physically supported.
But she couldn’t lean on them, not for this.
They wouldn’t understand. They would tell her it was fine, that it was going to be okay, that as long as she was healthy, nothing else mattered, and that there were options. Those were true things but not things she wanted to hear now.
As she joined the cocktail hour, a server in a white button-down shirt and bow tie passed her with a tray of champagne, and she grabbed a flute.
Before she’d taken one sip, the man she’d come there to see, the man who she recognized from the ax photo she’d grilled Liam about, crossed the deck path ten yards away from her.
She sucked in a startled breath and froze.
A domino of split-second chain reactions toppled through her: excitement, nerves, confusion, and disappointment.
The man was within spitting distance, and there were no butterflies, no tingles, and no fanny flutters, as the kids from Love Island say.
In fact, she felt nothing. She was teetering on despair when she remembered AJ had a carbon copy, and hope sprang eternal once more.
She’d bet her entire life savings that the man she was watching head inside the main lodge was not AJ but his genetic doppelganger, Niko.
Relief washed over her. She’d pinned so much on the hope that she was and still could be madly, wildly attracted to someone based on her seeing that photo.
Even if all the night held were stolen glances and an internal game of will-they-won’t-they with a player of one, she would be happy.
She just wanted to feel good things again.
She was so desperate she’d settle for a one-sided unrequited crush as her dopamine, serotonin, endorphin hit supplier.
Especially if it came from spending an evening covertly drooling over a man who looked like a Greek-god version of Henry Cavill.
AJ watched his sister Frankie trying to make their mom’s day perfect and could see how stressed she was.
He wished that he possessed the skills to make it easier for his sister, but he did not.
All he could do was stand on the periphery and watch as Frankie expertly navigated the emotional and physical maze of their mother’s wedding day minefield like the mini-sized, hyper-organized, strawberry-blonde superhero she was.
She effortlessly put out fires from the wrong cake order being delivered to their mom’s last-minute decision to move the wedding indoors to shifting gears in seconds to comfort Angelica, their frazzled second cousin, who’d splattered Merlot all over her pale green dress.
When each crisis arose, Frankie met it with a calm authority, offering solutions that were both impressive and also broke AJ’s heart a little.