Chapter 26
Sebastian
ON THE NINETY-MINUTE ride back from Wayford, my father blabbered endlessly about the cars we’d seen. A first-rate sign that he was nervous.
It was close to midnight.
“That was the friend from work whose daughter you wanted me to meet, right?” I asked when he finally paused to draw breath.
“Yes. Funny running into him there. Saw him today at the office, and he didn’t say a word about him going to the car show, too. And I had that extra ticket I could have given him.”
I turned my head and gave him a look that said Who do you think you’re kidding?
“No, really.”
“Okay, Dad.” I sighed, dragging it out.
“He’s a real nice guy. But I’m glad you ended up using the ticket.”
“Usually, it’s the moms doing the matchmaking. Refreshing twist that it’s you two instead,” I said, dry as the refreshments they’d handed out at the show.
“A cup of coffee is not matchmaking,” he said, way too defensively for that to be true.
“I’m going back to Houston soon, anyway. So what’s the point?”
He gave me a smug look. “She graduated from the University of Texas.”
I laughed. “Good one, Dad.”
Dropping him off at home, I declined his offer to sleep in Blueshore and drove back to the Coral Bay Inn.
Ruby’s cottage bathed in darkness at one a.m., but knowing she sometimes stayed up late, I circled it to look for a light.
Finding none, I went back to my cabin and forced myself to see it as a sign—dark house, closed door, radio silence, distance. Clear signals, if I cared to read them right.
RUBY WAS ALREADY STANDING with Dave near the steps of the main building when I arrived early the next morning.
Her curls veiled part of her face as she and Dave looked over the printed pages she held.
“Morning,” I said, and they both looked up.
“Got what you need?” Dave asked her. She nodded, and he gave me a quick smile before heading off to unload equipment from the back of his truck.
“Hey,” Ruby said with a tired half-smile. The faint laugh lines around her mouth settled straight in my chest. “You survived the car show?”
“We got back late.”
“Your dad okay?”
“He loved it. Spent the whole ride home narrating everything we saw all over again.”
“Classics are a serious business,” she said, and the smile lingered as she added, “Glad he had a good time.”
She held up the papers. “I got Dave’s take on the roofers. He likes the one I’m leaning toward. Want to go over them? I got coffee inside.”
“Sure.”
Inside, the smell of that floral cleaner they used on the floors mixed with the sharper tang of fresh-cut wood, dust, chemicals, and the adhesive they were using upstairs.
Ruby veered down the hall, her heels clicking across the tiled floor.
In her office, she handed me a mug of coffee, fingers brushing mine for half a second before she circled behind her desk. I took the chair across from her. She leaned forward and flipped through the printed Excel sheets I’d sent her yesterday.
Somewhere between comparing insulation types and assessing underlayment options, I caught myself wondering what the hell we were now.
When Ruby chose the roofer she wanted to hire, we stayed seated in something that was just a few days old between us—an uncomfortable silence.
“Can we just ... acknowledge the elephant in the room?” I said.
Her eyes flicked up to mine.
“I’m not trying to push you,” I added. “I wanted to come over last night, but wasn’t sure if ... I just think we’re both doing a lot of pretending. And maybe we both need to think about what we really want.”
She didn’t wince, didn’t roll her eyes, or deflect. She just held my gaze for a long moment.
There was that glint in her eyes again, like a blue wave brimming, when she said, quietly: “Can’t things go back to how they were?”
There was no defensiveness in it. Just a soft, tired question.
I leaned back in my chair. “I don’t know.”
She nodded like she’d already known the answer. Then she looked back down at the papers between us, like she couldn’t acknowledge the shift between us more than she already had.
I let the silence stretch another beat before clearing my throat. “By the way, I might need to head out to Armstrong Flight Research tomorrow. Just a quick trip. One of our payload mounts didn’t hold up in testing.”
“Armstrong?” she asked, eyes flicking back up. “Not Ames?”
“Yeah. NASA center near Edwards Air Force Base. They need me there. I’ll be back the next day.”
She nodded again, and this time, she didn’t quite meet my eyes. “Sounds important.”
“Not more important than this,” I said.
She bit on her lower lip and nodded, her eyes drifting shut for a moment as if my words pained her more than they helped.
The last thing I wanted was to cause pain to the woman I loved.
But somehow, loving her and hurting her were starting to feel like the same damn thing.