Alone with You

Chapter Two

Gwen

“M ooooom!” Daphne exclaimed, turning in the booth behind us, her blond hair whipping the shared backrest.

Her mother was sitting beside me, but as I saw my son holding her at straw-point with a spitball locked and loaded at the tip, I knew I was the mom she needed.

“Nathan Bryce Weaver, one blow and you will be knitting her a scarf tonight.”

It was an odd threat to give an eight-year-old boy, but I’d learned that the typical punishments of taking away toys, video games, or screen time just didn’t work for us. Mainly because my son didn’t give a damn about any of the aforementioned pastimes.

Nate was a wild beast. He spent his days outside, attempting to cut down trees with butter knives, barefoot and shirtless, running beside the golf carts in our neighborhood (much to our HOA’s dismay), or riding his bike off ramps he’d made using scraps of wood he’d collected from God only knew where.

I’d tried taking away his bike once. It backfired monumentally. Less than an hour later, I’d found him bouncing off the side of my house, teaching himself parkour. (Coincidentally, this was something I did not realize was actually a thing outside of an episode of The Office .) I was still paying the price for that mistake. Quite literally everything in my house had been jumped on, jumped off, or flipped over.

But what was I supposed to do? There was nothing else I could take away from him when he got into trouble besides fresh air, exercise, or, say…his legs. I had to get creative. A little forced mother-son bonding time did the trick.

When he’d dented my fridge rebounding off it, we’d spent an entire afternoon recreating a Bob Ross painting together. Nate was bored out of his mind, but you better believe he steered clear of anything breakable after that. So far, we’d scrapbooked pictures from the first year of his life, completed a one-thousand-piece puzzle, and we were only one up-past-his-bedtime away from finishing a gorgeous floral diamond art.

Truth be told, I loved when he got into trouble.

Something he knew all too well—hence the way his brown eyes flashed wide as he lowered the weaponized straw. “Jeez, Mom. I wasn’t really going to do it.”

His best friend and partner in crime elbowed him in the side. “Dude, you gotta be sneakier.”

“Pike, stay out of it,” Dylan scolded. Her back was to her son. Therefore, she never saw his eye roll. “Anyway,” she said, tossing her napkin on top of a barely touched patty melt that, by the looks of the pooling grease, had left a lot to be desired. “Ohhh-kay, before a riot breaks out back there. Any chance you’re going to tell us why you dragged us here? I know it wasn’t for the food. Spill it. What’s the big secret?”

Angela giggled musically beside me, her wilted chef’s salad equally as untouched.

Dylan’s eyes—which were Caribbean blue this week thanks to the miracle of colored contacts—narrowed. Leaning forward on her colorfully tattooed forearms, she hissed, “You hussy, you already know?”

“Of course I do.” Little Miss Prim and Proper dabbed the corner of her lips with a cheap paper napkin. True to its marketing, the red lip stain didn’t budge. “I actually send texts that contain more than just links to TikToks. It’s called a conversation.”

Dylan scoffed. “Oh, yes, the daily updates on your period and what you’re substituting for bread this week is far more riveting.”

How these two had been friends since kindergarten, I would never understand. There was a story about them becoming besties after someone had pushed someone off a slide, but if I’d learned anything by becoming best friends with a set of lifelong best friends, it was that I usually “had to have been there” to understand the hilarity of their youthful antics.

They still tried to fill me in every chance they got. I’d seen plenty of photos of them growing up. Angela had looked exactly like a Barbie brought to life, clutching her pearls after she was crowned homecoming queen. Meanwhile, Dylan had home-pierced her nose, daith, and belly button all by the time she was sixteen.

They’d adopted me about eight years earlier, after we’d met at a birthing class. Nate, Pike, and Daphne had all been born over the span of four weeks. After that, the three of us bonded over the ups, downs, and flat-out disgusting perils of motherhood. Sitting on your couch, trying to figure out how to make a fussy baby fart, was infinitely better when you had company cheering you on. We were vastly different people though.

Angela was a Stepford Wife, reserved and proper.

Dylan was a jaded single mom, sarcastic and protective.

And I was… God, what was I? Anxious. Bitter. Broken. Those had all been more recent developments. At one point, I’d been witty and bold. I think? It was hard to remember anymore.

Regardless, I was trying to get back to that woman. Stepping out on my own after ten years of marriage had been terrifying. My marriage had fallen apart long before I’d actually left, but checking out emotionally was something completely different than braving a world I’d been manipulated into believing I couldn’t make it in alone.

Not anymore. It was time for me to find strength where fear had once inhabited. To rediscover who I was when I wasn’t forced into existing in a constant state of fight or flight. The best part was that I got to reinvent myself on my own terms, with my own goals, and I didn’t have to ask permission from anyone.

Which led me right back to why I was sitting in a run-down diner with wobbly tables and peeling wallpaper, with my two best friends, our three kids, six plates of inedible food spread between two booths, and one dream to find myself again.

Smiling, I announced, “Welcome to The Rosewood Café. I’m Gwendolyn Weaver: owner, operator, and head chef.”

Dylan curled her lip. “First of all, you are not using”—she lowered her voice so the kids couldn’t hear her before finishing her sentence—“that asshole’s last name anymore. Pierce is a perfectly good maiden name, and if you are against going back to that, I will wife you up myself just to get rid of Weaver. Secondly, I’m sorry. Did you say owner ?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Angela flashing her a scolding expression, which I’d learned translated to: Be nice. Gwen is clearly on the verge of a midlife crisis slash mental breakdown .

She was correct on both counts, but when starting over at forty-one, I assumed that was par for the course. I’d made that confirmation pretty clear when I’d chopped off eight inches of my hair, added blonde highlights to my natural mahogany, and pierced my nose with a tiny silver stud. (And no, I didn’t let Dylan do it at home. Despite her begging.)

After all of that, a restaurant shouldn’t be that shocking.

Dylan silently replied to Angela in yet another expression I was familiar with. This one read: Are you going to handle this? Or am I?

Neither of them needed to handle anything. I was perfectly capable of digging my own grave, lying in it for an extended period of time while brainwashing myself that it was a normal and brilliant phase in life, only to finally wake up, realize I’d gotten in way over my head, and then be forced to claw my way out fueled by nothing but regrets and tears. It was something of a pattern in my life, and I was nothing if not consistent.

Twisting the clear plastic cup with a red Coca-Cola logo rubbing off the front, I made a mental note to trash them immediately before confirming, “I did say owner.”

“Of this restaurant?” Dylan lifted a single finger in the air. “Nay, this hellhole ?”

“Yep, and I don’t want to hear shit about it.”

“I mean, shit is quite literally all I can say about it,” she shot back.

I glared at her, but Angela quickly waded in, her freshly manicured nails patting me on the thigh under the table. “Ohhhhh-kay, let’s take it down a notch. Maybe we should allow Gwen a few minutes to explain.”

When I’d sent Angela a text telling her I’d bought a restaurant, she’d been stoked. Which was exactly why I’d texted her and not Dylan. Sure, I’d glossed over the fact that it was a diner still stuck in the nineties, complete with greasy linoleum and tattered booths. But I could see the promise hidden in those four walls. Currently known as The Grille, the soon-to-be Rosewood Café had been around since I was a kid. Surely that had to mean it at least had the potential to be successful. Maybe The Rosewood was having a midlife crisis too. Life didn’t end because you had saggy boobs or booths. A little facelift and new accessories and she could look and feel fabulous again too.

Honestly, Old Rose and I were the perfect fit for each other. I’d fix her up physically, and she’d help me find my place in the world again. Win-win.

What else could my friends possibly want me to explain? “I bought a restaurant. I’m excited. Renovations start this weekend. Ribbon cutting in four-to-six weeks. You’re both invited. There. Explained.”

“Great. Ribbon cutting. Awesome,” Dylan deadpanned. “Any chance you want to touch on the part where you’ve never shown even the slightest interest in owning a restaurant before today?”

I arched a challenging eyebrow. “That is completely untrue. I managed three restaurants, and cooked at two before I met Jeff. And then remember when Nate first started preschool and I toyed with the idea of a catering business?”

“Right.” She rolled her eyes. “But Jeff hated the idea of you working because then he couldn’t lord it over you that he made all the money and thus had the right to control your every move.”

It was my turn to speak with my eyes. I flashed them wide to yell, Would you shut up! The kids can hear you.

It could be said that neither of my friends was Jeff’s biggest fan, but Dylan lacked the ability to bite her tongue. She never missed an opportunity to bash him. Both to his face and behind his back. A solid ninety-nine percent of the time, he deserved it. But I wouldn’t stand for it to be done in front of my son.

Co-parenting with a narcissist was hard enough. I couldn’t control what Jeff said about me on his weekends with Nate, but I’d vowed I would never sink to his level. Not just because his level was so low it could scrape the floor of the ocean, but rather because Nate was the only one who would suffer from that kind of toxicity. Jeff would always be his father, and I would always be his mother. We didn’t work as husband and wife, but there was nothing I wouldn’t do to make sure my son never felt the blowback of that failure.

Dylan immediately lifted her hands in surrender. “Sorry. Habit.”

I sighed. “There’s a lot of stuff I haven’t shown interest in over the last decade. Myself being at the very top of that list.”

Her eyes got soft with understanding, and Angela scooted closer to my side.

“But I’ve got to start somewhere. I know this place looks bad now, but I remember when The Grille had the best burgers and cheese fries in all of Belton. I mean, it wasn’t difficult. There were, like, four restaurants here back then. But this was the place to be. There was a line out the door practically every day. And then…” I shrugged. “Life happened. For me and this place. Short of building a time machine, there’s not much I can do about the me part of that equation, but I think it would be really therapeutic to prove to myself that it’s possible to rebuild, reinvent, and come back better than ever.”

Dylan blew out a ragged breath. “I hear you. I really do. But buying a restaurant seems like a big step. What if we just go on a shopping spree to redecorate your living room instead?”

“Well, that would be tough considering I just spent my life savings on what you seem to think is a dump.”

She flinched. “Shit. I’m sorry.”

Angela, who might as well have been the personification of rainbows and kittens, chimed in. “It’s not a dump. It just needs a little TLC.” She folded her hands over mine. “And you’re not a dump, either.”

“Thank you,” I whispered. “I don’t remember saying I was, but I do appreciate the sentiment.”

“So it’s done, then?” Dylan asked. “Papers all signed? Money and keys exchanged? No need to spend weeks convincing you that this is a fantastically horrible idea?”

“Yep. All done. The Grille closes on Friday, and then I have a demo crew coming in on Saturday to help me with the heavy lifting. I’m trying to save some cash by doing a lot of the easier renovations on my own, but I’m a one-woman show. So we’ll see how that goes.”

“Okay, then.” Dylan leaned back in her seat. “No use harping on a done deal. Give me all the deets.” She poked at her soggy bread. “Please tell me you’re firing the chef.”

I grinned. “Yep. All new kitchen staff. I’m aiming for an upscale café. Farm to table with everything fresh and locally sourced. A menu that changes quarterly, highlighting whatever produce is in season, and weekly specials that feature homestyle comfort foods. I want The Rosewood Café to appeal to every age and demographic, from the trendy twenty-somethings to mom and pop’s Sunday supper.”

“That’s…a lot,” Angela said, flashing me a tight smile.

“I know, but it will keep me busy. What’s the old saying about idle—”

“Mooooom,” Daphne interrupted.

My gaze sliced straight to my son.

Still holding the smoking gun—or in this case the straw—next to his mouth, he shouted, “I didn’t mean to!”

Yes. Shouted .

At me.

In the middle of a restaurant.

I took a brief second to ponder if it would be more difficult to teach him to knit or crochet.

Narrowing my eyes, I whispered, “Did you just yell at me?”

“No! I mean…yes. Kinda. But it’s Pike’s fault. He made me laugh while I had the straw in my mouth! It just flew out and it didn’t even hit her!”

Pike defended himself in an equally loud tone, and Daphne joined to referee the nuh-uh, ya-huh brawl.

Through the chaos, I heard the rumble of a deep baritone. The hairs on the back of my neck instantly stood on end.

“Shit,” the man said, a loud clatter following the curse.

I turned in time to see a mammoth of a man lurch to his feet, water soaking his stomach and his lap.

Stunned, I stared at him. It was like that scene from The Terminator when Arnold was in scan mode, searching his database for answers of what he was seeing.

After a few attempts, my frazzled brain identified him as none other than Truett fucking West.

It had been years since I’d seen him. The last time our paths had crossed, he’d been passed out drunk on the front lawn of a frat party. But he was a hard man to forget.

He was gorgeous. No denying that, but not in the traditional clean-cut, tailored-suit sense. He was more like the GQ version of a convict.

His dark-brown hair was the same military cut he’d been sporting since his high school JROTC days. Slightly longer on top now, but it was styled with a skilled hand. A thick beard peppered with the slightest bit of gray masked his face, but it was the tattoos covering both of his arms that truly gave him away. Judging by the muscles carved beneath the fabric of his shirt, time had been good to Truett.

His cold, distant brown eyes collided with mine, and while there was definitely a spark of recognition, his handsome face remained otherwise blank.

I sucked in a sharp breath as a chill over two decades old pebbled my skin. That was the Truett West effect. Only this time, it no longer held me captive.

The air seemed to thicken as a rush of emotions, long dormant, surged within me. Disdain. Anger. Bitterness. The laundry list could go on for a mile, but as I visually added up the one-plus-one of the situation where my son’s spitball was responsible for the overturned glass and water dripping off his table, I couldn’t very well lead with any of those. My emotional grid went with my old friend Indifference instead.

I grabbed the stack of extra napkins off our table and walked them over. As I stopped in front of him, it struck me how tall he was. I wasn’t a short woman by any means, but he towered over me. His broad shoulders made him seem larger than the six foot three I knew him to be.

Extending the napkins his way, I issued a monotone, “Sorry about that.”

He hummed an acknowledgement as he took the napkins and spread them across the table. His club sandwich swam in a pool of water, but given how bad the rest of the food had been, I assumed Nate had done him a favor.

I awkwardly stood there, waiting to do the whole, “Hi, how are you?” bit that was required when you ran into someone from your past. But not surprisingly, Truett said nothing.

Not as he flagged down the waitress for more napkins.

Not as he dried the bench seat.

Not even as he sat down, head straight, eyes forward, as if I didn’t exist at all.

I blinked, waiting for him to say something. A simple hi or a lecture on disciplining my son would have been okay. Hell, even a “fuck off” would have worked.

He said nothing. I’m not sure why I was surprised. I’d spent over a year playing one-sided charades with that man. Silence was his preferred method of communication. Clearly that had not changed.

“Right,” I mumbled. Rapping my knuckles on the table, I snipped, “Good talk as always.” I walked away from Truett West no worse for the wear but pissed off all the same.

Nate, Pike, and Daphne were still arguing while Angela and Dylan tried to keep the peace. For a brief second, I considered allowing Nate to fling a few more spitballs in Truett’s direction, but sometimes being a mom and setting a good example was seriously overrated.

I snapped my fingers before pointing at my son. “You.” That one syllable was all I had to say to freeze him in his tracks. His mouth clamped shut and his face screwed tight, correctly reading the trouble he was about to be in. “We’re leaving.”

“It was an accident!” he argued.

But after the world’s most infuriating and anticlimactic run-in with Truett, I was all out of patience. “Not another word, Nate, or you’ll be helping me tie-dye beach towels too.”

“Ugh,” he groaned.

Grabbing my purse, I found our waitress pouring water for a table near the door and headed her way. Which just so happened to be right past Truett’s table. This time, I pretended that he didn’t exist. Because truth be told, he didn’t exist anymore. At least, not the man I’d known.

“Excuse me.” I paused, unsure what to call her. She was older, at least sixty, though she still looked amazing. Her gray hair was thick, pulled back into a bun, and her makeup was fresh and modern. When she’d introduced herself as Cooter despite her name tag reading Lucille, it made the conversation awkward really quick. Unwilling to call her—or anyone else for that matter— Cooter, I stuck with something a little more appropriate. “Ma’am. Would it be possible for me to pay our check now please?”

She grinned. “Sorry. No can do. Mr. Branning told us that if you ever came in, your food was on the house. Seems he made a pretty penny when he finally got you to take this train wreck off his hands.”

I twisted my lips. “How… kind of him. But I still need to pay for my friends.”

“Nope. I’m under direct orders from the boss. And I’m nothing if not an honest, loyal, hardworking, and very soon-to-be jobless employee.” She arched an eyebrow. “You wouldn’t happen to be hiring, would ya?”

“Oh, um, maybe? But I won’t be reopening for at least a month or so.”

“That’s perfect! My daughter has been making me crazy to come out and stay with her for a few weeks. I can’t stand her husband, always chewing with his mouth open and drinking beer while tinkering with his motorbikes in the garage. But a vacation never hurt anyone. Trust me, you won’t find a better waitress in Belton.” Laughing, she waved a half empty water pitcher around the restaurant. “Nobody knows this place like I do, and you might be thinking that’s not a good thing, but I didn’t make the rules or the menu here. It’s only my job to obey them and serve with a smile.” She lowered her voice and leaned in close like she was about to tell me a secret.

Never one to turn down juicy gossip, I leaned in too.

“I’ve been here a long time,” she said quietly. “I’ve had a front-row seat to a lot of mistakes Mr. Branning made through the years.” She hooked her thumb over her shoulder toward the kitchen. “Like, say, hiring his delinquent son, who doesn’t have a lick of experience making a PB and J much less managing a grill, as his head kitchen manager.”

I hummed. “That would explain a lot.”

“You need somebody on your team with experience. The good and the bad kind.” Holding my gaze, she nodded at least a dozen times to really drive home her point.

She wasn’t wrong. God knew I’d made my fair share of mistakes in life. Maybe having someone at my back who knew what not to do would save me a lot of growing pains in the figuring out what- to- do department.

From my purse, I pulled out a scrap of paper, a pen, and forty dollars. “Well, I’m assuming Mr. Branning won’t be covering your tip, so this is for you. Give me your number and I’ll call you tomorrow to see if we can work something out for when you get back from your vacation.”

Her blue eyes twinkled as she snatched my offerings. Leaning on an empty table, she jotted down her information.

As I waited, I glanced back to see if Dylan and Angela had managed to calm the kids. They were all three sitting quietly in the booth, crossed arms and pouty faces. It seemed Nate wasn’t going to be the only one in trouble when they got home.

I told myself not to do it.

My brain screamed for me to let it go and ignore him the way he had always done me.

But as if my eyes had a mind of their own, they flicked to Truett.

I could only see his profile, but the round of his strong shoulders as he hunched over the table revealed his anguish with a stark clarity. God, it was surreal to see him again. The city of Belton wasn’t big by any stretch, and when our paths hadn’t crossed over the years, I’d figured he’d long since moved away.

But there he sat.

No ring on his finger.

No family surrounding him with smiles and laughter.

Not even a friend sharing a meal.

Alone.

An odd pang of guilt hit me as I watched him peeling off the top piece of bread on each half of his sandwich, trying to salvage his sopping-wet meal.

I let out an audible groan, hating him that much more for making me feel anything other than disdain.

“Here ya go,” Coot—um, Lucille —said, reclaiming my attention.

I took the receipt from her hand and tucked it into my purse. “Hey, can you do me a favor?”

“Anything, Boss ?” She flashed me a wicked grin.

“Can you put that man’s dinner on my tab too? And…maybe bring him a fresh sandwich?”

Curling her lip, she leaned around me and pointed at Truett. “That man?”

“Yeah. I feel awful that my son ruined his dinner.”

She barked a laugh. “Oh, honey. That’s not his dinner. And trust me when I tell you that’s no man over there, either. That right there is the hot gargoyle who takes up residence in that booth every Wednesday from six to seven p.m. He doesn’t even eat the dang sandwich.”

“What?” I breathed, swinging my gaze back to Truett. He’d placed the salvaged half of the sandwich on a dry napkin alongside two strips of bacon. “So, why does he order it, then?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s not a talker. He walks up here, waits for that specific booth, then I bring him out a club sandwich, no mayo, bacon on the side, and a water. He stays for a while, leaves cash on the table, and then disappears.”

“He walks?”

“Yep. He only lives a few blocks up. Mr. Branning followed him home one night. Thought he was a creep or something, but he’s harmless.”

I’d been wrong about him leaving Belton, but the fact that he still lived in his mom’s old house was beyond surprising. I’d figured he would have burned that place to the ground sooner than he’d make it his forever home.

Since he was so close, it made sense that he often came by for dinner. Except… “Are you sure he doesn’t eat any of it?”

“Not a single bite. Mr. Branning once told me to quit wasting food and just put his sandwich in the cooler so he could resell it to him the following week. I wasn’t about to do that to the guy. He’s an odd duck but a good tipper.” She nudged me with her elbow. “And besides, scamming your most loyal customers would fall under one of those bad kind of mistakes I could help you avoid after you hire me.”

On instinct, I smiled, but with a pit forming in my stomach, I couldn’t tear my eyes—or thoughts—off Truett.

I had so many questions, but if I’d learned anything, it was that I’d never get the answers from him.

After drawing in a deep breath, I held it for a long second, allowing the pain of the past and present to filter through my body.

And then I let it go. All of it.

My breath.

My curiosity.

My guilt.

Hell, I even managed to temporarily pack down my bitterness.

“Enough,” I whispered to myself before flashing the waitress a grin. “Thanks for everything. I’ll be in touch soon.”

“I can’t wait,” she chirped.

Focusing on what truly mattered in my life, I walked back to my table and took my son’s hand. Mad as I was, a warmth filled my chest as Nate’s hand folded around mine.

Truett didn’t fit into that equation, and I had every intention of keeping it that way.

It wasn’t like I had time for yet another obstacle anyway. I still needed to gut a restaurant, remodel it from the ground up, tame my wild beast of a child, try not to have a texting brawl with my ex-husband, and then follow through on the promise I’d made to myself as a teenager to always live life to the fullest.

Though, in my experience, the last one might have been the hardest part of all.