Chapter 3 #2
“Gracie, there’s a whole lot you’re not ready to hear yet. So you’re going to have to just trust me on some of this.”
“What the hell does that even mean?”
“We tell them we were friends until we were more than friends. Happens to people all the time.”
I just stare at him because suddenly I feel even more out of my depth than I was five minutes ago. I need my life to slow down for a damn minute so I can catch a breath.
“So,” he says, and his voice is back to business, steady and sure, the emotional detour apparently concluded without ceremony, “Halloween. That's our starting point. A few months of sneaking around. Then we went out of town. Got married.”
“When exactly did we supposedly elope? Because the timeline matters. If we say too recently, people will wonder why we didn't mention it. If we say too long ago, people will wonder how we kept it secret.”
“When was your last day off from the bakery?” he asks.
“I had Sunday and Monday off.”
He gives a decisive nod. “That’s perfect. You hang out with anyone?”
Just some fictional characters and my vibrator but I’m sure not saying that out loud. “No.”
He slants me at look. “Great. That’s when we did it. Took a romantic trip on Sunday and impulsively got married on Monday morning.”
“And what? Just didn’t mention it to anyone until now?”
“Not if we wanted to wait and tell everyone together. We can say we were planning to wait until the big anniversary party in a few days. But then dipshit showed up and ruined the surprise.”
I turn the idea over in my mind, looking for flaws in the logic. Besides the obvious flaw that Henry and I are so poorly matched. But there’s no way around that. “So, where did we go on this romantic getaway?
He's quiet for a beat. “Somewhere people won't ask to see photos.”
“So not Paris.”
“Not Paris.”
“Not Vegas?”
“We're not Vegas people.”
“You're not Vegas people. I could be Vegas people. You don't know.”
He gives me a look that is both perfectly flat and deeply communicative. “Gracie, you go to bed at eight-thirty, and your idea of a wild Friday night is a new episode of a baking competition and a glass of Riesling.”
I wince. How does he know all of that? “I’m a baker, we go to bed early because we have to be up early.”
“I could,” I insist.
“You brought a book to Kelsie and Ethan's joint bachelorette/bachelor party.”
I shrug. “It was a good book.”
“It was a book. At a bachelor party. In a bar.”
“The music was too loud to talk, and I wasn't going to just sit there—”
“We're not saying Vegas.”
“Fine. Somewhere small. Somewhere quiet.” I think. “A coast? We drove down to the coast and did it at a little courthouse. Or a little chapel. Somewhere in a town nobody's heard of.”
“That works.”
“And we can't give a specific name because it was spontaneous and romantic and we were caught up in the moment.” I wave a hand vaguely. “All very swept-away and impulsive.”
“You've never been impulsive in your life.”
“People don't know that.”
“Everyone knows that. You meal prep on Sundays. You have a color-coded calendar on your refrigerator. You once made a spreadsheet to decide which streaming service to subscribe to.”
“That spreadsheet saves me eleven dollars a month.”
“My point stands.”
I cross my arms. “Maybe falling for you made me impulsive.
Maybe you're so devastatingly attractive that I abandoned all rational thought and eloped with you in a tiny chapel in a town whose name I can't remember because I was so overwhelmed by love and hormones and your—your—” I gesture vaguely at the general vicinity of his everything. “Whatever this is.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “My whatever-this-is?”
“Don't let it go to your head.”
“Wouldn't dream of it.”
We ride in silence for a moment. The road curves past the Henderson place—their longhorns are out, clustered near the fence like they're holding a staff meeting—and then straightens again toward the stretch of pecan trees that marks the last half mile before my house.
Before my house, where I'll be packing a bag. To move into his house. Because we're married. Because we're selling it.
My stomach does something complicated.
My house appears ahead—the small blue clapboard with the white porch railing and the lemon tree I planted last spring that is growing at the speed of a snail caught in some tree sap.
Everything looks the same as it did this morning, when I left for the bakery with nothing more complicated on my mind than whether the eclairs would set properly.
That was four hours ago.
Four hours ago, I was single. Unattached. A woman whose biggest problem was a temperamental sourdough starter and an underachieving lemon tree.
Now I'm married. Moving. Constructing an alibi. And still, still feeling the ghost of Henry Blankenship's mouth on mine like a brand I can't wash off.
He pulls into the driveway. Kills the engine.
The sudden silence is enormous. No road noise. No engine hum. Just the tick of cooling metal and a mockingbird in the live oak by the mailbox, running through its catalogue with the manic energy of a performer who doesn't know the show's been cancelled.
“Pack what you need for a few days,” he says. “We can come back for the rest this weekend.”
“This is insane.”
“It's practical.”
“Those aren't mutually exclusive.”
He looks at me then. Full on. No glancing. No profile. Those blue eyes, steady and warm and so certain it makes my teeth ache.
“Gracie,” he says. Just my name. Nothing else. Just the two syllables, said in that low, careful way he has—the way that makes it sound less like a name and more like a question he's been carrying for a long time.
I hold his gaze.
The mockingbird cycles through three more songs. A cloud moves across the sun and the light in the cab shifts from gold to gray and back again.
“Six months,” I say. “That's it.”
“That's it.”
“And then we figure out the legal stuff. Quietly.”
“Quietly,” he agrees. “I’ll wait here and drive you out.”
“No. That does not work for me.”
“Why the hell not?”
Because I need private time to FREAK THE FUCK OUT! Instead, I say, “because I need my car to get to work in the morning. Also, you are not the boss of me.”
He grins, but holds his hands up, feigning innocence. There’s not an innocent bone in his finely sculpted body.
“Yes ma’am. I’ll see you there, then.”
I nod. “Oh, one more thing, Henry.”
“What’s that?”
“You have to keep your hands to yourself.”
A beat. His eyes drop to my mouth—just for a second, just a flicker, so fast I almost miss it—and then back up.
“I'll do my best,” he says.
Which is not the same as yes.
And we both know it.