Chapter 30
ELLA
Hal Mosley orders the same thing every week. Two eggs over medium, rye toast, coffee with one cream. He’s been doing it since before I started at the Red Rock, and the day he orders something different is the day I call the authorities.
“Looking good today, Hal.” I set his plate down and top off his mug without asking. “How’s the knee?”
“Still attached.” He shakes hot sauce onto his eggs like he has stock in antacids. “You look tired, sweetheart.”
“Long week.”
“It’s Tuesday.”
I laugh, or something close to it, and move on.
Hal goes back to his eggs. I go on being the version of myself that works best here: capable, warm enough, present enough to pass.
The version that earns as many smiles as tips, remembers the regulars’ orders, and doesn’t fall apart between the coffee station and the dessert case.
I don’t need to be here. I have more money in a savings account than the Red Rock grosses in a year. Maybe several years. But two million dollars can’t pour Hal his coffee or remember that the woman at table six is allergic to sesame or argue with Tony about whether the jukebox needs new songs.
Money doesn’t make good company. The diner is loud and alive and full of people who need things from me that I know how to give, and right now, being needed for something I’m good at is the only thing keeping me upright.
Lisa catches my eye from the register and tilts her head in an unspoken question. You okay?
I nod. She doesn’t believe me, but she lets it go.
The afternoon is thinning out. Four tables occupied, the lunch rush long gone, the light through the front windows turning amber. I’m restocking the napkin dispensers when the hurt I’ve been medicating with busy work finds me again.
It’s not a thought so much as a physical sensation.
A hollowness behind my ribs where his voice used to sit, where the low sound of him saying my name used to land and stay warm for hours.
My body keeps reaching for him the way a tongue finds the gap where a tooth used to be.
Involuntary. Stupid. As if the nerve endings haven’t gotten the memo.
I locked the door on my heartache myself.
Every hour I don’t unlock it, the lock gets harder to undo, because undoing it means I was wrong to turn it in the first place, and being wrong means the last two days of holding myself together were for nothing, and I cannot have that conversation with myself while the napkin dispensers are only half full and Lisa is watching me like I’m a flight risk.
So, I fill the dispensers. I wipe down the counter. I do the next thing, and the next.
I’m pushing through the kitchen’s swinging door on my way back from the storeroom with ketchup refills when I sense the air in the dining room has changed.
There’s a shift in the quality of the space, like the diner has taken a breath and is holding it. My skin prickles along the back of my neck and down both arms before I understand why.
I look up. To the booth by the window. My section.
A man is sitting there. Broad shoulders, dark hair.
Leaning against the vinyl seat back with the boneless exhaustion of someone who has been traveling for a long time and has finally stopped moving.
His light-blue button-down shirt is wrinkled and untucked.
His jaw is covered in stubble so heavy it’s almost a beard. The shadows under his eyes are purple.
Alec.
My hands go numb. The ketchup bottle is suddenly very far away, in someone else’s fingers. The air between us feels thick and warm, like the room has been heated from the inside, and I can feel my heartbeat in the base of my throat, in my wrists, in the soft skin behind my knees.
He hasn’t seen me yet. He’s staring at his folded hands where they rest on the table, and even wrecked, even haggard and unshaven and visibly running on fumes, his forearms on my diner table make my stomach tighten.
Those arms. Those hands. The memory of them is so specific that my body supplies it without permission: his fingers threading through my hair, his palm flat against my lower back, the way he’d pull me against him in the dark like I was something he couldn’t afford to let drift away.
I can’t breathe. No. I am breathing. My lungs are doing their job. It’s everything else that has stopped functioning.
I put the ketchup down and cautiously approach the booth, uncertain what to do or say. Part of me is convinced I’m hallucinating. I pull the order pad from my apron out of pure reflex, because I’m a waitress and that’s what I do.
I pause at the edge of the booth. “Welcome to Red Rock Diner. What can I get you?”
The words come out steady. A miracle of muscle memory and years of serving people while my personal life burned in the background.
He looks up. His eyes meet mine and the impact goes through my chest like a hand reaching in and closing around my heart. I was right. He does look terrible and exhausted. He’s also the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen, and my knees feel about as mushy as Tony’s baked macaroni.
“Ella.” That deep, low voice of his has a rough, unused quality to it.
The raw sound reaches a place between my thighs that has nothing to do with this awkward reunion and everything to do with the fact that I know what that voice sounds like at two in the morning with his mouth against my neck. Not to mention other parts of my body.
I clear my throat. “You want coffee? We just brewed a fresh pot.”
He shakes his head, barely a movement. “No coffee, thanks.”
“We have a lunch special,” I say, because apparently, I am going to die on this hill. “Soup and half sandwich. The soup today is tomato basil.”
A crease forms between his brows. “I didn’t come here to eat.”
“The pie is good too. Lisa made it this morning.”
“Ella.”
The second time he says it, quieter, and something in my chest pulls tight like a thread attached to his voice. I grip the order pad harder.
“Then why are you here, Alec?”
He reaches into his pocket. “I wanted to bring you this.”
He holds it out to me, the square of turquoise silk with the sea turtle painted on it. The scarf he gave me. The gift I couldn’t bear to keep but have missed like one of my own limbs ever since.
I can’t take it from him. My hands refuse to move from my sides. I stare at him, at the delicate silk in his hands. He’s holding it the way he’d hold something fragile. The way he held me.
“You left it at my place,” he says.
“I know.” My voice is barely there. “It doesn’t belong with me.”
“Yes, it does.”
He still hasn’t told me why he’s here, and as much as I long to throw myself into his arms and tell him I forgive him and I hope he can forgive me, I still have some dignity left to preserve.
I look at him. “You came all this way to bring me a scarf?”
“No.” His handsome face is solemn, his voice rough with unspoken emotion. “I came all this way to try to make things right between us.”
He places the scarf into my hand and my heartrate kicks into a higher gear. Hope kindles inside me but I’m afraid to give it more fuel. Not until he tells me why it took him so long to decide to reach out to me. So, in a show of defiance, I shove the scarf into my apron pocket.
“You’re late. It’s been two days.”
I hear myself say it and the rawness of it sits between us like a living thing. Two days. I counted every hour and he knows it now.
“I have other tables, Alec.” It’s true enough. I have customers to serve and side work to handle, and an afternoon that does not include falling apart in front of the Tuesday regulars. “I’m working. This isn’t the time or the place for this.”
“I know it’s not. But this is where you are.”
His voice drops lower and the sound of it, the tone that used to wrap around me in the dark when we were naked and tangled together, pulls at the frayed edges of the heart he broke two days ago.
I start to take a step away and he reaches for me.
I stare down at the strong fingers wrapped tenderly around my wrist.
“Please. If you walk away, I don’t know if I’ll get another chance. So, please Ella, don’t go. Not again.” He swallows. I watch his throat move. “Five minutes. That’s all I need. Just hear me out.”
The corner of his mouth shifts. Not a smile. Not even close. Just the faintest suggestion of the left dimple, the one that always shows first, the one that has been ruining my ability to make rational decisions since I met this aggravating, devastating man.
Something in the way he pleads with me, his confidence faltering, his fingers still grasping my arm, makes some of the wall I’m trying—and failing—to build crumble now.
“All right. Five minutes.”
I sit down. His knee is inches from mine beneath the table, close enough that I can feel the heat of him in the gap, and the proximity sends a low current up my thigh that I can’t even pretend to ignore. But it’s his raw gaze that holds me riveted to the seat.
Behind me, I catch the faintest clink of Lisa setting something down at the counter very, very carefully.
She’s watching. She knows who he is. She’s been listening to me cry about Alec since I got home, and now the cold toaster who hurt her friend is sitting in our diner looking like he crawled here from the East Coast, and I can feel Lisa’s attention on the back of my neck like a warm hand.
I fold my arms on the table because I need them somewhere that isn’t reaching for him. “Go ahead, then. Talk.”
“Everything you said the other night was true. I messed up. Every day that I kept the truth about myself hidden from you was wrong. I didn’t trust you at first because I haven’t been able to trust anyone for so long.
You changed that. After I got to know you, I wanted you to know everything about me.
But by then, the lie of omission felt even bigger.
I told myself I’d find the right time, the right place, and then I’d tell you everything. ”