Chapter 18
Ethan watched Julia stalk out of the room, barely hearing Temu Harry Potter with his friends-with-benefits bullshit commentary.
Maybe he shouldn’t have pushed as hard as he had, especially with her words ringing in his ears—You actually know nothing about me, and maybe you never did—and he felt almost guilty about bringing it up at all.
Though he would never agree with the sentiment that he didn’t know her, it was true that he had a tendency to push when things should be let go.
To force things to bend just enough that sometimes they broke.
He wasn’t proud of that quality in himself or his bullish, ill-advised ways of achieving what he wanted, whether it be confirmation, answers, or validation.
In this instance, however, all he’d managed to achieve was a vaguely sick feeling as he watched her go.
It lingered with him even as Noah tried to make conversation, perhaps feeling uneasy about his own assumptions, or when Katy and Maggie returned, faces flushed from the heat of the kitchen and their shared laughter.
Maggie had brought in a chocolate cake, and both women inquired about Julia, to which Noah and Ethan shrugged and made up slightly contradictory excuses, but their answers appeared to be satisfactory enough that it wasn’t brought up again.
Trying to avoid further suspicion, Ethan willed himself to stay seated and smile and eat a piece of cake once it was offered to him.
Julia had baked it that morning before their outing, Maggie said as she was serving up slices, that flush still present in her cheeks.
Maggie had just done the frosting while preparing dinner.
She talked about how she’d gone shopping in town herself, off to the farmers’ market down the street, a part of town they hadn’t explored.
Katy and Noah bemoaned the thought of missing out on the quaint farmers’ market, the pictures they could have gotten there exploring—“Smelling flowers and shit,” as Noah put it, with which Katy vehemently agreed.
I can’t think of everything, Ethan wanted to snap, feeling the caustic remnants of the still-simmering thoughts of his interaction with Julia.
But the fact was, he should be thinking of everything.
He should be planning these things with more care and attention to detail.
He’d flown them out here, for Christ’s sake, with his fucking job on the line, to make it look like they were falling in love in fucking wine country, with no one to witness it except for a few locals with popular social media accounts.
One false move, one image that had even a mild aura of insincerity, and he was going to be fucking toast.
So yeah, he did need to be thinking of everything, and not letting an ancient fight interfere with his present-day goals. Even if it was over a decades-old friendship he hadn’t been able to let go of or forget.
He needed to stay focused.
“You’re right, we should have walked through there. Better photo ops. Maybe we can try heading there tomorrow?”
“No can do!” Maggie said, a little too cheerfully considering she was crushing his plans beneath her excessively large soup ladle. “It’s only open Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
“Ah.” The lack of consonants between his teeth meant that no one in the room could hear him grinding them. “In that case, we’ll just go down to the lake tomorrow, as planned.”
“The pier in town or just staying here?” Maggie interjected again, handing Ethan a piece of cake that was double what he’d expected.
“I mean…” He was flummoxed by the question.
He’d assumed they would go down to the dock by the cottage, take some sunset shots, maybe use those for official pictures once the “relationship” had leaked.
He knew he couldn’t get away with treating lake pictures as candids necessarily, but at least he could get some good photographs in.
“Which is the better side of the lake?” Katy asked, completing the sentence that Ethan couldn’t.
“Oh, here, for sure,” Maggie replied enthusiastically.
“I live just down the way, and my favorite way to get to the lake is through the trees just at the edge of the driveway. It takes you to the best side with the most gorgeous views.” She sighed wistfully.
“Julia and I keep talking about it as a place to take some pictures to post on the website, but it’s always under construction—”
“The lake?” Noah interjected, confused.
“No, the website!” Maggie said with her tinkling laugh.
“We just never get around to updating it. We figured, as long as the booking works, and there’s word of mouth, that should get us by for now.
Some people have posted nice pictures on Tripadvisor!
” she added, her enthusiasm present, though perhaps a bit misplaced.
Ethan should have been paying more attention to what Maggie was saying—Julia needed an updated website; people could barely do online booking—but something else she had said before was poking at his mind, like when you suck air into a cavity just to feel it hurt.
“You said you live just down the way?” he asked carefully. “Whereabouts?”
“Oh, it’s such a funny story. I actually live in the cottage that Julia’s family used to own!”
Ethan felt like the floor was falling out from underneath him. Maggie—Julia’s housekeeper—her family had been the one to buy the old Schaeffer cottage?
Ethan remembered when it had finally sold.
Julia’s dad had held on to it for so long, Ethan’s family had thought it would eventually just go to rot.
But then a family had moved in, locals, his parents had said, looking for a bigger place closer to the water.
He had never thought too much about them, nor had anyone bothered to go see them.
The trees had grown thick between the two cottages at that point, the path overgrown, the dock on that end dismantled.
There was no reason to go visit, to see strangers there, from some misguided sense of loyalty or nostalgia.
To think, things had come full circle, and now the new owners’ daughter was here, working with Julia, at his parents’—
“Julia’s family owned a cottage here? Why wouldn’t she use that one for the bed-and-breakfast?” Seemingly realizing what he had asked, and how it would leave Maggie and her family out of the picture, Noah tried to backtrack. “I mean, if circumstances, you know—thankfully things worked out the way—”
Maggie giggled and waved her hand, as if to say no harm done.
“It’s a valid question. But no, apparently Julia’s dad hadn’t wanted to keep their cottage in the family and was looking to sell—and this place belonged to family friends, who wanted to see it go into good hands, so Julia was the perfect candidate to purchase it! ”
Go into good hands.
Ethan couldn’t hear Noah’s response over the ringing in his ears.
Is that what Julia told people? That his family had sold it to her so someone could finally take care of the place?
Since their only flesh-and-blood son couldn’t be trusted to do it himself?
Meanwhile, the history of that fucking cottage was still knotted up so tight inside him, it felt impossible to separate it from everything he’d lost.
Above the roar in his head, there was only one prevailing thought.
I need to go find Julia.
To do what? Fight? Set the record straight? If that was the story she was telling, he felt like he needed to step in and defend himself, not allow her to always paint him as the problem child and her as the savior.
The thought stung. And it made him want to talk to her even more.
His grandiose plan began and ended with his desire to seek her out, to see her face.
He knew that whatever came out the moment he did, right or wrong, he’d be willing to deal with.
But the first step had to happen—and it had to happen now.
“Excuse me,” he said abruptly, standing up so fast, his chair screeched as it slid across the floor behind him.
All three people at the table looked up at him from their chocolate cakes, nonplussed.
“I have to, uh…” His mind scrambled for an excuse, since he didn’t want to leave it at an incredibly mawkish I must find Gem! Instead, he fell back on a timeless excuse that no one could refute: “I have to go to the bathroom.”
Six eyes blinked simultaneously. After a beat in which nobody moved a muscle, including Ethan, who was supposedly desperate for a toilet, Maggie hesitantly gestured toward the door. “By all means…?”
Barely offering a curt nod, Ethan took his leave.
With long strides, he turned himself in the direction of the stairs leading to the kitchen, taking them two at a time before forcing himself to slow down so he didn’t literally bombard her while she was…
tidying up? Having some peaceful quiet time to herself? Reading? Sleeping?
He realized he wasn’t even sure if she had gone to her room. He’d just assumed. Perhaps she’d gone outside. Maybe she’d walked (hobbled?) to the lake for a respite?
All those were valid options, but it felt like the first place he should look would also be the most obvious.
Purposely moderating his pace so as not to come across as a rampaging elephant, he quickly glanced around the kitchen first to see if she was in there.
It was perfectly logical for him not to be able to find her. She could be literally anywhere—it was her home, after all. Still, alarm bells started to go off, and he wondered if maybe she was hurt or in some kind of trouble.
It felt ludicrous—the idea that she, a grown woman, had done something to injure herself in such a short period of time.
But it was possible and even likely at times.
So he followed his intuition an extra few steps into the hallway, all the way to her bedroom door.
Touched it lightly, until it was open more than its initial crack.
Cautiously, he peered in. A quick inventory of the room, however—bed, carpet, desk—showed that it was empty.