16. Ivy #2
The waitress appears. She’s a woman in her fifties with a pad and a pen and the kind of no-nonsense attitude that tells me she’s done this ten thousand times before. “What can I get you?”
“Pancakes,” I tell her. “With bananas and chocolate chips, please.”
I haven’t even looked at the menu. I don’t know where that came from. It bypassed my brain, and the order rose from someplace deeper. Someplace instinctive, automatic. It’s the middle of the afternoon, yet here I am, craving pancakes.
The table goes silent. It feels like all the air has been sucked out of the diner as I look back and forth between the two men staring intensely at each other now. “What?” I whisper. It’s pretty damn uncomfortable.
Liam sounds like he’s choking. “That was always your order. Every week. Pancakes with bananas and chocolate chips.”
Meanwhile, the waitress has no idea what we’re talking about. She only scribbles on her pad and takes Nick’s order before moving along to another table. The moment passes.
For everybody but me, anyway. He could be making it up, of course. Telling me what he imagines I want to hear. He couldn’t possibly know what I want to hear, right? Because he doesn’t know me. Nobody at this table really knows me.
But… for the first time in all the years I can actually remember, I want somebody to know me. I actually want to be known, because when I watch Liam and Aurora together, it makes something ache in my chest. Something I didn’t even know was there until now.
In spite of everything, this feels strangely normal.
The four of us in a booth, chatting quietly until the food comes, and my eyes almost bulge out at the sight of pancakes big enough to almost hang over the edges of my plate.
Aurora reaches over Liam’s plate for the ketchup to use on her fries.
Liam steals one of them, and she smacks his hand playfully.
When she laughs, the look on his face… he could light up a room.
“How did you two meet?” I ask, because I’m curious, and because asking questions about other people is safer than answering questions about myself.
She glances at Liam with an expression that’s equal parts affection and mischief. “He blackmailed me into marrying him.”
I blink. “Excuse me?”
“You heard her,” Nick mutters from beside me, sipping his coffee like this is old news.
“It’s a long story,” Liam says, eyeing his wife. I get the feeling this is not the version of their love story he would choose to lead with.
“It’s not that long.” Aurora’s eyes dance when she takes a sip of her water. “He needed a way to access my dad’s fortune. I was the way. He forced me into marriage, locked me up, and I spent the first few weeks plotting various ways to escape.”
I look at Liam. He looks back at me with the resigned expression of a man who knows this summary is the truth but wishes it wasn’t. “Are you ever going to let that go?”
“Absolutely not,” she chirps cheerfully.
But there’s warmth underneath the words.
Real warmth, the kind that comes from two people who fought their way through something ugly and came out on the other side holding on to each other.
Whatever their beginning was, however terrible it might have been, they built something genuine on top of it.
I see it in the way he looks at her. The way she looks at him.
The ease between them that only exists when trust has been earned the hard way.
And it makes that ache in my chest stronger than ever. It’s not jealousy, exactly. It’s closer to longing.
So I take another bite of my pancakes, trying to connect with whatever part of myself remembered them. As dangerous as it seems, it’s even more dangerous to want what I can’t have. And people like me don’t get the kind of life they’re building together.
The table quiets down as we finish eating. Somebody comes by to clear the plates. Liam orders more coffee and leans back in the booth with his arm stretched out along the back of the seat behind Aurora.
“The tracker is gone,” he says, shifting into the tone that tells me the fun times are over, and we’re back to business. “Nick confirmed it for me. That means Vincenzo has no way of finding you right now.”
“As far as we know,” I add, because I feel like it needs to be said.
“As far as we know,” he concedes. “But without the tracker, he’s working blind. That means you don’t need to keep running. Not right now.”
He pauses, as if he’s measuring his next words. Aurora leans into him, giving him the tiniest nod, like she’s encouraging him to say whatever comes next.
“The penthouse is secure,” he continues. “It’s the safest place I have. Armed security, surveillance, controlled access. I would like you to stay there, at least until we figure out the next move with Gabriel.”
I look at Nick. He gives me the same small nod Aurora gave Liam. Obviously, the three of them already worked this out without my knowledge. It’s the kind of thing that would normally piss me off, but at the moment, I’m too busy working out the pros and cons of the situation.
“It’s your choice,” Liam adds. He might not know he has a tell, but I do.
It’s all in the way he says it. Carefully, deliberately.
Like those three words took everything he had.
It means he’s fighting the impulse to order me around, probably because Nick told him to.
Either that, or he figured out on his own that pushing me will get him nowhere.
Nobody is telling me what to do. It’s up to me.
I look around the diner one more time. According to Liam, I spent every Sunday here for years. In this booth, waiting for pancakes with bananas and chocolate chips.
I think I might want to know more about her. “Okay,” I decide. “I’ll stay.”
Liam exhales. Barely visible, but I catch it. The release of something he’s been holding since he walked into the cabin, and I looked at him like the stranger he is to me. There’s no smile, no look of relief. He only nods once, but that’s all it takes for me to know how much this means.
And I’m glad I can give it to him. I don’t owe him anything, not really, but I sense how much he loved Laura.
Which tells me Laura probably loved him just as much, and she would want him to be happy.