Chapter 38
MAGGIE
Right now, I was supposed to be at a dress fitting, but instead, I lay in bed with a seventy-pound puppy sprawled across my torso. His head rested under my chin, one humongous paw spread across my ribs, and every time I breathed too deeply, he sighed in his sleep like my lungs were offending him.
I got where he was coming from, though. At this point, the mere fact of my existence was offending me too. This had been without a doubt the worst month of my life.
Nothing was on fire and I wasn’t running, hiding, or shying away anymore, but for a few seconds when I woke up every morning, I forgot that I had lost Ryan.
Those were the only few seconds of the day when it felt like everything was okay, but then I would remember and it hit me all over again that my heart had been carved cleanly out of my chest.
For the first couple weeks, I had cried uncontrollably. Before I’d come home from the cottage, I’d spent days curled into a ball on the couch, just sobbing my eyes out, then I’d screamed, and then when that phase had subsided, I’d thrown things.
When I’d finally come back to the city, I’d reached numbness. That was where I was now. Or where I had been until my mother had brought the puppy to my room.
I missed numbness now. Numb had been easier than this.
It had allowed me to go to fittings, planning meetings, and luncheons, smiling my way through listening to my mother talk about the wedding like nothing had gone wrong before.
Numb had let me pretend I’d forgotten the way Ryan had looked at me in the rain that night on the sidewalk like admitting the truth was slicing him in half.
Sighing as I felt a fresh wave of tears sting the backs of my eyes, I burrowed my face into the back of the unnamed puppy’s head. I couldn’t bring myself to name him. It felt wrong, doing it without Ryan. Which made no sense, but hey.
Neither did the fact that he and I couldn’t be together.
When I heard my bedroom door open, I didn’t look up until I heard Cathy’s voice. “Good lord, girl. When was the last time you let some sunshine in here?”
“Don’t wake him,” I murmured, finally lifting my head to glance at her.
She cocked her head with obvious concern written all over her face, but then she sighed and quietly shut the door behind her. “Right. Of course. We wouldn’t want to wake a sleeping dog.”
As she lowered herself onto the very edge of the mattress with the same measure of caution used by people getting comfortable beside an armed bomb, she looked me over, her eyes clouding with worry.
“Are you okay?” she asked quietly, waving a hand around the room. “It smells like wet dog in here.”
“I gave him a bath him earlier,” I said, stroking my fingers across his back as I dropped my head against the pillows. “I guess I forgot to open the windows.”
“Girl, you haven’t open the door or your curtains in days either,” she said, then sighed when I gave her a warning look. “Oh, this is ridiculous, but okay. I’ll keep my voice down.”
She pushed up and strode over to the bank of windows on one side of the room, drawing open the curtains before pushing open the windows too. With that done, she gave the same treatment to the windows on the other side of the room, letting in bright, harsh sunshine that immediately made me squint.
“What’s that for?”
“Fresh air,” she said, then planted her hands on her hips after spinning to face me, but as promised, she kept her voice down. “Maybe also to remind you that there’s an actual world out there, waiting for you to rejoin it.”
“No, thank you.” I shielded my eyes with my free hand, watching as she strode back to the bed. “Why are you insisting on torturing me?”
“What, with a beautiful day and a bright blue sky?” She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
She paused for a beat as she sat down, her gaze sweeping across the puppy again but a little slower this time. “So, it’s true, then. An absolutely deranged Ryan Thayer showed up at your parents’ house, handed your mother that beast of a dog, and disappeared?”
Another huge lump formed in my throat as I nodded. “He’s not a beast, but yeah. That’s what happened. Except that I don’t think Ryan was deranged either. He was just keeping a promise.”
Cathy’s expression softened when her gaze lifted back to mine. “Oh, Maggie.”
“Yeah,” I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut against the tide of tears building behind them. “I guess this means he thinks I’m stable enough now. He thinks I have a plan and I’m sticking to it.”
“Don’t you?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, I do.”
“So why are you crying?”
“Haven’t you heard?” I asked dryly. “I have terrible allergies.”
She let out a soft, sad-sounding chuckle. “To shellfish, so unless that dog is a lobster or a scallop in disguise, you’re going to have to come up with a new excuse.”
The puppy shifted, his enormous head sliding farther up my chest, and I wrapped my arms around him, holding him close as my heart cracked just a little more in my chest. “Maybe we can convince people that I’m allergic to everything.
At least that way, they’ll leave me in a bubble in my room forever, right? ”
Cathy reached over and squeezed my ankle. “Are you actually going to go through with this wedding if it’s hurting you this badly?”
“Yes, I am. It’s a week away. There’s no getting out of it anymore.”
“You’re actually going to get married?”
“That’s what weddings are for.”
“Sure. It’s just that I thought maybe you’d changed your mind.”
“I’ve considered it, but I’ve already done that,” I said. “I figured this time, I’ll change things up and actually do it.”
She let out a soft laugh. “If that’s true, then why aren’t you at your dress fitting?”
I shrugged. “Mom will make sure it fits. I don’t need to be there. I’ve been at all the others.”
“Yeah, well, that’s what fittings are for,” she said, giving my own words back to me. “It’s a beautiful dress, but it still won’t be comfortable if you’re not there for them to make sure it fits right.”
I sighed, my gaze drifting to the closet my yellow vintage dress was hanging in. It was still there. I’d kept it, but my mother had nearly had a coronary when I’d shown it to her. As a result, we’d compromised on a pearl white creation with softer lines than the previous one.
It was elegant and expensive, but I still didn’t love it nearly as much as the one Ryan had found.
Mom, however, had deemed the yellow dress a tacky disaster that was entirely unacceptable and she’d dug her heels in real deep on the issue.
Eventually, I’d caved and selected the least offensive of the options her designer had sent over.
Every time I opened my closet though, I still saw my dream dress, and whenever I did, I remembered Ryan coming back with it after I’d described it to him just one time. The memory pushed me over the edge and a tear I couldn’t hold back any longer slipped from the corner of one eye.
I swiped it away, but Cathy had already seen it, breathing out a heavy sigh as she shook her head at me. “What is going on with you, babe? I know you’re not crazy, head-over-heels in love with Daniel, but that’s not what this is about, is it?”
“No,” I admitted quietly a moment later. “I am marrying Daniel, though. There is no way around that and I can’t get out of it, so it’s just cruel to string someone else along or to pretend like there could be a happily ever after for any of us.”
She went quiet for a long beat. “Ryan Thayer?”
I shrugged. “Does it matter?”
“It could.”
“It won’t,” I said firmly. “My family has arranged my marriage to Daniel Hawthorne. That’s what matters. Trust me, that’s how this story ends, with me as Maggie Hawthorne. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, will change that.”
“Maybe.” Cathy nudged my shoulder. “You could call Ryan, though.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s over, Cathy.” I finally glanced up at her again, needing her to see how serious I was about this. “It’s over. Done. Kaput.”
Aside from the fact that I didn’t need to be harboring any false hope about somehow getting out of this marriage, especially after talking to Viola, calling Ryan would mean hearing his voice.
It would mean remembering the way he looked at me like he actually saw who I was inside and that would mean asking if it had all been a lie.
I couldn’t afford any of that. I had nowhere else to run and no one left to chase me. This was it.
I’d chosen to come home, to marry Daniel in a pearly white dress with no carnival, and I had to live with that. It was the only responsible choice if I didn’t want to end up like Viola, in my eighties and still regretting the one who’d gotten away.
She’d actually thought they had a shot, her and my grandfather. They’d gotten married, after all, and sure, she hadn’t known what it meant to be a Pembroke when she’d said those vows, but look at how that had turned out.
All these years later, and she was still heartbroken over him. I refused to let that be my fate. I knew exactly what it meant to be a Pembroke and talking to her had made me realize there was no point in trying to get out of this.
The best I could do was rip off the band-aid before my relationship with Ryan had gone any further and hope like hell that I got over him in time. We hadn’t even really been anything at all. We’d slept together once, but that was it.
If I got in any deeper than that, even just to hear his explanation about taking the money from my family, it would kill me even more than it already was to let him go. I couldn’t let that happen.
Marrying Daniel was set in stone. That was what I had to focus on now.
Cathy sighed but finally glanced at the puppy again. “Okay, then. Does Daniel like dogs?”
“I don’t know.” I glanced down at the puppy sprawled across my chest and fought yet another wave of tears. “I’ve never asked, but I guess I’ll find out soon enough.”