Cara #2
We drifted into high school territory after that.
Who’d gotten married, who’d moved away, who’d come back looking exactly the same, and who’d come back looking like a different person entirely.
Eric had opinions about all of it, delivered with the easy authority of someone who’d kept better tabs on everyone than I had, which wasn’t hard—I’d spent most of high school inside the library or behind the Pine & Pages counter with my grandfather.
My working knowledge of what our classmates were doing with their lives was very little.
It was somewhere after the entrees arrived that Eric leaned back in his chair with the ease of a man completely at home in his own company and said, “Hey—isn’t Jasper Dean back in town? I heard he’s working over at Twilight Tavern now.”
Something dropped through my chest, clean and fast, and I looked at my plate for a half-second before I looked back up.
“He is,” I said. “I’ve seen him around.”
“Huh.” Eric tilted his head, something moving behind his expression that I didn’t especially like. “Didn’t you tutor him?”
“For a semester, yeah. When he was a senior.”
“Right, right.” He speared a piece of asparagus on his plate, unhurried. “A sophomore tutoring a senior.” He shook his head with a short laugh. “Must’ve been humbling for him.”
I kept my face where it was. The comment hit the way those types of comments do—small enough to seem offhand, shaped precisely enough to sting.
There was nothing to say to it that wouldn’t make me look like I was overreacting, which I suspected Eric understood perfectly well.
I picked up my fork. “He did fine,” I said, and the evenness in my own voice cost me something I didn’t examine.
“I’m sure he did.” Eric smiled. “Seemed like the type who was always about to do something you couldn’t quite predict. Your sister Lucy was in his year, right? Did they know each other?”
“Lucy and I are the same age,” I said. “Different mothers. She was in our class. You have to remember that.” I said it evenly because the alternative was to make it into something that would require a reaction from whoever I was talking to, and I had never wanted to do that.
But for just a moment, I turned the comment over quietly—how he’d said it, the timing, whether he’d known exactly what he was bringing up and said it anyway to get a reaction out of me.
That was the thing about Eric. He was smooth enough that I could never quite tell where careless ended and deliberate began, and that uncertainty was its own type of exhausting.
He raised his eyebrows in surprise, or the performance of it—and he said, “Right, of course,” without a trace of embarrassment.
“I went to a party once. Homecoming, I think. She was there,” he continued, easy as anything.
“She never liked me.” He laughed, genuinely, as if the memory delighted him. “Tough girl.”
She was. Lucy had always had excellent instincts and had never once bothered to hide them, which was one of the many reasons I loved her so much.
We’d grown up with the same story trailing behind us—our father had been married to Lucy’s mother when he’d started something with mine, and Honeybrook Hollow being the size that it was, nobody had ever really forgotten it.
The small-town arithmetic that people felt entitled to do out loud, usually in front of the children most affected by it.
We’d handled it completely differently. Lucy had come out swinging.
Literally, more than once. She’d gotten into fights in the Sweetbriar High parking lot over things people said, had never once backed down, and had worn the whole complicated truth of who we were like it was nobody’s business but ours.
I’d gone quiet instead. Kept my head down and learned early that if you didn’t react, people eventually lost interest. It had worked, mostly.
It had also cost me things I didn’t always let myself think about.
I hadn’t been at that party Eric mentioned—I hadn’t been at most parties—and that was a distinction that would have required more explanation than I wanted to give Eric Michaelson over a candlelight dinner—or ever.
“Anyway.” He turned his glass by the stem. “Good for Jasper, I guess, if he’s finally figured out where to settle. Some people just take longer to figure out that running doesn’t actually get you anywhere.”
“Joining the Marines isn’t exactly running away,” I pointed out. It came out before I’d decided to say it.
Eric looked at me for a beat, mildly surprised, and I looked back at him with an expression I kept carefully neutral. He recovered smoothly and moved on. And I let him. It was easier to let it go rather than start an argument with someone I didn’t have anything to prove to.
The presumptions started arriving shortly after that, slipped between other sentences the way you slide something under a door—small enough to seem incidental, deliberate enough to mean something.
“This place is great, right?” Eric said, looking around the room with the satisfaction of a man who’d made a good decision and knew it. “I knew you’d like it.”
“It’s really lovely,” I said, and cut into my steak.
“There’s a place in Sweetbriar I’ve been wanting to try. Farm-to-table, very low-key, but the reviews are incredible. I think you’d love it.”
“Mm.” I speared a piece of asparagus. “The steak here is really good.”
“We could drive up to the lake sometime, too. There’s a place up there that does a great Sunday brunch. Better in the evening, though, honestly. The light off the water is something else.” He picked up his glass. “Have you been up there recently?”
“Not in a while,” I said. I reached for my wine. The steak really was good. I focused on that—and the mashed potatoes, which were my second favorite food.
“We should fix that.” He smiled, easy and certain, like he was making a note of it somewhere. “And I’d love to meet your sisters properly at some point. The ones I haven’t pissed off yet.” He laughed at his own joke.
I smiled back because it was the path of least resistance, and because I was spending considerable energy trying to stay one gentle redirect ahead of wherever the conversation kept wanting to go.
Every time I steered, he course-corrected back, smooth and unhurried, like a man who was used to arriving at his destination eventually and wasn’t troubled by the scenic route. I took another bite and let him talk.
He brought up his divorce without much preamble, somewhere between the entrée and dessert menus.
“She was a city person at heart,” he said, with the measured generosity of a man who’d practiced being fair about it.
“Seattle, ultimately. She always wanted that life—the restaurants, the scene, all of it. I tried it for a while, I really did, but my family is here. My parents, my brother. I’d come back for holidays and remember what it actually felt like to belong somewhere.
” He paused, turning his glass. “She wasn’t interested in any of that.
Roots, community. She called it small thinking.
” Something tightened briefly at the corner of his mouth before the easy smile returned.
“I’m in Portland now, which works fine for my law firm, but I can be home in about an hour when it matters.
That’s what I wanted. What I always wanted, really.
” He said it in a way that made it clear his ex-wife’s failure to understand this had been a significant personal shortcoming on her part.
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” I said, because I was raised to say things like that.
“Don’t be.” He looked at me with the quiet confidence of a man delivering the thesis of his evening. “Being back here has reminded me of what actually matters. I want something real this time. You know what I mean? I think you’re pretty amazing, Cara.” His voice dropped low, and I looked away.
I turned my wine glass slowly by the stem and thought carefully about what to say—something true, something kind, something that didn’t leave a door open that I had no intention of walking through.
“I think Honeybrook Hollow does that to people,” I said finally. “Makes everything feel more—” I searched for the word. “Possible.”
It wasn’t what he wanted to hear from me, and we both knew it.
But it was true, and it was kind, and it closed the door quietly enough that he could pretend he hadn’t noticed.
He held my gaze for a beat, something shifting behind his expression, and then he picked up his fork and moved on, easy and certain, as though the answer had been close enough to what he wanted and he’d decided to take it.
“What about you?” he asked, after a moment. “Anyone on the scene?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve been single for about a year and a half. I’m not really looking for anything right now.”
“A long time.” He tilted his head, something in his expression that I couldn’t quite read. “What happened there, if you don’t mind me asking?”