Page 71 of The Summer Swap

Lily couldn’t help smiling. He was asking all the questions she would have wanted to ask if good manners hadn’t held her back.

Cecilia sighed. “If I asked you these questions, you’d be telling me to mind my own business.”

“Not true. I’ll answer any question you ask. Try me.”

“All right.” Cecilia narrowed her eyes. “What happened with Amelie?”

“Ah. Amelie. I realized I made a mistake.” Todd answered without hesitation. “I’m making that sound as if it was a sudden revelation. It wasn’t. I knew it was a mistake from the beginning.”

“If that’s the case, why did you propose?”

Lily held her breath, waiting to hear the answer to that.

Todd levered himself away from the table and pulled out a chair. “If it’s confession time, then I need to be sitting. And the answer is, I didn’t.”

“You didn’t propose to her?”

“No. She proposed to me.” His eyes had lost the laughter, and Lily saw for the first time that under the smile and his easy manner he looked tired. As if he hadn’t been sleeping well.

Cecilia sat down, too. “She proposed to you? How very modern.”

“Yes. And at this point I should add that I have no problem with it in principle. But she chose to do it in public. With no warning.” He tapped his fingers on the table, a tense rhythmic drumming. “It was her birthday. Fifty of her friends, looking on, waiting. Primed. Phones at the ready to record the moment.”

Fifty friends? Lily tried to imagine it. She didn’t have fifty friends. How did one even stay in touch with fifty people? But that was Amelie. She collected people like trophies as if the number of contacts in her phone was somehow a measure of her worth.

“She’d told her friends what she was going to do?” Cecilia looked astounded. “Why?”

“It was a filmable moment. I’m lucky she didn’t live stream it.”

“And because there was an audience, you said yes. Because you’re you, of course.”

“I didn’t want to humiliate her,” Todd said. “It was the wrong decision. I realized that pretty quickly, but in that single second, with no warning that it was going to happen, I couldn’t think clearly. I intended to put it right before we even left the place, but it snowballed. I couldn’t get near her for her friends screaming and hugging her. The right moment just didn’t present itself.”

Cecilia ran her fingers across her forehead. “How did she propose? Did she expect you to go shopping for a ring?”

“She already had a ring. She had everything covered. It was her grandmother’s. She had it sized and gave it to me to give to her.”

“Goodness. That doesn’t sound like my dream proposal.” Cecilia sat up straighter. “What do you think, Lily?”

Lily blinked. “I haven’t ever thought about it. I wouldn’t want it to be public, I know that. A proposal should be something intimate, surely. Something between two people.” Her cheeks were hot enough to fry an egg and she saw Todd’s gaze linger on her face as if he was trying to figure something out.

She felt a stab of acute longing and something else. Something much more complicated, and at the same time she felt a thrill of relief.

Todd hadn’t proposed to Amelie.

He hadn’t asked her to marry him.

All those hashtags, #soulmate #manofmydreams #truelove, had been wishful thinking on Amelie’s part.

“She proposed and provided you with a ring to give her. She’s obviously a woman who knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to go after it,” Cecilia said.

Lily thought about the Amelie she knew. Top of the class in everything. Captain of every team. A winner. “It probably didn’t occur to her that you wouldn’t be feeling the same way.” In her experience, Amelie focused on her own feelings, not the feelings of others. And what Amelie wanted, Amelie always got.

But not Todd.

She didn’t have Todd.

“Or maybe,” Cecilia said, “she knew you were too much of a gentleman to turn her down. She knew that in the end your ingrained kindness and decency would ensure that you went along with it.”

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