Page 149 of The Single Dad

“Excuse me?”

“It was more than that, and both of you know it,” she says, exasperated. “Come on, admit it. That was not just some casual fling.”

I hesitate. I know that she’s right, but I don’t know if I’m willing—or able—to say that out loud.

At the same time, though, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to move on without admitting the truth. That I thought there was something more between us. Something special.

I take a deep, shuddering breath and nod. “You’re right,” I confess. “It was.”

Olivia doesn’t respond. She lays a hand on my shoulder, giving me the space to say more, if I decide to.

I push past the final barrier in my mind and look at her, my gaze blurred by tears. “I fell in love with him,” I blurt out.

“Oh, honey,” Olivia murmurs. Her arms wrap around me as I dissolve back into sobs.

Chapter 47

Riley

“Welcome to Henry’s. I’ll be your server this evening. Is there anything I can get the two of you?”

I stand, pen poised against my notepad, at the side of a young couple’s table. After a week of unemployment, wallowing in my apartment, I was forced to reconcile with the fact that I needed a job—and that the fastest job I could snag was my old one, at the restaurant. I’ve been back for over two weeks, and it’s starting to feel like I never even left.

“Um, yeah,” says the woman, who’s wearing a silky black dress. I have to tear my gaze away from it, or I’ll be reminded of the one Cole ordered for me. He sent it back to my apartment along with everything else, but I haven’t had the stomach to unpack that box yet. “We’ll share a bottle of your house cabernet—”

Her partner, a man with curly black hair, shoots her an adoring smile across the table, and she returns it, her fingers entwining with his. I feel as though there’s a pit in my stomach.

“—and I’m going to get a Caesar salad, to start with.”

I turn my attention to him, and he says, “I’ll get the minestrone.”

I jot down both orders. “Okay, that’s great. Would you guys like to order your main course right now as well, or wait until after the appetizers are out?”

“We’ll wait, for now,” he replies.

“Okay, thanks.” I flip the notepad closed, giving them a forced, courteous smile. “That’ll be out in just a few minutes for you.”

I head back to the kitchen, where there’s a computer terminal for entering orders. I tap at the screen to wake it up from screensaver mode, then begin keying in the wine, the salad—

Oh, shit.

As I hit the button for minestrone, the computer displays a message: out of ingredients. I groan, staring at the rubber mat on the floor. That’s right. Our manager told us this afternoon, at the beginning of my shift, that we were out of minestrone. I should have remembered.

One of my coworkers, a waitress named Julia, pauses as she goes past me. “Seriously? Again?”

I suck in air through my teeth, letting it out as a sigh rather than replying to her directly. Julia has been on my case since the moment I got back.

“That’s your fifth mistake this week,” Julia says. “Get your head in the game.”

Then she bustles off toward the cooler. I glare after her half-heartedly, wishing I could put my foot down and argue with her a little. Unfortunately, she’s right.

I have been off my game this entire time. Coming back to the grind of waitressing felt painfully familiar, but that doesn’t mean that I remember everything about the job.

Since I started back up again, I’ve felt like I’m wearing a pair of shoes that are a size too small.

They moved everything around behind the bar, so I feel like I don’t know how to find anything, even though it would’ve been second nature when I last worked here. I’m distracted, frazzled, and I’ve messed up half a dozen orders in the past two weeks—an alarming rate of failure.

I’m trying to push past this period in my life. Moving on has been harder than I ever would’ve imagined, but all I can do is keep my head down, pay my bills, and move through it.

---