Page 44 of Happy After All

Her theatrics really are wasted on a town this size.

They are a spectacle far too large to be contained in this room.

“We have a Zoom call scheduled,” she says.

My heart scurries into my throat.

“With Christopher Weaver.” There’s a smattering of applause in the room, and I’m frozen. I haven’t seen Chris in any capacity where he could also see me for three years. Yes, I have seen him on national commercials, and in promos for Christmas movies. But his twinkling blue eyes can’t see me in those situations.

As Reigna begins to open her computer, as she clicks the link, my heart goes into a free fall.

What if he thinks I’m the reason he got the job?

I am undone by this.

I don’t know what to do. I want to run; I want to hide.

I’m hoping Chris’s vision is based on movement and if I freeze, he won’t see me. If I run, I’ll only create a bigger commotion, that I’m sure about. I barely breathe.

He won’t see me.

He spent months looking through me when we lived in the same house.

Ihopehe’ll look through me now.

Reigna clicks the link, and I curl my hands underneath my chair.

Sylvia looks at me. “Amelia. Are you okay?”

“Starstruck,” I say, the word getting stuck halfway up my throat.

In this instance, the lie feels a little bit more painful than the truth. At least to my pride.

“I don’t blame you,” she says. “He’s very handsome.”

“Just ... so handsome,” I say.

I wish I were anywhere else. I wish a hole in the floor would open up and swallow me. This is an extremely dramatic reaction considering I was thinking I was somehow just going to get to the end of the month without dealing with this. Without talking to anyone about it, without admitting what the situation was.

But this is unexpected. I had no time to prepare for it. I was prepared for the fact his name might be brought up tonight, but I was not prepared to see him.

Even with hundreds of miles between us.

The camera flashes on the screen, and there he is, sitting at his desk, thankfully in a house that isn’t familiar.

I’m so grateful we decided to sell.

If I had to see him sitting back in our place, it might have tossed me into an uncanny valley I couldn’t scrape myself out of.

“Hi, everybody,” he says, his smile wide, a Seacrest grin that’s nearly painful to look at directly.

Everyone says hi, and I don’t know how to react in a way that isn’t self-conscious. I feel like a small burrowing animal that’s been wrenched mercilessly out of its hole. I don’t know what to do. Pull the fire alarm. Play dead. Try to blend in.

I opt for trying to blend in.

“Thank you so much, Christopher,” Reigna says in her booming theatrical voice. “We are so appreciative that you have agreed to do a reading of the Christmas story for our event. Ever since we put your face and name up on the website, our ticket sales have skyrocketed.”

I would love to see the demographic information on that. I’m quite certain that there are a lot of women from the ages of twenty to eighty-five who love clean, romantic Christmas movies and who are very excited to see him. I can’t blame them. Looking at him now, I’m reminded of his appeal.

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