Page 1 of Happy After All

Chapter One

The Meet-Cute—an amusing or charming first encounter between two main characters that typically results in a romantic entanglement.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged—at least, in a romance novel—that the moment the main character has her life in order, the exact person she doesn’t want to meet will come along and knock all that careful order into disarray.

For example, when a respectable motel owner who has decided to focus on her career and her own personal happiness is beginning to feel satisfied with the way she’s rebuilding her life, a disastrously gorgeous man will walk in and disrupt everything.

When Nathan Hart—room 32, staying for the whole summer, special requests: to be left alone—walks into the newly renovated lobby of the Pink Flamingo, I can’t escape the feeling that that’s exactly what’s just happened to me.

I’m immobilized by the impact of him. I don’t know where to look. I don’t know how to breathe. I don’t know how to talk to him.

I know how I would write him, though.

He was tall with dark-brown hair and green eyes that held mysteries she could only guess at. His hands were large and ... capable.Capable? Well, they do look capable.His forearms muscular, but not from work in a gym—oh no, he looked like a man who got his muscles from working the land or fighting a bear or ...

Then he makes eye contact with me. That’s when I remember I’ve sworn off men until I pick up every last piece of my shattered self and glue her back together. That’s when I remember I’m dedicated to the Pink Flamingo—my newly opened, newly refurbished motel in Rancho Encanto, California—and to my fledging career as a romance author.

Most importantly, I’m newly dedicated to myself.

To the refurbishment of Amelia Taylor, who lost herself in LA and had to move to the desert to begin to feel something like joy again.

If I were writing this, it would be a meet-cute. But I’m not writing it, so it’s just me checking in a guest.

“Checking in. I have a reservation under—”

“Hart,” I say, and then immediately want to go back in time.

He looks at me, and it’s not friendly. It’s not unfriendly per se, but I can see he wants to make conversation with me as much as he’d like to turn around, wander into the desert, and die of heatstroke. “Yes.”

I came across as too eager.

I have nothing to be eager about except a guest. A guest—other than my long-term residents—which I’ve been told is a rarity in the summer when the heat hits 114 degrees.

This is my first summer.

My first summer since I answered a real estate listing that said:Midcentury Gem of a Motel on Route 66 on Sale for a Steal...If You’re Able to Weather Record-Breaking Heat!

The record-breaking heat had seemed theoretical then. It does not seem theoretical now. It’s ... oppressive.

I’ve been questioning myself the whole time. As the renovations got more and more expensive, as the people in town treated me with abject skepticism. (And I get why—because they don’t expect me to last. I’m not sure if I expect me to last either.)

It doesn’t surprise me to feel like an outsider. I grew up barely feeling like part of my own family.

My mom is professionally bitter at my dad, and I look like him. Sometimes I think it would be easier if she’d found someone new andloved him more than she loved me. Had some new kids and loved them more than me, and livedhappily.

Instead, it’s just vitriol.

My dad remarried when I was eight and moved an hour north on I-5. I’m always welcome to come visit. But all my siblings are half siblings, and I’m like some odd mouse out, my hair brown and dull next to their shiny blond. I’m the kid from the Oops Wife. The accidental life. My dad loves me, I think. He also doesn’t know where I fit. His real kids are half him and half Stacy, who is lovely and gracious, even to me. I’m half him and half the weird, bitter woman down the freeway who actually called Stacy while drunk once and told her she was a skank for stealing her husband.

I feel caught in the middle of this, or maybe I would if I’d stayed. My mom thinks my dad had an affair. I think he probably did too. He’s been with Stacy for more than twenty years. He was with my mom for less than a decade. Who’s the love story? In the end I believe it’s him and Stacy, no matter how they got there.

Though, I think if I tried to sell that as a romance to my publisher, they’d say he was unsympathetic.

People are too complicated to be sympathetic, generally speaking.

I’m not naive enough to believe my life would have been perfect if he’d stayed with my mother. It would have been weird and bitter in a different way, that’s all. Like I said, he tries.

Sometimes I just can’t bear to be something he has to try quite so hard for.

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