Page 69 of Happy After All

He’s letting me in, a little at a time. It works, I assume, because he’s not letting me into a place I need to live. I don’t need to worry about how dark it is once I’m inside.

There’s a time limit on this. The clock is ticking.

But today, we have this.

He’s going to pretend to be my fake boyfriend, I’m going to pretend that everything is great and that looking at Christopher doesn’t hurt me. And we are going to my favorite national park.

All is well.

For the moment.

I’ll take that.

Chapter Sixteen

I’m lacing up some hiking boots when there’s a knock on my door. It’s not him, I know, because it’s fifteen minutes before we are supposed to meet, and the tenor of the knock is different.

I open the door, and it’s Elise.

“I hear that you came into the diner this morning with a tall and dangerously gorgeous man,” she says. “Not my words.”

“Who told youthat?”

“Mary.”

Mary, the owner of the diner and Elise’s former boss. I didn’t even see her there.

“Mary is a snitch,” I say.

“Tell me,” Elise says, her eyes glittering brightly.

I sniff. “I may or may not have had breakfast this morning with Nathan, and now we’re going to Joshua Tree.”

“Oh my God,”she says, her eyes going wide. “You slept with him.”

“I did,” I say, unable to keep a somewhat smug smile off my face.

“Good for you,” says Elise. “I thought you were a nun.”

“The same can be said about you,” I say.

“I have a reason,” she says.

She means Emma.

I know she’s not meaning to be hurtful. How could she? She doesn’t know.

I haven’t told her, and that’s my choice. My way of coping. When I got to Rancho Encanto, I was floundering. Swimming against the tide of my life. I set up the motel, I got my life in order, and it’s felt really nice to lie here in more still waters ... floating.

I realize it’s been a lot of floating. I’ve found a writing routine that works. I don’t deviate from it. I love what I write, but I have other ideas. Still, writing something new, finding an agent, all of that sounds like paddling, and I’m resistant to it.

Telling anyone here my story sounds like paddling.

I turn my focus to her.

“Yeah. I know you have great reasons. But don’t you ever miss it?”

“Yes. I do. A lot. That’s why I have a vibrator. It doesn’t give me any trouble.”

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