Page 27 of Stuck With the Best Man

I turn my face toward the window so he can’t see the flush that’s suddenly warmed my cheeks. At the same time, however, I’m still annoyed. He remembers kissing a girl who looked extremely similar to me, but he couldn’t even recall my name?

I swallow hard and face him again. “Then why did you disappear off the face of the planet?”

Ben lets out a low string of very impressive curse words. The car slows slightly, as if he’s so caught up in his thoughts that he’s forgotten to keep his foot fully on the gas. He blinks fast, remembering that we’re on a major highway, and picks up the pace again.

“First and foremost,” he begins, “I should tell you that I’m not very good with names. I also struggle with something called prosopagnosia.”

“What?”

“Also known as face blindness.”

I roll my eyes. “That’s not a thing.”

“It is a thing,” he retorts, an unexpected harshness creeping into his tone. “Listen, I don’t talk about this often, but… when I was kid, I had an accident. I was usually left with an endless cycle of nannies and au pairs because my parents were too busy being, you know, Hawthornes. One of the nannies was kind of careless, I guess you could say. Long story short, she didn’t notice when an eight-year-old boy put on a pair of roller skates inside the house, nor did she notice when I fell down the stairs. At least, not until I hit the first-floor landing. With my head.”

“Holy crap, Ben.”

“Sounds worse than it was. I only got, like, ten stitches, but the reason I keep my hair longer is because it helps cover the scar. The worst part was the concussion. I had a little bit of amnesia, and ever since then, my memory hasn’t been that great.”

“Did your parents fire the nanny?”

For some reason, Ben chuckles. “Yes, Ruby. They fired the nanny.”

“Well, I’m sorry you went through that and I’m sorry you’re still dealing with the effects of the injury.”

“But…”

I purse my lips. “But I really don’t understand how a minor head injury that occurred, like, twenty years ago is a decent excuse for ghosting someone,” I force myself to say.

“What? You ghostedme!” he exclaims.

“Excuse me? I don’t ghost people. It’s rude.”

“Yeah, I agree that it’s rude! Therefore, Ialsodon’t ghost people!”

I stare at him. “So, you’re telling me that you spent hours with me, kissed me in the dusty back aisles of a bookstore, bought me dinner, then walked me home, and yet decided to never text or call me ever again? That doesn’t seem like ghosting to you?”

Ben opens his mouth to continue arguing, but then he lets out a long exhale and briefly shuts his eyes. Luckily, the highway is mostly empty and perfectly straight ahead of us. Even so, I think it’s pretty clear that neither one of us is paying that much attention to where we’re going. Not like it matters. Given the detour that’s apparently necessary to take, we’ll be on this stretch of I-495 for at least the next hour.

“I think I know what happened,” he admits quietly.

“Enlighten me.”

“It was last May, right?”

“You tell me,” I reply sarcastically.

“Fine. It was May. I know that. Because the day after we met, my father sent me to England to represent the family at a charity gala for the London Symphony Orchestra. I remember because it was the most boring event of my life and was more of a threat than an olive branch on his part.”

“A threat?”

“My father is a difficult man,” Ben explains. “He’s hard to please. And, for most of my life, I didn’t really bother pleasing him in the first place. I have three older siblings and they’re impressive enough. I’m the great shame of the family because I wasn’t as interested in flaunting our surname all over the world. He sent me to London because he wanted to remind me that he could control me—control my schedule and my responsibilities and my metaphorical purse strings.”

“Was the position on the board a threat too?”

“No, not at all. I actually wanted that. Anyway, my point is that even though I got shipped off to a different continent for a week, I didn’t forget about you. I texted you.”

“No, you didn’t.”

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