Page 3 of Good Guy Gabe

I haven’t had a ton of girlfriends, no wives to speak of, but I do have four sisters. If I didn’t know my colors, I’d never have survived the emergency nail polish runs to CVS in high school.

The shop is a block away from the Camden Square pizza place I like. I’m genuinely surprised I’ve never noticed it before. There’s no way that quilt wouldn’t have caught my eye.

I flip over to my text messages, needing to let Merrick know he has to get a ride home with Blaise. I don’t get a single word typed before Emily yells from down the hall, “And Shaunessy?”

“Ma’am?” I call back.

“You got a date for the gala, right?”

Crud. That was something else they’ve told us at least three times now. Dates are required so no one’s trying to pick up any senators again this year.

“Yes, ma’am,” I say as sweetly as possible.

“You’re lying to me, Shaunessy. Find yourself a date.”

Like it’s that easy.

Chapter 2

Joss

“YOU CAN’T LIVEforever without a phone,” Tilly says from hundreds of miles away, disproving the very point she’s trying to make.

I line up my project in my sewing machine, nudge the thick fold of fabric into the narrow space, and drop the foot. “I’ll get it when I get my car.”

“I just saw Jimmy Dawson yesterday, and he says you haven’t called him to approve repairs yet,” Cora says, ratting me out.

“Well, how can I do that if I don’t have a phone?” Okay, there’s a landline right in the shop. But that even better proves this isn’t urgent.

“You can’t hide forever,” Tilly says more gently.

I gesture to the room around me. They’re not physically with me, but they’re the ones who help me set everything up every time I update equipment. They know what I’m pointing at. “I’m not exactly hiding.”

“Honey, you’ve been hiding for almost a decade,” Cora says. Tilly nods in agreement, and I decide not to argue the point that it’s only been six years.I can’t really say I haven’t been hiding in my own home, either.

This place has a long and colorful history. Despite the farmhouse exterior and the massive barn behind it, the propertyhas never been a farm. The first resident was a blacksmith who gained some notoriety for allegedly supplying bullets and cannons to the wrong side during the Civil War. That ultimately led to his shop getting razed, but the main house survived, only to literally explode half a century later by a drugstore owner who fancied himself a thoroughly educated chemist. He was nothing of the sort and learned the hard way that vinegar and baking soda can make a surprisingly powerful bomb when enough are combined and sealed up tight.

He did not live to share this discovery with the world, but the world at large already knew that.

The house that was built to replace it — the farmhouse with the clapboard siding and the wraparound porch — was initially a bed and breakfast. The owners didn’t make enough money to keep it running, so it bounced from hand to hand, ultimately getting renovated into a veterinary clinic with an apartment upstairs.

When the vet retired, the old animal clinic sat for nearly a decade, the smell too pungent for most. Ultimately, a pediatric oral surgeon spent an obscene amount of money to gut and remodel the downstairs, setting up a quaint practice where he and his pageant queen wife could settle down and build a future together. He planned to only live in the apartment upstairs for a few years, promised his wife that it was temporary, even vowed to rush it once the baby was on the way, although he did set up a nursery for the baby, just in case things didn’t work the way he hoped.

They didn’t.

Because he was a disgusting pervert.

And the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.

“Stop it right now, missy.”

I blink and look back up at the monitor mounted above my Husqvarna domestic. One half of the screen is Tilly Reinhardt, currently in Atlanta, hiding in the dark recesses of the wardrobe of the set she’s been working on for the last month, going absolutely ham on a jar of pickles after having already eaten half a tub of Greek yogurt.Cora Prasad, meanwhile, is all of twelve minutes away from me if she takes the highway, but she’s driving herself crazy putting together twenty-four outfits for a runway for December. I’m going live in an hour to demonstrate this modern cathedral window quilt technique that I’ve been partially assembling units for.

This works. We live in the time of virtual meetings. We got this.

Up in the corner are two smaller video feeds. One shows my fingers guiding my fabric under the presser foot, the needle rhythmically punching through at sixteenth-inch increments along the edge of the folded-over fabric. The other miniature video is of my face, the scowl on it the one Cora and Tilly refer to as The Ex.

Ex human, unfortunately. The jackass didn’t give me a chance to divorce him before he exed himself from life. The only good thing he did for me was gifting me the house when he initially bought it. I thought it was a grand gesture, a wedding gift. Ended up being the only thing I had left after the lawsuits from his victims were wrapped up.

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