Page 7 of Fall For You

I’m tempted to grill Vi for details, but she’s gone back to eating her breakfast with single-minded concentration—no surprise there, the food is amazing—and Carter’s abrupt, departure barely even seems to have registered with her.

“Why did he run out of here like that?” I mumble grumpily.

Vi pauses to look at me. “Who’s that, dear?”

“Carter.” I gesture toward the door. “Where do you think he’s going?”

“Back to work, I imagine,” my aunt replies. “Did Carter tell you about his restaurant?”

“Well, not exactly,” I admit, blushing a little as I remember the conclusions I jumped to when I first saw him today.

“It’s very good,” Vi assures me. “You should try his food.”

“I am,” I say gesturing at the plate I’d left sitting on the side table.

Vi frowns uncertainly. Her hand is shaking as she raises it to rub her forehead.

“Do you have a headache?” I ask, gently. “Can I get you something for it?”

Evelyn glances up. “I can do that for her,” she tells me. “Do you need one of your pills, Ms. Vi?”

“No, thank you both,” Vi replies, dropping her hand into her lap. Then she turns away slightly, so that she’s looking out the window.

“Are you sure?” I ask.

“What’s that?” Vi turns to face me again. There’s a polite smile curving her lips, but it fades away as her gaze refocuses on my plate. “Eat your food. It won’t be as good if it’s cold, you know.”

But my appetite is gone and the food I’ve already eaten is sitting like a lead weight in my stomach. I feel like I’ve entered an alternate reality where things no longer make sense. And I guess most of that is due to Vi’s concussion, but it’s disturbing all the same.

It occurs to me that the person I always would have talked to about anything like this is the same man who just ghosted, dipping out of here as though this was all perfectly normal, making me feel likeI’mthe one who’s totally out of sync.

Which I might well be. I haven’t felt this confused and uncertain in a very long time—probably not since I first fell in love with Carter Donahue.

I was thirteen at the time, a quiet, awkward child, an unhappy loner with an overactive imagination, who’d taken to viewing her life through the lens of Gothic Romance. I wasn’t actually an orphan, you understand—my parents had left me, yes; they hadn’t died. But it was easier to think of myself as one. And this house—while not a castle, or an isolated manor, by any means—was still darker and older and more mysterious-seeming than any place I’d lived before. Or since, either, for that matter.

Carter was everything back then—tall, quiet and kind—totally unlike his arrogant, show-off of a brother, whose appeal I never did understand. I mean, I’m sure Cash has his good points, but I was always too angry with him (mostly on Carter’s behalf) to even notice.

I quickly plugged Carter, with his dark, good looks and brooding expression, into the Heathcliff-shaped space in my romantic inner narrative. I used to follow him around whenever he was here, watching from a distance, too shy to actually speak to him.

But, oh! The imaginary conversations we used to have, all the illnesses and injuries we nursed each other through, the heroic rescues we undertook to save each other’s lives; those were freaking epic.

Eventually, Carter broke the ice—by agreeing to let me drive his truck. And yes, it still pisses me off that he used that against me today, reminding me that whatever we had, back in the day, was long gone.

But what did we have, really? It was just a crush—what else could it have been at that young an age? It wasn’t anything to be taken seriously. Just puppy love brought on by circumstances, always doomed to fail. And if I’d remembered that, or realized it sooner, I might have saved us both a truckload of grief and hurt feelings.

CHAPTER

THREE

Carter

If you takethe direct route from Ms. Vi’s house to my restaurant, it’s a distance of only a few blocks, which you can travel in a handful of minutes. Today, however, I take the long way round—the so-called scenic route that runs alongside the river. In part that’s because it’s a beautiful day and I don’t spend enough time outside anymore. But mostly I do it because I need time to think.

My thoughts are in the past—which is not my favorite thing. I don’t like dwelling on what used to be, because that inevitably leads to thoughts of what might have been. And where’s the use in that? What’s done is done. Regretting anything is pointless.

I know there are people who say that you can learn a lot from your mistakes. But what I’ve mostly learned from mine is not to repeat them. Well, that and the fact that I’ve been an idiot for most of my life.

The me who headed off to college at eighteen, for example, could have given a very good impression of someone who’d been dropped on his head one too many times as a child. In my mother’s defense, I don’t think that’s what happened.

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