Page 37 of If This Was a Movie

That was when I decided that one way or another, I was going to convince Jules to give me another shot. I just needed to figureout how. Maybe it isn’t so bad that my sisters are here today, because I could use all the help I can get.

“Grandma!” Sophie shouts as she bounds into my childhood home. My mom is standing in the living room and scooping her up when she reaches her. It’s a well-practiced routine at this point, and every time, it makes me smile wide. “Grandma! Daddy met the real-life Ashlyn, and she’s living in Aunt Claire’s house, and they’re going to fall in love!”

The smile melts off my face as I look to the ceiling and groan aloud.

My mom’s head jerks back in surprise, a smile on her lips before she looks at me. “Are they now?”

“Yup! It was my Christmas wish.”

“Well, it sounds like we have a little cupid on our hands, don’t we?”

“No, just a really good wisher,” my daughter says matter-of-factly as my mom shifts her onto her hip.

“Yeah, Nate’s in love with Ashlyn,” Sutton says as she walks into the living room, making kissy noises. She’s twenty-five and barely acts older than my daughter. I glare at her. “We need to figure out how to make her fall in love with him. That’s going to be the harder part since he’s…well…Nate.”

“Well, hold on because last night, Nate said he wanted us to ease off him,” Sloane, my oldest sister and the most level-headed, says as she enters the fray. “He didn’t want to force her into anything.”

“Thank you, Sloa—” I start, but she cuts me off.

“Even though he’s clearly head over heels in love with her.”

“Jesus,” I grumble.

“He told me falling in love is the step right before getting married!” Sophie says, clapping her hands excitedly.

“Sophie,” I start, ready to warn her not to get her hopes up too high, but my mom saves my ass as she tends to do.

“Hey, Sophie, baby, can you go find Grandpa? He wants to show you something in his workshop,” she says, setting Sophie on the floor.

Eagerly, knowing that in the workshop there’s a bowl of candy my dad thinks I forgot exists, she runs off.

“So, tell me everything,” my mom says, sitting down on the couch and smoothing out the skirt of her apron. For a split second, I contemplate lying or avoiding the subject altogether, but I know three things as facts in this world.

One, my mom can always tell when I’m lying.

Two, my sisters have big fucking mouths.

And three, nothing stays a secret long in Evergreen Park, especially when a Donovan is involved.

So with a sigh, I sit on the loveseat across from her and spill, telling my mom and sisters the whole story. How I met Jules in a bar, how I took her home (leaving out all of the gory details, of course), and we got snowed in. I tell them about how I felt that feeling Dad always talked about—that gut knowledge that I found my person—only to have her disappear from my life completely. Finally, I filled my mom in on last night about meeting Jules again and finding out the true reason she stopped talking to me and how it was all just a messy, stupid string of events.

“I wasn’t going to push any kind of romance on her, I swear,” I say finally, getting to the end of my story. “I just wanted to give her somewhere safe to stay, and with my workload being light this month, I have the time to fix her place without having to charge an arm and a leg. You know how Pete down in approvals can be a dick about recertifying the occupancy.” My mom nods, knowing all too well about peers. “But then I found out she’d been keeping this matchbook in her bag.” I pull it out of my pocket and show them.

“Why?” Sloane asks, looking at me like I’m insane, which is valid since it’s a fucking matchbook.

“Is she a smoker?” Sutton asks through a grimace.

I laugh and shake my head. “No, I was fidgeting the night we met and?—”

“Always were a fidgeter when you got nervous,” my mom says with a smile.

I roll my eyes and continue my story.

“And I was playing with it. She asked me about it, and I told her I fidget when I’m nervous, like when I’m talking to a pretty girl.” My sisters let out a small aww. “She kept it all this time. If she was done with me, if there was nothing between us, I think she would have gotten rid of it, right?”

My mom nods before giving me a knowing glance, and I know why. The night my dad met my mom, he bought her a soda. She ran off with her friends before he could get her number, but she kept the bottle cap from it. When they met again later, she still had that bottle cap, and he knew they were something special. It’s in a frame now, hanging over the sofa she’s sitting at, a part of a gallery wall containing memories and photos of their life together.

I can’t help but wonder what this matchbook would look like framed in my living room as I flip it mindlessly between my fingers.

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