Page 25 of What You Wish For

“I thought of the title for my autobiography.”

“Thank God!”

“I know, right?”

“What is it????”

“Do the math.”

“Please never tell me to do math.”

“No! That’s the title!”

“???”

“Do the Math: The Alice Brouillard Story.”

“Ah.”

“Perfect, right? I’m going to make it my catchphrase, too.”

“You have always needed a catchphrase.”

“Agreed. And thanks in advance.”

“For?”

“Being my ghostwriter.”

All fairly standard texting for Alice and me. We threw in a few GIFs, too, and then just when I thought we were done, I got one lastding, and Alice added, “Can’t wait to meet the Guy tomorrow!”

And that’s when I dropped the phone.

Tomorrow. It was suddenly about to betomorrow. As inthetomorrow. The one I’d been dreading so hard I’d lost track of time. The one where I would see Duncan Carpenter again, for better or for worse, as I stepped—willingly or not—into the rest of my life.

I couldn’t believe it.

It just didn’t seem possible.

None of it seemed possible, in fact.

De-stress, I reminded myself.De-stress.

But it was good timing. I always found grocery stores pleasantly anesthetizing.

I grabbed a cart and took deep breaths as I curved my way around the magazines and mass-market paperbacks, then up and down the aisles. I considered buying a beach towel with unicorns all over it—on sale for $7.99. Did I need a blender? A coffee grinder? A new muffin tin?

I had only managed to put one thing in my cart—the most essential of all essentials: coffee—when, suddenly, I saw him.

Duncan Carpenter.

He was here. Just like that. In my grocery store.

I caught a glimpse—one glimpse—of him walking past the far end of the aisle, and it was enough to make me drop down into a squat, hiding behind my cart.

Slowly, every sense on high alert, I stood back up, and pushed my cart to the edge of the aisle where I’d just seen him, and peeked around the corner.

There he was, at the far end of the wide center aisle, in a white oxford shirt and gray suit pants, striding along with his cart like it was no big deal. Like it was totally normal. Like people named DuncanCarpenter just… wandered around grocery stores in Galveston all the time.

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