Page 65 of Hello Stranger

I’d thank her, and then—yes—I’d cry… because happiness and sadness are always so tangled up. And then I’d put on a Cary Grant movie—and usually eat the birthday cake, sometimes digging straight in with a fork without even slicing it, until I conked out on the sofa.

It was quite the ritual.

I’d started out trying to feel happy. But in the end, I’d settled for grateful.

Which might be the better emotion, if I had to choose.

Anyway, the chances I’d be telling Oliver Addison, DVM, about any of this were pretty close to zero. He didn’t need to do a belly flop into my sad past on our first date.

I’d be cheery and positive and funny and charming—as best I could. I’d set all my bittersweet emotions about my lost mother on a mental shelf. And then I’d shut the conversation down before I could accidentally reveal any personal imperfections… and go stop by the grocery store for the ingredients for the cake.

Yellow cake with chocolate icing. My mom’s favorite. And mine, too.

This would work. I could have it all.

As long as I kept to the schedule.

I WENT DOWNto Bean Street at six o’clock on the dot. I found a table that faced the exterior door, couldn’t resist dabbing just one more spot of a lipstick color called Passionfruit onto the poutiest part of my lower lip, gave myself a little pep talk about how doing scary things is good for you, and waited.

And waited.

And then I waited some more.

And while I waited, I could feel the confidence leaking out of me like a punctured tire. Was it cold in here? Maybe I should’ve brought a sweater. Should I take my hair back down? Was my lipstick too orangy? And of all the bras I owned, how had I managed to grab the one that always slid off my shoulder?

I yanked the shoulder strap up and pressed it in place sternly, like,Stay.

Maybe this was a bad idea. Maybe I couldn’t pull this off. The entire future I’d just mapped out for myself as Mrs. Oliver Addison, DVM, was riding on not screwing up this moment.

The wordsdon’t screw it upkept circling around in my head like they were on an airplane banner. Great tip—but the problem was, there were so many ways to screw it up.

What if, to just take the biggest, scariest, most likely example, I didn’t recognize him?

What if—and this likelihood was really only occurring to me now, as I sat there—without his lab coat on and out of the context of the clinic, I truly couldn’t tell him apart from anyone else? It was more than possible.

How mortifying would that be?

I thought about the woman on Facebook who’d called her face blindness “a superpower.” What wouldshebe doing right now? She wouldn’t be sitting here nervously ripping up a paper napkin, her stomach cold with dread as she questioned her value as a human being. Hell, no! She would put her shoulders back, embrace the uncertainty, surf that tsunami of self-doubt like a badass, and find a way to make it fun.

At the very least, she wouldn’t give up on herself before she’d even tried.

You’ve got this,I pep-talked myself as I started mutilating a new napkin.You know what to do.

And with that, I did know what to do: Just smile—and positively radiate warmth and availability—at every single man who walked in through the Bean Street doors as if he were my future husband.

Not my usual strategy in life.

But not that hard to do, either.

I mean, Dr. Addison had a job to do here, too—right? He would recognize me. Sure, I looked a little different with my hair up and my passionfruit lips. But I could rely on him to know me when he saw me.

Anyway, I’d just have to put my faith in destiny.

What was meant to be was meant to be.

Except maybe it wasn’t meant to be… because an hour—an actual hour—went by, and Dr. Addison didn’t show up.

There’s a very specific slow-burn heartbreak to getting stood up as the realization slowly comes into focus: No one’s coming. In that one interminable hour of looking up each time the doors opened and watching every single one of them sweep on past me like we were total strangers—which we must have been—I felt myself wilting like a time-lapse version of a neglected houseplant.

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