Page 106 of Best Served Cold

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

SOPHIE

Up until now, this week has felt so dreamy and delicious. It was like the luck from those two small winning lottery tickets was carrying me along in a cloud. Or maybe it was the rainbow of condoms that was carrying me along. I’ve been so excited about the present that it felt like the past and future couldn’t touch me. Rob and I were in a bubble, but that changed yesterday, when he told me about the whole Thanksgiving thing.

And then today…

Well, today has felt cursed from early this morning, and no matter how many times I rub my fingers over Rob’s guitar pick, it doesn’t seem to get better.

First, the woman who bought my wedding gown emailed Otis a plea to cancel the transaction because her fiancée was cheating on her. Talk about bad omens. Of course we said yes, but that leaves us back where we started financially.

Second, I got my parents’ RSVP for my wedding this morning. Well, I suppose it must have arrived yesterday, but Otis and I aren’t particularly good at gathering the mail.

They RSVPed yes and ordered the fish.

Poor choice. It was cooked sous vide, whatever that means, and Patricia is the only one who’d liked it.

Their RSVP card didn’t even have a message on it. Just the penned circle around fish.

That’s how close I am with my parents. They think I’m still marrying Jonah Price.

It made me feel a sharper stab of unease about driving a wedge between Rob and his dad. Because even though he insists the damage to their relationship was done long ago, I suspect part of him still wants to repair it.

I got Rob’s text about dinner tomorrow while I was still stewing about all of this, and my first reaction was to start bouncing on my feet. It sounded like he was asking me outfor real. But then panic set in…

It took me a while to figure out why I was panicking, but my ultimate conclusion was this: I’m going to have to tell him everything if we move forward, and also, he may have to give up half of his flipping family for me.

So I held off on answering him but spent all day thinking about it, hyperaware of my phone in my pocket. The only enjoyable moment of my shift was when Dottie came in to hone our drink offerings.

After work, I got home, only to find Otis was off on a bird-hunting mission. Texting Rob was the obvious next move. I wanted to do it, too, but I went up to my room to change and ended up tripping over the box Jonah had left on my doorstep last weekend.

It felt like a physical manifestation of my crappy past, and I had the firm conviction that unless I did something about it, I’d never be free to move on.

So I asked Hannah and Briar over to help me. Now we’re sitting on the floor of my bedroom with beers, going through it. It’s a big box, and we’re only half done.

“Uh. This isn’t mine,” I say, lifting up a lacy thong with a pencil.

“It’s mine,” Briar says, blushing, then pulls the big trash bag closer. “Bin it.”

“What a shithead,” Hannah muses as she flips through the paperback she’d claimed from the box. “He couldn’t even be bothered to sort through all of his various girlfriends’ crap.”

She’s not exaggerating. We’ve already found several things that don’t belong to any of us. A pretty pen with a jeweled top, an expensive-looking bra, and a journal with a list of rom-com movies inside. There is also a toothbrush that’s unfamiliar to all of us, but we figured it was some kind of trap.Please, use this toothbrush that looks deceptively new. I totally didn’t clean my toilet with it.

“Do you think this stuff belongs to GingerBeerBabe?” Hannah asks, gesturing to the unidentified belongings. “We could bring them to The Ginger Station and ask. She might want this stuff back.”

Hannah made a follow-up trip to The Ginger Station last week, but no one would tell her anything about Jonah’s possible fourth girlfriend. And she’d been warned to stop hanging up the STD flyers.

“Yes, whatever will she do without her bucket list of rom-coms and her sparkly pen,” I say dryly, recognizing this as evidence of Hannah’s leave-no-one-behind mentality. She’s looking for excuses to get involved. “I think we should throw it all away. In fact, I’m done looking through the box. Unless you two want to comb through the rest, I’m tossing it.”

“No,” Briar says, wrinkling her nose with disgust. “I’m done too. I don’t want any of this stuff back. It would only remind me of him.”

“I’m keeping the book,” Hannah says with a shrug. “And the rom-com list. I want to know if GingerBeerBabe has good taste.”

“You know,” I say, “I have a box of Jonah’s crap in my closet. Do you guys?”

“I only had one of his T-shirts,” Hannah says. “I burned it weeks ago.”

I try not to flinch. “Briar?”

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