Page 106 of A Novel Love Story

“Someone told me that love is worth taking a chance, even if it’s the wrong one.”

Hurt flickered across Maya’s moonlit face. “You think you’ll regret me?”

“No,” the gardener replied, and came closer to the girl she had loved for years, though she’d never given her heart the chance to admit it. “I think I’ll regret never doing this.”

Then she kissed Maya Shah in the forgotten courtyard. And the summer hummed on, humid and clear, without a cloud in the sky, and the fireflies lit on the edges of too-tall blades of grass, and so, so quietly, the wind that sighed through the trees sounded like the turn of a page.

It was a thread that Rachel had put in motion in the first book, one that came together even without my help.

Because sometimes things just fell together. Sometimes things were meant to be.

Anders smiled at me, and I returned it, and we knocked our fists together.

A truly happy ending.

“Let’s sneak out?” he mouthed.

I nodded.

We were almost caught when Anders tripped over a bust of his own head,but Lyssa said it was probably the possum, and kissed her girlfriend again. We hurried out of the garden, and back up the veranda to the inn, where the soft golden glow of light illuminated the porch. Anders’s fingers were woven through mine, and it felt natural.

It felt fated.

“Has anyone else called shotgun?” he asked jokingly.

I gave it a thought. “You might have to fight with the box of wine …” I trailed off as I noticed a figure at the front gates of the inn. Tall, thin, curly dark hair. I saw her a moment before Anders did, and when he did, he looked like he had seen a ghost.

Because Beatrice Everly stood at the garden gates, returned home.

34

Rachel Flowers

INEVER ARRIVED FOR ANYTHINGon time.

School? Casually late. College clubs? You had to tell me to arrive, atleastthirty minutes early. Christmas Eve? New Year’s? Doctor visits? I laughed in the face of calendar appointments, just like my mother had before me. I was either too early or too late. There was never an in-between.

The only time I’d ever been on time for anything was the night Pru and I met Rachel Flowers. It was an event in a small, unassuming bookstore in Decatur, where there were as many indoor plants as books, and enough chairs set out for a small horde of fans.

None of them showed up—with the exception of Pru and me.

We began to get an inkling that this event was going south when we took our seats in the front row (Prualwaysinsisted on getting the best seats no matter what, so being blissfully comfortable in the back of the room was never going to be my lot in life) and the closer we got to the event start time, the more apparent the empty chairs around us became. Some customers came in to buy books,and a few asked what the event was for, but when they heard it was a “romance author,” quite a few of them looked amused by the idea but never lingered.

But while I grew worried about the turnout, Pru was just blissfully excited. She didn’t care if there was one person in the audience, or ten. She held the new book—Return to Sender—to her chest and waited in nervous anticipation. We’d never met an author before, at least not one that we loved. (I had, sadly, met quite a few that I didn’t like at all, and that was rather unfortunate in my line of work.)

“I’ve got so many questions to ask her,” Pru told me, squirming in her seat like a child. “A hundred questions! Do you think I should make a list of my top ten?”

I glanced around at the empty seats. “I think she might have time for one or two.”

Pru laughed.

“I feel bad for her,” I said. “No one’s here.”

“Yeah butwe’rehere.”

“We’re just two people.”

“Two people more than zero,” she replied simply, and then gasped. “Oh, there she is! How does my hair look?” she added, facing me, and when I told her she looked fine, she turned back to the front and excitedly waited as a tall, thin young woman with dark hair and glasses came and sat down in a plush chair set up in front of us. She shifted a little nervously, looking at the two of us, and no one else. We were all the same age. We could’ve gone to the same school, been in the same college classes. We could’ve all had sleepovers and painted our nails together, if we’d been in the same town.

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