Page 90 of A Novel Love Story

But this … this felt like being in the middle of a story, between one sentence and the next, not sure where to go.

Here, I was little more than a woman who’d come in from out of town—someone not quite a friend, but not a stranger, either. A visitor, here for a moment, just passing through.

A secondary character.

And as I passed shop after shop, street after street, watching the town breathe, and shift, I began to think … I could just stay here. I might have been an errant puzzle piece belonging to a different puzzle altogether, but even lost puzzle pieces were put back in the box when you were done with them. I could just be another secondary character, a blurred figure in the background of someone else’s story.

That didn’t sound too bad.

When I was on the block with the bookshop, I noticed that Anders’s Buick was gone. I stared at the parking spot where it used to be, the only thing left was a huge oil stain from where it’d leaked there for months.Behind me, the door to the bookshop opened, the bell jingling, and Anders stepped out.

I asked, “What happened to your car?”

“It was bound for the junk heap anyway. It barely ran.”

“But it did run,” I said, and I frowned, remembering Frank’s strange wink to him when he came into the bookshop earlier. “You didn’t—you didn’t give your car to Frank to fix mine, did you?”

“You have people waiting out there for you,” he replied, and that was all the answer I needed.

“I didn’taskyou to—”

“But I did. And I got quite a few cases of hot sauce in return.” He put his hands into his jeans pockets. He’d changed out of his business casual into a Henley and sneakers, his fair hair disheveled in that infuriatingly artful way.

“But—but … what about your car?” I asked, my voice breaking.

“It’s fine. I never used it anyway, and it was ugly.”

It was, but … my bottom lip wobbled. I blinked tears out of my eyes.

Anders gave a start. “You’re—why are you crying?”

“I … it’s … why are you so thoughtful? You shouldn’t be sothoughtful,” I croaked, because I hadn’t expected this at all. I’d gone through so much of my life filling wants and needs for other people, I hadn’t … I didn’t …

It was thoughtful, and I was thankful.

And confused.

I sank down onto the curb, pushing the tears out of my eyes, and he came to sit down beside me.

“Hey,” he said gently, “you’re allowed to be cared for, too. You don’t have to do everything alone.”

I set my jaw, and picked at my fingernails. “I was engaged once,” I began, as if that explained my outburst.

“I know,” he replied.

“We were perfect together, I thought. He was lovely, and talented, and good-looking. Whenever we would go out on our anniversaries—all of them, three-month, sixth-month, a year, four years—people would tell me how lucky I was. Except I’d always be the one to make the reservations. I’d always be the one to get both of our cards. I’d buy the Christmas presents. I’d book the vacations …”

He could have asked me why I thought he’d care about this history, but I felt it was important—a part of me that was the kind of broken that couldn’t be fixed with a cup of coffee or a few pretty words. But he was silent, and attentive, and he listened.

“He broke up with me a week before the wedding. Moved out that night. Because I’d done everything else for the wedding, I had to call everyone,bothof our families, and help them get some money back on their plane tickets and hotels. And the thing is—I thought it was me. I thought it was my fault, that I was defective or something, and I couldn’t deal with it so I just—I just stopped. My wedding dress is still hanging up in my closet, my wedding shoes in their box. I just froze everything. I put it on ice. Me included,” I added. “Maybe that’s why I read romance novels so often, because they’re pretty stories clearly shelved in fiction, and that’s where I wanted to be. And then I came here, to a fictional town, and I think … in the back of my mind I just … I knew I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay in a world where the plots are predictable and the endings are happy. Somewhere just as frozen as I am.”

Quietly, he reached down and took my hand, and flipped it over, palm facing up. “My mother once told me that you can tell a lot about someone by their hands.” Gently, he traced the long crease that ran from the middle of my palm to just beneath my first finger.“She never meant mystically—lifelines or luck lines or love lines. But by the scars, and the calluses, and the efficacy.”

“Then mine must look pretty lazy,” I commented, but my heart had started to race. He held my hand so tenderly, brushing his thumb across my palm so lightly I repressed a shiver.

He shook his head. “Your hands are gentle and cold. You use them a lot, but no one ever holds them to keep them warm.”

Then he raised my fingertips to his lips, and kissed them.

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