Page 20 of Dear Ripley

Alicia and I hadn’t properly run into each other again since the horrible, awkward encounter on Thursday, but I’d also been charging around the place at odd hours, with my head down, trying my best to avoid her. Though, since she now knew where I worked, I supposed it would be easy for her to find me even if I was going out of my way to avoid seeing her. I was grateful she hadn’t tried to do so.

And I still, somehow, wanted to see her again. She was annoying like that. Still far too beautiful and interesting. Still a book I knew only too well how to read. She needed to stop having every emotion she felt displayed on her face like that. It was irritating.

Morgan had been oddly supportive of my self-imposed confinement, though, if she’d shown up on my doorstep looking the way I must have when I landed on hers at 7pm on Thursday night, I imagined I wouldn’t push my luck either.

Harlow was back now, too, of course. As if handing off Edith’s flowers to her in a stupor wasn’t confirmation enough, I’d seen her and Alicia walking past the store a couple of times over the weekend. Because I was a grown-up, I ducked every time I saw them coming. As far as I could tell, Alicia had no interest in trying to catch another glimpse of me, but I wasn’t sure about Harlow. I’d never known her quite as well as I knew Alicia—though I doubted I’d ever known anyone the way I knew Alicia. Thank goodness. But Harlow… she was something of a mystery. Curious and cautious. An interesting and unreliable combination. Some things were thought through in every detail. Others, well, dive in first and ask questions later.

I wouldn’t put it past her to go with the latter option if she’d heard the tale of our horrific run-in. I could see her being filled with some weird desire to sit us down in the same room towork out our differences. Mostly for Alicia’s wellbeing, but, undoubtedly, a little for the monstrous hilarity of it all.

Sometimes, she was a little too much like Morgan. I tried hard not to think about what it said about me and Alicia that we each chose best friends who often embodied chaos—even if Harlow didn’t quite do so on the same level as Morgan.

Though, perhaps I shouldn’t have been thinking down that particular road. Alicia had decided to marryme, and I didn’t want to get into what that said about her.

I stared at the walls of my apartment, trying hard not to imagine her and the look on her face when she realized whose store she was in. She’d looked at me a lot of ways over the years, but never like that. Just another look to add to the list, I supposed.

Before I’d seen her the plan to avoid her had seemed fine, sustainable. Now that I’d seen her, and the memories of her were bouncing around in my head, the vision of her in Petal and Pebble burned into my brain, it didn’t feel so manageable.

I wondered whether I should try reaching out to her. Perhaps it was on me to apologize? It was true I hadn’t made sure she got the message I owned the flower shop and she might want to avoid coming in unless she was planning to see me. But it wasn’t like we communicated. We’d decided a few weeks after going our separate ways that staying in touch was making things too hard and we needed a complete break from each other.

It was honestly astounding that we’d had such a mature breakup and divorce when we were currently acting like skittish cats who couldn’t exist in the same country.

But this was different. She wasn’t usually back in Jackson Point. Perhaps the courteous thing to do would have been to reach out and let her know. I wouldn't have even needed to speak to her directly, just checked that one of the many people we both knew thought to get the message to her.

Come to think of it, why hadn’t they done that? Word had reached me that she was coming back, and sure, part of that was just the local love of gossip and sharing news, but some part of it was out of consideration for my feelings. Hadn’t it occurred to the Burtons or Harlow or Edith—who very clearly knew I was a florist—to mention that Petal and Pebble wasn’t the place for Alicia to get flowers in town unless she was looking to have an ill-advised reunion with her ex-wife?

Some friends and family they were.

I shook my head. Realistically, it probably just hadn’t occurred to them to mention it. Perhaps they, like me, had assumed she wouldn’t have cause to need flowers while in town. Or, perhaps, they were so used tonottalking about me, it never occurred to them that there might be a time when they really needed to talk about me.

Ugh. I hadn’t been this fixated on what she was and was not hearing, saying, or thinking about me since the early days of our relationship. I’d thought that by the time I hit thirty-seven, I’d have grown enough to handle this better. Matters of the heart seemed to be just another place people had blatantly lied about understanding once I was older. Sure, some things changed, you understood a little more, accepted all the things you didn’t understand, and felt more comfortable in yourself, but the whole narrative around maturity was such a lie. You never felt like an adult and you never really knew how to handle the big stuff. You just followed patterns and examples and hoped for the best, all while feeling like you were drowning. And the person standing next to you couldn’t really help because they were drowning too, but at least you weren’t alone in it. That was all adulthood was. A weird, massive con. How much easier life would be if everyone admitted that was how it went.

I gave up any semblance of having a relaxing day off and pulled my shoes on, heading out of the apartment. Being cooped up in the place Alicia and I had lived together wasn’t helping anyone. I just had to avoid running into her in the street too.

My feet carried me to work and I wasn’t entirely sure whether it was muscle memory and the familiarity of the walk, or whether it was because my brain was so stuck on the memory of Alicia there.

Ekundayo looked up from behind the counter as I walked in. His greeting smile morphed into something questioning. “Everything okay, Ripley?”

“Yeah,” I replied, too tense and knowing my smile was too tight for it to come across naturally and truthfully.

His eyes narrowed and he leaned forward on the counter, amusement playing across his features. “Pining after the ex-wife now she’s back in town?”

I jolted, the sensation of my heart falling out through the bottom of my stomach hitting hard. “What? No! Of course not. Why would you even ask me that?”

He laughed. “Because you’re pining over your ex-wife who happens to be back in town for the first time in about eight years, according to my sources.”

I dropped into a chair, staring him down. “Firstly, I’m not pining. We split up a long time ago, and I am completely fine, thank you very much. Secondly, who the hell are these sources?”

He stared at me like I really should be able to figure that out. Perhaps I should. My brain had stopped functioning properly around the same time I’d run into my ex-wife in my place of business.

“You do realize Joel and I are about the same age and both in the same program, right?”

I groaned, sinking down until my head hit the top of the chair back. “Of course, you’re friends with Joel. How did I forget that?”

“Too busy pining, I imagine.”

I scowled at him. “I can fire you anytime, buddy.”

He laughed, knowing I absolutely would not. “Sure you can. But you won’t.”

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