Page 57 of Playing for Keeps in Starr's Fall
“I couldn’t tell the tone at all,” Laurie admitted, her hands cradling her cup. “I mean, is she sorry for trying to pay me off or is she worried I might make trouble for her? It’s been over six months. Why now?” She shook her head. “At first I was so happy that she’d reached out, but now… now I’m wondering if it’s better not to meet. To protect myself, you know?”
Maggie took a sip of her own coffee. “I’ve generally found that protecting yourself doesn’t work out too well. You get hurt anyway, and you also have to live with regrets, never knowing what could have been.”
Laurie’s eyes widened as she lowered her mug. “Okay, I have to ask… is this about you and your husband… or about you and Zach?”
Maggie grimaced in rueful acknowledgment. “What does this town know about me and Zach?” She’d been doing her best not to listen to the gossip, and so far she’d succeeded. Mostly.
“I think everyone is wondering,” Laurie told her. “I mean, Zach spent so much time here, and then he justdidn’t, you know? And now he’s having this complete life revamp—which I don’t think is a bad thing, by the way—and no one knows what’s up with him.” Laurie paused, her smile turning playful. “And no matter how much you tried to play it down, I could always tell you really liked him. Your eyes gave it away. They lit up at his name. They still do.”
“They don’t,” Maggie cried, appalled that she could be so revealing, even now.
“They do,” Laurie assured her. “And I’m not the only one who’s noticed.”
“Oh, heavens.” Maggie pressed her hands to her now flaming cheeks. “That is seriously embarrassing.”
“Only if you let it be. Zach’s a good guy, Maggie.” Laurie’s smile faded. “Sometimes I’ve felt people here have given him a hard time. I’m a newbie, so I didn’t live through his history, but it was all in high school, so…”
“There’s nothing going on with me and Zach.” Maggie cut her off before Laurie could give her the hard sell. “And that’s not by my choice,” she added quietly.
“Oh, Maggie…” Laurie reached for her hand. “What happened?”
“Nothing much,” she confessed on a sigh. “I was stupid and scared—trying to protect myself—and Zach decided he didn’t want to play those games anymore, which was totally fair. We’re still friends, so—” She found she couldn’t go on. There was a lump the size of a golf ball forming in her throat and Maggie had the horrible suspicion she was about to start bawling. “I really miss him,” she finished on a sniff, and then had to wipe her eyes.
“Oh, Maggie…” Laurie said again, helplessly. “Have you told him how you feel?”
“Yes, basically, and he was… appreciative, I guess, but he said it didn’t matter at this point, which it doesn’t. Anyway.” Now she had to wipe her damp cheeks. “Let’s talk about you and your mom. Are you going to write her back?”
Laurie was quiet for a moment, pensively gazing into her coffee cup. “Yes, I am,” she finally said. “And maybe you should give Zach another chance, too.”
Maggie was already shaking her head. “I’m not the one who needs to give chances here, Laurie?—”
“Give him a chance to reconsider,” Laurie told her. “If you miss him that much, what, really, is the risk?”
Humiliating herself yet again, Maggie thought wryly, not that she even cared about that anymore. “I don’t think so,” she told Laurie. “Not yet, anyway. Zach needs some space. I need to give it to him. When he’s figured out what he wants to do with his life…” She let that thought trail away into nothing. When Zach did that, she feared, he might very well walk away from her and Ben for good.
20
Zach stood on the porch of the log cabin, his coffee mug cradled between his hands as he watched the mist rise from the river in ghostly, gossamer strands and dawn sunlight filter through the haze of clouds. Although the air possessed a chill at this time of day, he knew it would be warm by mid-morning as the sun rose in the sky. It was mid-April, and spring had finally come to this corner of northwestern Connecticut, so the landscape was a glory of blossom and birdsong, damp earth and new leaf. Zach loved this time of year, after the frigid, deadening months of winter, when the whole world woke up again. Every breath felt like a fresh start, which was how he was feeling, now that he’d finally made some changes to his life.
None of it had been easy, mainly because changing so much as the color of your shirt in Starr’s Fall could make the front page of its newspaper and feed the town’s gossip mill for weeks. Moving out of his parents’ house, more or less quitting his job, and no longer taking any crap about his personal life had been cataclysmic not just for him, but for everyone he knew, simply because none of them knew how to let people change.
Zach was going to make them do it, even if it involved a lot of kicking and screaming.
He took a sip of coffee, narrowing his eyes as he watched a heron land gracefully on the water, slate-blue wings outstretched. For some reason, the bird’s inherent elegance made him think of Maggie. He missed her, missed what they’d almost had together, but at the same time he knew he’d made the right decision… for that time. He needed to figure himself out before he tried yet another relationship that would likely be doomed to fail. He cared too much about Maggie for that, and yet at the same time he recognized he very well might have missed his chance… something he was going to have to accept.
The memory of the look of hurt on her face when he’d given her that hackneyed it’s-me-not-you line still had the power to make him wince. The trouble was, he’d meant every word. He just didn’t know if Maggie believed him.
Over the last month, he’d made sure to drop by Your Turn Next every few days, checking in on both Maggie and Ben, keeping the conversation light, wanting to maintain their friendship. Although he always enjoyed seeing her, he didn’t know if it was working or not. He felt a distance from Maggie that he didn’t like, even though he knew he’d been the one to move away first. Whether they could move back toward each other one day remained to be seen…
Sighing, Zach turned away from the dawn beauty of the morning, swallowing the last of the coffee before he put the mug in the sink. This morning, he was enacting the next stage of his life plan, and he was determined to make Jenna agree to it.
He grabbed his jacket and keys and then headed out to his truck for the ten-minute drive into Starr’s Fall. When he’d first told her he was doing it, Jenna had thought he was being “a little much”—leaving home and renting this log cabin out in the middle of nowhere—but the space had been good for him, better even than he’d expected. He’d enjoyed not being so close to Starr’s Fall, where sometimes it felt as if life were being played out on a stage. He’d also been glad to take a step back from the store and reconsider what he really wanted to do with his life.
And now that he had a plan, he just needed to sell it—or really, state it—to his sister. Because this time Zach wasn’t taking no for an answer.
He pulled into the parking lot of the store, the gravel crunching under the wheels. Usually he walked around to the back where their living quarters were, but this time he unlocked the front door and went through the store, feeling like it was a reckoning as well as a goodbye. He strolled down the aisles, running his fingers along the shelves of hardware supplies and grocery staples, including the argued-over soup. How many afternoons had he spent stocking these shelves? How many days stacking boxes or manning the cash register? All through high school, he’d done shifts whenever his parents had asked him, and then that year of his mom’s cancer treatment, when he’d often been alone in here, wondering where on earth his life was going. The years since his parents had decided to retire, working with Jenna, hoping for something better.
None of it, Zach acknowledged, had been a waste, but he knew now he wanted more for his life than waiting and wishing. Today he was going to start going after it.
