Page 7 of Snowflakes Over Starr's Fall
The guy’s eyes widened. He wore a greasy baseball cap backward and sported a very patchy beard that mostly hid his pimples. He scratched his cheek thoughtfully as he gazed at Jack, who stared levelly back. “New here?” he finally asked, and Jack just nodded. He really wasn’t in the mood for some kind of heart-to-heart.
Fortunately, the guy decided to finally make his pizza—this was clearly a one-man operation—and Jack retreated to the window, sliding out his phone to check for messages.
Nothing. He’d been in Starr’s Fall for three days and no one had checked in once. No one had checked in after his first week in the hospital, either. He’d run a company with over a hundred employees and not one of them had bothered to ask how he was, whether he was settling in, or if his health was okay.
Not that Jack had actually expected them to; he knew what Wall Street was like. A couple of years ago, Michael Banner—someone he’d worked very closely with and would have, at least in a matter of speaking, called a friend—had discovered Buddhism and retired early, cashing in his stocks and moving to Bermuda. Jack hadn’t sent him a single text to ask how he was. Such a notion hadn’t even crossed his mind.
Banner had been out of the game; he’d become instantly irrelevant. You didn’t stay on top in the finance world by chasing after has-beens, not even if they’d been your friends.Especiallynot if they’d been your friends. Better to create a little distance, show people you absolutely were not about to try to find yourself or join an ashram.
Jack started to swipe to check his NYSE app, but then he stopped himself. No point going down that route. His heart couldn’t take it, in more ways than one.
“Hey, mister? Your pizza’s ready.”
“Thanks.” Jack swiped his credit card—he didn’t even bother whipping out his platinum this time—before taking the box and heading outside. It was a beautiful summer’s evening, the air soft and dusky, the sky a twilit violet with the first stars starting to glimmer on a horizon fringed darkly with evergreens. For a second, he imagined himself in the Hamptons—like Jenna Miller had so nastily joked—at the beachfront mansion he’d once rented with a bunch of friends. He couldn’t remember much about that trip, to be honest. It had been whiskey-soaked and drug-fueled, although he’d kept himself from the latter. Unlike a lot of the guys on Wall Street, he’d never dabbled in the hard stuff. It hadn’t mattered in the end, though. He’d still had to call time at just forty-two years of age, in the prime of his career.
Three months on, it remained a bitter pill he continued to choke on.
The drive back to his sprawling house on the lake took ten minutes, and Jack felt his mood plummet with each one. What did he have to look forward to? Eating a pizza alone that would probably cause him heartburn, if not something worse, and then a couple hours of mindless TV when he’d never been one for television, anyway. There had never been enoughtime.
But that frantic, busy-busy buzz of life that had kept him constantly on his toes, blood pressure soaring, excitement always fizzing as he looked to close the next deal… it was all gone. Some guys, like his former friend Michael, had been glad to re-evaluate their priorities. Slow down and savor whatever it was they wanted to savor. Jack, however, did not appreciate the opportunity. He just wanted his old life back, in every aspect, even the stress and accompanying ulcer. He’d thrived on it, all of it.
Out here in the boonies, there was nothing to thrive on. There was nothing, period.
He unlocked the back door of the lake house he’d bought after one look online and strode through the yawning mudroom to the even bigger kitchen. It was far too big a house for one person, although he’d always liked airy spaces, and the floor-to-ceiling picture window overlooking the lake, so close you almost felt as if you were walking on water, had been a definite selling point.
Still, it wasn’t like he was going to host parties or even have anyone over. There was no onetohave over; the friends and colleagues of his old life had already forgotten him. As for his new life? Well, his welcome to Starr’s Fall had not exactly been heartening, to say the least.
Jack tossed the pizza on the kitchen table that seated twelve and had been carved out of a single piece of oak—he’d hired an interior decorator to furnish the entire place, giving her carte blanche because he hadn’t cared—and glanced longingly at the empty drinks cabinet. Strictly no alcohol for the foreseeable, his doctor had said, unless he wanted to wind up on the operating table again. Jack had obeyed him so far, but what he wouldn’t do for a single malt whiskey right about now…
With a sigh he turned to the picture window, taking some small solace from the view of the lake, an evening mist settling onto its placid surface in ghostly shreds, the shoreline across the stretch of water dense with dark evergreens. Loneliness swept through him like an empty wind, rustling and rattling and leaving nothing behind but a deep, painful longing for what was… and what would never be again.
Improbably as well as irritatingly, his mind drifted once more to Jenna Miller. Back at the diner she’d been seated in a booth with another woman—Jack hadn’t taken in the details, but he’d seen that much. Clearly enjoying roasting him to all and sundry, too. She was probably the toast of the town, he reflected sourly. Born and bred here, loved by everyone, defended to the death, yada, yada, yada.
Flipping the lid of the box and reaching for a slice of pizza, he wondered what she was doing now.
* * *
By six-thirty, Annie needed to get back to her mom and Jenna was heading back to Miller’s Mercantile, feeling disconsolate and a little restless. No matter how much she kept telling herself that Jack Wexler had made his own bed, and he could now darned well lie in it, she still felt… notguilty, no, but uncomfortable. A little, at least, although she wasn’t even sure why, because he really had been rude.
And good-looking. For some reason, she kept remembering just how much.
But it wasn’t even Jack Wexler who was making her feel this way, Jenna knew as she let herself into the empty house behind the store where she’d lived for most of her life. It was the loneliness that she’d kept at bay for the last few years but was always crouching at the door, waiting to rush in and take up all the space if she gave it a second’s chance.
Whenever she felt this way, she trotted out the laundry list of reasons why it was unreasonable to do so. She had good friends, a great brother—even if they’d been at odds occasionally—and, well, not athrivingbusiness, but at least one that was limping along, and that she enjoyed. Many people had less, a lot less, and she had never been one for self-pity. At least not overt self-pity; like the loneliness, it could creep in by the back door and take up irritating residence.
But she didn’t want to do that now, even if Jack Wexler—and yes, this was about him, sort of—had as good as held a mirror up to her own life and forced her to stare at her reflection.Look at you, you rude, washed-up shrew of a woman. Who would ever love you, never mind like you? You’re pathetic.
All right, he hadn’t said all that, but he might as well have. He’d certainly been thinking it, and now Jenna was too, which felt pretty miserable. She’d spent a lot of time doing her best to stop thinking these kinds of thoughts, back when she’d come back to Starr’s Fall, emotionally bloodied and bruised and trying her hardest not to show just how much. Ryan Taylor hadn’t just broken her heart, he’d crushed her confidence, her sense of self. She’d done the one thing she’d sworn she wouldn’t and tried to make a man her everything, searching for that stupid fairy-tale romance that growing up she’d watched from afar. Her parents might have had it, but she didn’t want it, and she wasn’t going to go looking for it ever again.
Neither was she going to talk about it or confess her feelings of loneliness to any of her good friends, because that would be patheticandmake her feel worse.
So here she was, in a dark kitchen, pulling her laptop toward her and stupidly clicking on TripAdvisor to look at that review again. Why was she torturing herself this way? Not that there was much else to do…
With a sigh, Jenna read through it again—she had it practically memorized by now—and noticed, glumly, that there were two new likes. Who had liked such a piece of vindictive garbage? Was it someone who had been to her store? Someone sheknew?
The prospect was even more dispiriting. She’d made Miller’s Mercantile her whole life for the last few years, since her parents had retired. She and Zach had been running it together, but she’d put her soul into this store in a way he never had. Maybe because she hadn’t let him, but still. Reading those words of Jack Wexler’s, even knowing they must have been fired off in a temper,hurt.
And they also made her wonder if maybe she was doing something wrong. The store’s profits had been slipping for well over a year. They didn’t get the tourists in Starr’s Fall to justify turning it into some high-end gift shop like they had in Litchfield, and now that Instacart delivered to the town, it was only the old-timers and loyalist townspeople who bought their groceries here. What could she do? What did shewantto do?
