Page 4 of The Grumpy Billionaire
“You okay, man?” Hap asked.
“Yeah, sure. I’m fine. Just clumsy that’s all.” I gave a half-hearted laugh, set the plates down, and slid back into my seat at the booth.
“I saw the TV screen,” Hunter said in a serious voice. “I didn’t know she was back. I guess you didn’t either?”
I shook my head, keeping my eyes trained on the plate in front of me though I no longer had any appetite for pie.
“No, I haven’t heard from her.”
“Are you going to call her?” Josh asked. “I mean, you guys were so close in high school.”
Close. Ha.That’s what I’d thought. I’d thought we were two halves of the same whole. Clearly not since Mara and I hadn’t exchanged a single word in over a decade.
Imbuing my tone with a sense of cool I did not feel, I said, “Nah, like I said earlier, it’s over. I'm moving on.”
“I don't know,” Hunter said. “Thereissomething compelling about the love of your youth. It’s hard to get over. And that’s not always a bad thing.”
“Maybe for you,” I said.
It had certainly worked out for Hunter and Kristal, the girl he’d longed for his entire adolescence and had recently made his bride.
“In my case, I'm not even sure it was love,” I said, warming to the notion. “More like a combination of raging teenage hormones and stupidity.”
They all laughed. Tucker held up his glass of chocolate milk. “To raging teenage hormones and stupidity—ever may they reign.”
“Hear hear,” Paul said.
“To moving on,” I said in a toast of my own.
All my friends clinked their glasses with mine in a toast, but I noticed them exchanging knowing glances, apparently not buying my show of disinterest in Mara’s surprise return to Rhode Island.
When everyone had gone back to their meals, Hunter leaned over and spoke in a low voice. “Maybe youshouldcall her, you know. Set up a coffee or something, just talk to her, get some closure. It would do you good.”
“Yeah, no. That’s not going to happen,” I insisted. “For one thing, she hasn’t answered any of the dozens of phone calls I’ve made to her over the past eleven years, so I don’t think she’ll suddenly decide to pick up the phone. For another, I don't evencarewhat happened anymore. I refuse to chase her. I’ve chased her enough for one lifetime already. If she wants to talk to me and explain herself, she'll call. But I'm not going to hold my breath for that. Obviously what we had meant nothing to her.”
As for me, Mara had beeneverything.
She had been my whole world back then.
TWO
Promise Me
Reid-Twelve years earlier
Calling Mara my first love was a disservice to everything else we were to each other. We were best friends, confidants, partners in crime, and when we were much younger, playmates.
We had grown up next door to each other, though you couldn't exactly call us “neighbors.” That word implied a certain sense of camaraderie and equal footing that bore no resemblance to the relationship between our respective families.
My mom had gone to work for the Neely family when she was eighteen—and pregnant with me.
The arrangement had been the result of some sort of Catholic charity matchmaking program pairing teenage girls who were “in trouble” with charitable families who were willing to take them in and give them room and board in exchange for help around the house.
In my mother's case, it had turned out to be a lifelong arrangement.
It had taken me years to realize Mom and I weren't actually part of the Neely family. When I was little and had no concept of things like minimum wage and social classes and live-in help, the estate’s expansive seaside grounds had seemed just as much my territory as Mara’s.
And I’d considered her my equal.
