Page 44 of Shortcake
I rolled my eyes. “You’retoo old? Yikes, what does that make me?” I took my sandwich and grabbed a knife from the drawer before sitting at the kitchen island.
“Ancient,” she teased.
Surprisingly, I found myself laughing. Again.
I dragged the knife into the bread, cutting off my crusts and tossed them to Gus. I sensed her eyes on me as I cut my sandwich diagonally and took the first bite. “What do I owe you for the groceries?”
“Nothing,” Addy said, reaching into the cage to pick up Eleanor.
“Nothing?”
Cradling her hedgehog like I would a football, Addy opened the freezer. “I used the money you left her for a pizza to get a couple frozen ones and a few other things, like bread, cheese, lunch meat, etc, that she can make herself if neither of us is home.”
Neither of us. Like we were a couple. A team. A family.
It was a lot of take in.
I sat there, dumbfounded, sandwich in hand, looking around my clean, well-organized kitchen.
When I had asked Addy to stay in the basement, I sort of assumed she'd spend most of her time down there. That she’d still be separate from us. But clearly, she had other plans.
And on a normal day, I would have hated this arrangement. I would have sat Addy down and had a face to face about boundaries.
But this wasn’t a normal day. It was the first day in months that I heard Harper laugh. That laugh changed everything.
The lump in my throat grew wider.
I think there was a very real possibility that Addy might be the best thing to happen to us in a long,longtime.
ChapterSeven
Addy
“What’s wrong with your face?”
I glanced up at Enzo who was staring intensely at me. “What?”
“Your face,” Enzo repeated and gestured with a sweeping hand from the crown of my head to my chin. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing!” I gave Haylee a look like,our best friend is nuts.
“Enzo’s right,” Haylee said, nodding. “Your face is doing this weird thing.”
Oh my God. What the hell was my face doing? “What is it?” I gasped and reached for the powder compact I kept in my purse. Once, when I was 12, I got Bell's palsy for two weeks because of tick-related Lyme disease. Half my face was frozen. I was damn lucky it wasonlyfor a couple weeks but still. I never wanted to experience that again.
I peered at my reflection, tilting my head to see different angles. “I don’t see anything.” Not even a pimple.
“Hm,” Enzo said. “Yeah, it went away. Weird.”
I closed the compact and went back to stocking the bar with clean pint glasses, my mind wandering to Conrad for not the first time since I opened the bar at four p.m.
Ancient, he had called himself. He wasfarfrom ancient, but our little banter about the age gap made me smile. I bit my bottom lip thinking about his own crooked grin.
“There it is again!” Enzo cried out.
“There what is?”
“The thing with your face,” Haylee said, her own smile spreading.
