Page 45 of For Keeps. For Always.

“I know.” I sigh jovially. “It’s a tough gig, but someone’s gotta do it.”

“I’m sure they had to twist your arm.”

“Something like that,” I murmur.

“Where are you anyway?” she asks. “Your reception isterrible.”

“Shenzen,” I tell her. “China,” I add in case her geography still sucks.

I can hear the smile in her voice when she speaks. “You and Henley, working to carve your name across the globe.”

“Henley is here?” I hate the hopelessness in my tone. The neediness in the way her name clings to my tongue.

“Was,” she clarifies, unperturbed by my longing.

Disappointment filters through my veins. My hope like a balloon with reality hitting it like the sharp point of a pin, bursting it with a bang loud enough to make me blink.

“When?”

“About three months ago.”

She was here. Just twelve weeks ago, she stood in the same place I did, studying the names of strangers who had carved their names into The Great Wall.

Nostalgia hit me like a freight train. Feeling the letters and symbols etched into the stone made me miss Lake Geneva and my childhood more than I should. I couldn’t bring myself to partake in the touristic tradition, the monument itself too consuming and potent for me to want to mark it in any way.

“Do you speak to her often?” I aim for nonchalance but fail. Miserably.

“Once a month,” she says distractedly. “You guys still don’t speak?”

I blow out a heavy breath. “Not since Glasgow. I called her a few weeks after to apologize for my tantrum, but she didn’t answer my call. Not that I blame her.”

I deserved her silence. I was a prick.

“I find it strange she hasn’t tried to contact you.” Subtlety isn’t Addy’s strong suit. Her eagerness for information as clear as crystal. I can’t hold it against her. She’s caught in the middle of a friendship that somehow went AWOL. It’s awkward for her. The third-wheel now is a central cog, keeping us connected whether we wanted it or not.

“She called me about six months after our blowup,” I volunteer easily. “But I was seeing someone at the time. After everything that went down, I didn’t think it was appropriate to take the call.”

It didn’t mean I didn’t want to. Shit, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. Seeing her name flash across my screen and watch it for a torturous number of seconds before it rang out. Before the screen once again fell blank, and she was once again out of reach.

“Sounds serious,” Addy fishes.

“It’s over.” I laugh. “But I did think I was in love for a minute.”

“You weren’t?”

“Caught in a cloud of lust too dense to escape. I was nursing a broken heart after Henley rejected me.”

Addy goes quiet on the end of the line. Likely an uncertainty of what to say, of how to respond to the melancholy dripping seven thousand miles across the ocean.

“So, not the bestsegue,” Addy starts. “Butthere was a reason for my call.”

“Oh?” I stand comfortably to the side of the path, enjoying my coffee as commuters brush and push past me, their heads focused downward on their feet.

“Andrew asked me to marry him.”

Choking on my coffee, I cough. “Jesus, Addy.Congratulations. Why the hell were you letting me make small talk?”

She laughs.

---