Page 26 of Can't Help Falling

“Lindsay,” I say, my voice quiet.

This is not a reunion I want. Or deserve. She should leave and go back to wherever she came from.

“Didn’t think I’d ever see you back in Harvest Hollow,” Lindsay says.

“Funny, I didn’t think I’d see you again, ever,” the words are out before I can stop them.

Emmy clears her throat, but it almost sounded like a laugh.

A customer calls out to her, holding out a newspaper and a pen. If someone asks me to autograph that thing, I might consider moving again.

I sit back down and take a drink, not looking at Lindsay.

“I’m only here because of you.” She sits next to me, angling her body in my direction.

I turn away in time to see Emmy glance at us as she hands the newspaper back to the customer with a smile. It probably annoyed her to have to do that, but you’d never know it by the look on her face.

Emmy is kind and sweet and good.

Lindsay, in totality, is not.

“Don’t you want to know why?” Lindsay asks..

“Why what?”

She laughs. “Are you even listening to me?”

I look at her full on. “Forgive me, I haven’t seen you since a gathering at a church eight years ago. Sorry if I’m at a loss for words.”

Okay, so maybe not all of the sting is gone.

She smiles as if I just made a joke. “Oh, Owen, you always did get lost in your thoughts,” she says. “You know, I spent most of our relationship wondering what you were thinking.”

I frown.

She continues. “You weren’t exactly an open book.”

Not to you, I think.

I turn away.

So what if I have a tendency to keep most of my thoughts to myself? So what if I don’t, at every waking moment, want to tell people exactly what I’m thinking?

“And not much has changed, I see,” she leans back and watches me.

There were other issues in our relationship too, which I was too stupid to realize at the time. For example, I had no interest in a desk job, but Lindsay was intent on me working for her father after the wedding. It didn’t matter to her that a 9-5 office job would suck the life right out of me.

But Lindsay had this savior complex, and she was convinced she could turn me into someone “respectable.”

She may as well have tried to make the pope eat a ham sandwich on a Friday in March.

I guess it wasn’t until the day of our wedding that she realized that—and us—would never happen.

Lindsay waves at Emmy, beckoning her away from the opposite end of the counter, and the second she returns, my insides feel off.

It’s like the jocks and the band guys got invited to the same party.

No, not exactly. More like two exes.

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