The name is a physical thing. It hits behind the sternum, short and sharp, and for one very bad second I forget how to control my expression.
Muir.
I haven’t let myself say his name in four years. I haven’t let myself think it, not the full weight of it. I’ve skimmed across the surface of the thought the way you skim across cold water when you know what’s underneath.
And now here it is, dropped into a perfectly good evening by the Bennett sisters in their matching linen cardigans, andevery feeling I have so carefully arranged is swaying on its foundations.
“Is he?” I say. The word comes out almost casual. Almost. “Huh.”
Rex’s hand finds the small of my back.
“He asked about you at the market, apparently,” the younger sister says. “Wanted to know if you were still running the Snack Hut during the summer.”
There’s a crack somewhere inside my chest, sharp and cold as lake ice giving way.
“Did he.” Not a question. Not anything.
“If you were stillhere,” Mr. Calloway adds, and he says it with a weight that suggests he is giving me important information, not gossip. He has always taken the difference between those two things seriously.
Where else would I be?This is my home now. He was the one who left. The idea that he’s back here asking ifI’mstill around?—
“If he wants a tour,” I say pleasantly, “there’s a contact form on the website. Refund policy is also on the website. Very clearly laid out.”
Rex’s hand presses harder against my back.
“You always were a firecracker,” Mr. Calloway says, and there’s something fond and faintly sad in it that I like considerably less than irritation. “Never fully understood what happened between you two. Seemed like the real thing.”
I bite the inside of my cheek, hard enough to feel it.
The real thing.
The real thing ended with someone vanishing into the sea one morning. No goodbye, no note, nothing but the absence of someone who had been, for about two years, the presence my whole life arranged itself around.
Real things don’t do that. Real things leave evidence they were there.
“Well,” the older sister says, with the gracious social instinct of someone who has navigated more conversations than she can count, “we didn’t mean to ambush you. Just wanted to give you a friendly heads-up.”
“I appreciate it,” I say, with my best tour-guide warmth. “I’m completely fine. Four years, I’ve very much moved on?—”
The sisters nod with the gentle compassion of people who absolutely do not believe you.
The silence that follows has a texture. I can feel their curiosity and their pity, can feel the shape of the story they’re already telling themselves.
Poor Cora, tried so hard to look unbothered.
And something in me goes hot and stubborn and three steps ahead of my better judgment.
“Actually,” I hear myself say, “I’m seeing someone. Have been for a while now. So there’s nothing to worry about.”
The eyebrows of both Bennett sisters ascend in perfect synchronized surprise.
“You are?” the younger one asks. “Who?”
“Me,” Rex says.
His arm slides around my waist with an ease that suggests he has made this decision calmly and in full possession of the facts, which cannot possibly be true.
I freeze. Then, because we are standing in front of three of the town’s most reliable gossip conduits and the alternative is complete social collapse, I lean into him. Just slightly. Like this is normal.