“That’s her ex?” Ava demanded. “How do you know where his parents live, Levi?”
“We had to do some recon,” he explained and she made sounds of assent, mm-hm, like that statement made perfect sense.
Not to Everly. “What’s recon? What’s an ex? If you don’t tell me, I’m going to ask Thea,” she threatened, referencing her best friend who had more than ten years on her and would know the answers to those questions.
“I need to go,” I announced, but I would need to find a back door, or maybe a window? Then my eyes lit on the person behind Grant. She stepped forward, flipping her long, dark hair over her shoulder and with her pretty mouth turned down, as if this restaurant wasn’t nearly nice enough for her amazing self. It was Vivienne. My eyes searched for her husband Lance, but I didn’t immediately spot him—
Grant saw me. I could tell when he did, because he stopped frowning and his jaw went slack, emphasizing that he’d gained a little more weight and that his second chin was becoming more prominent. He stared across the restaurant and I stared back, unable to think through the shock of it. “That’s Grant,” I told them again. “That guy right there, he and I were together for five years. Five years of my life.”
“Emerson.” Levi put his hand on my arm, and I turned to him instead. “Do you want to leave?”
“No, we can’t walk past him,” Ava responded. I saw that she was taking in the whole situation through the corners of her eyes, without moving her head at all. “We’ll wait until he and his…that woman get a table, and then we’re out. We’ll stop and getice cream,” she immediately said to her daughter, who closed her mouth on any kind of complaint and seemed pleased.
“We don’t have to leave,” I told them. My voice sounded hoarse and croaky.
“You don’t want to stay here,” Ava said, and she was right. Levi moved his hand away but I reached for it again, and he linked our fingers together.
Both Grant and Vivienne stared the entire time they stood at the host stand, and then they kept it up as they went to their table. Fortunately, they were across the room from us, but they still could see when Ava put down money for our drinks, gathered our stuff, and hustled us out, positioning herself between me and my ex-boyfriend and apologizing to the server on the way. “It’s a crisis,” she told him, and then we were on the sidewalk.
“Time to go home,” Levi said to me and Everly mentioned the ice cream, which she was very interested in.
“Text me later,” Ava ordered us, and we walked toward his car.
When we got there, when we were safely inside and then driving away from that restaurant, Levi spoke again. “You don’t look like you’re going to faint anymore.”
“What? I’m not going to faint.”
“You were like a ghost,” he countered. “The minute you saw him, your eyes got huge and you lost all color.”
“I was surprised.”
“That’s an understatement,” he said. “You have to think that you’ll see him sometime, since you live in the same place.”
Maybe Vivienne had been right about what she’d said when she came over to my apartment: I needed to move back to where I’d come from.
“It may be a big city but you should prepare yourself,” Levi continued. “I run into people all the time.”
“What would you do if you ran into Mary Evelyn?” I asked.
He thought for a moment. “I would probably be surprised too, especially if she was with her new boyfriend like your ex was with that woman today. But I hope that I’d be able to say hello, or at least wave, and I hope I wouldn’t let on that I was upset. She doesn’t have a part in my life anymore and she doesn’t need to know what I’m thinking or feeling. I certainly wouldn’t want her to believe that I was still in love with her and that my world was rocked by her presence.”
“Grant wasn’t with a new girlfriend,” I corrected. “That was Vivienne, the woman who dropped by my apartment in her Porsche. She’s married to his best friend, Lance.” I hadn’t seen him or any of their other friends as we’d walked out, thank goodness. “I was surprised. I was shocked,” I admitted, but there was more to correct in what he’d just said. “I’m not in love with Grant anymore. I’m not.”
“Sure.”
“I’m not,” I repeated, and we didn’t say much else for the rest of the way to my apartment. I couldn’t tell if he believed me, but it was true. I took a deep breath and repeated that in my mind: I was over Grant, no matter if I had almost fainted.
I was over him.
Chapter 10
“What was it that I said about moving?”
“When you carried the last bag of stuff out to Hernán’s car, you announced, ‘I’m never moving anything again. You can quote me,’” I answered.
“I guess you just did that,” Levi said. “You have an amazing auditory memory. Maybe it’s because you didn’t like the visual stuff.”
Maybe, but more likely it was that I recorded it all (to the best of my ability) and then read through it a lot (also to the best of my ability). I was very sure of what he’d said about moving, because it had been in the last painful moments before Hernán had driven away and I probably would have remembered it even without the transcript.
