But it had changed everything. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“I’m not gonna chase after you like a lovestruck pup just because we…did it.”
“I didn’t think you were.”
“I don’t want a man I have to chase down and rope, like your cousin Trevor with a stray calf. That’s not what it was about to me.” She was opening the door. She was backing through it. “I told you it wouldn’t be the end of the world, and it’s not. So you can relax. Okay?”
What was happening? It didn’t feel like what he wanted to be happening. Not even close.
“G’night, Ethan.”
Do something! Don’t let her walk away.
“’Night, Lily,” he said.
At least he didn’t need another cold shower. Her words had been like a bucket of ice.
Eventually, Ethan got into bed, stacked the pillows under him, and reached for Lily’s tablet. The note on the front said, “password 999999.”
She was acting like making love on the riverbank hadn’t shattered her the way it had him. But he kind of thought it had. She was way too good for meaningless sex. And she was way too good for him, too.
He keyed in the passcode on the old iPad and tapped the Presentation icon. When he hit play, a spinning image cartwheeled onto the page, then filled the screen. The presentation was computer-generated, he realized, but it looked for all the world like the fully renovated Cantina from the outside, front, with the big sliding glass doors wide open, and the taco station and fire-and-water feature in place on the huge flagstone patio that used to be the parking lot. On one side of the station, there were tables and people eating. On the other side, people were dancing.
The view panned into the new addition, over a gleaming dance floor, across the stage, and then behind it, where there were a pair of dressing rooms for guest bands. Back inside, the presentation took him through the kitchen with its devoted veggie station and new cook surface in place, and then back through the dining room with the bar gleaming, the tables in place, new light fixtures. He noticed each light fixture was different. And the tables and chairs were in several different designs too, so he could see what each choice would look like in place.
Upstairs, she’d added a partition dividing the space into two offices, rather than one. He wondered if that was an effort to distance herself from him. Had making love driven them further apart instead of bringing them closer, as he’d feared?
The camera took him out the rear of the building to the new parking lot, then around the right side, where the new main entrance was a big set of double doors almost where the little shed used to be.
The presentation returned to the view from out front, and he saw that he could now manually click through each room. Every item she’d changed popped up with notes when he touched it. The whole thing was brilliant. On the final screen, he touched a summary tab.
She had the whole place laid out right there, as if it were already finished, everything they’d already agreed on and then some, with spaces for him to enter the amounts of the estimates from the contractors for each portion.
He tapped to open the app and figured out how to add his own notes to hers. The stage needed more outlets for amps. The dressing room needed extra guitar strings and drumsticks and fiddle bows for emergencies. And the mic…he wanted it to look old-fashioned, one of those fat rectangular ones with radio call letters on it, only it would say…
What would it say?
What was he going to name the place?
Breakfast was long over by the time Lily came downstairs. She’d overslept by hours and only realized during her shower that she hadn’t slept that well in weeks. One would think she’d released a little tension.
She’d meant it when she’d told Ethan that making love didn’t have to change anything. It had been…beautiful. Wonderful. Everything. And she hoped it would happen again. But she knew it might not.
As soon as Lily took her place at the fully set breakfast table, Garrett came and sat across from her.
She looked at him, then at the table, set for four. “Oh gosh, tell me you haven’t been waiting for me before having your breakfast,” she said.
Garrett leaned forward, holding a hand to one side of his mouth to stage-whisper, “If I’d eaten earlier, she’d have given me oatmeal, like most days.”
“Oatmeal’s good for you, especially considering what you have the rest of the day,” Chelsea said, heading in from the kitchen with platters of steaming food.
Lily didn’t know how the woman did it. She must’ve heard her moving around upstairs and started cooking immediately.
Her dad came from somewhere, rubbing his hands together. “Garrett waited for sausage. I, on the other hand, waited for you,” he said. “What took you so long?”
“I haven’t been sleeping, to be honest. I think it finally caught up with me. And by the way, oatmeal would be better for you, too, Dad.” But he was already scooping hash browns onto his plate.
Ethan’s chair remained empty. He’d had an early appointment with the bank.
