“You’re making almost five hundred deviled eggs?”
“Angeleggs. It’s a big picnic, hon. Get cracking.” Then she laughs at her mom jokes, which are always orders of magnitude worse than any dad joke.
I pull out a tray and set it at the breakfast bar, settle onto a stool, and get to work. I can peel an egg in about ten seconds, but that’s still going to take almost…I stifle a sigh. At least forty minutes.
“How’s Creekville doing?” I settle in and listen as she catches me up on the news and gossip. It holds her for about twenty minutes as she slices and scoops the yolks out of the shelled eggs.
“Anyway, I think Miss Lily tried to set up Taylor Bixby with her grandson, but as far as I know, Taylor hasn’t dated anyone in…” She trails off and looks at me. “Do you know?”
Taylor’s about two years younger than me, so we weren’t ever tight in school or anything. “I don’t think I’ve heard about her dating anyone, but I don’t keep up that closely with her. Her Instagram is mainly baked goods.”
“Well, that’s all the town news. Now why don’t you tell me why you’re really here?”
“Nothing like a small-town Fourth of July,” I say. “It’s been too long since I had one.” I don’t know why I haven’t confessed that Sawyer brought me back to Creekville. My mom and I have been mending fences since Christmas, but I don’t know how she’ll react to the news of a man in my life. Plus, I don’t know if it’s even true.
I’ve texted Sawyer twice since my breakthrough in Jane’s office. The first time, I said I was wrong for cutting off texting, and I wanted us to still be friends because I missed hearing from him. His answer was…
Nothing.
I tried again two days ago, asking if he was doing anything fun for the Fourth. More nothing.
All of which may explain why I’d planned to be on the road to Camp Oak Crest by now, and instead I’m hiding in my mom’s kitchen.
“Sorry,” my mom says. “I meant for you to tell me theactualreal reason you’re here.”
Grace and I come by our sarcasm honestly.
“Am I that obvious?”
She shrugs. “It wouldn’t be if you ever came home for more than Christmas. So I figure something must be up. What is it?”
I peel a few more eggs before I decide I’ll tell her. She’s been less judgy when we talk on the phone. I have to give her a chance at some point. “Do you remember when I was a counselor at Oak Crest?”
“Of course.”
“Do you remember when I had a big crush on one of the other counselors?”
Grace and I had never talked to my mom much about boys since she would only give us a lecture on not getting too serious until we established our careers. And I’d already moved to college by then, so it wasn’t like I would have even been home to tell her much. But Grace had teased me about it enough times in my mom’s hearing that she probably had known something about it.
“Kind of,” she says. “He was from Boston or something?”
“Right. I ran into him in May when I came out for the grand opening, and I’m thinking it wasn’t a crush after all.”
She stops mashing yolks. “You mean it’s more than a crush?”
“I think so. I thought the whole reason I stayed out of relationships was because you always told us to focus on our careers first, and thatispart of it.”
Her forehead wrinkles. “Tabitha, honey, I owe you—”
“Nothing. You owe me nothing. It was good advice. But it was easy to follow because I got my heart broken when I was twenty, and I never got over it. Maybe at some level I knew I was trying to protect myself from being hurt again, but it’s more than that. I think I never fell out of love with him.”
“Wow,” she says, scraping a container of plain Greek yogurt into the yolks. “That’s big. You better tell me about him.”
So I do. About how we’d finally connected in our third summer, how he’d dumped me at the end when I said I loved him, how we’d avoided each other ever since. How he’d sprung our old marriage pact on me, and how he’d tried to win me over. And how I’d shut him down.
“I came down here because Natalie says he’s at his cabin for the Fourth,” I conclude. “I thought I’d see if I could get him back, but I’ve texted him twice in the last week, and he hasn’t answered either of them. I’m not sure he’s going to be happy to find me on his doorstep. If this was a book or a movie and a guy was doing this, I’d tell the girl to watch for the flying red flags when the dude kept harassing her.”
“I don’t think two follow-up texts after you were the one to end texting is harassment.” Her voice is thoughtful. “I understand what you’re saying about how it can be a red flag, but this is apples to oranges.”
