“She doing okay now?” I asked.

“Depends on your definition of ‘okay.’ She found a way to heal, a few months after it happened, and it started out great. The intentions were good. She joined this prayer group and it was really helping. I didn’t see her cry as much. She smiled when I smiled. Then weekly meetings turned into daily meetings, she was always at the church and never home with me, and when I did see her, the only thing she’d talk to me about was my relationship with God and how I needed to get on the right path. She was better, happy, but different. Not the mom who ate popsicles with me. That woman was gone and far too busy with her new spiritual family to eat popsicles.”

I felt something twist and wrench in my gut.

“Babe,” I whispered.

“And that is all the sad talk you’re going to get out of me tonight.”

Her voice floated with a hint of laughter.

She was trying to move forward and tread with amusement, possibly into dildo territory, where our conversations stayed the farthest from serious, but all I could picture was a sad little girl and her melted popsicle.

It fucked with my head.

“You have anybody after that happened? Any other family?” I asked, fidgeting in bed, adjusting and readjusting the height of my pillow until my upper body was bent and the weight of my edginess shifted out of my chest.

“I had Tori. She’s my best friend. And her family. I’ve always had them.”

“That’s good.”

“Then I had Marcus.”

My brows rose.

“Husband?”

“Yep.”

“You wanna talk about him?”

“Nope.”

I laughed. So did she.

“He hasn’t called,” she revealed a heartbeat later, her tone broken. “I left two days ago, packed up and walked out, and he hasn’t called. Seven years together and he doesn’t even bother to make sure I’m okay.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that.

I couldn’t be reassuring. I didn’t know dick about this guy or their marriage. I didn’t know if silence was usual for him. I only knew what she told me, that he wanted out. He ended it. Let her walk away.

He was the dumbest motherfucker on the planet.

“Even if he knew I was living with Tori now, he could’ve called,” she whispered, then with words too quiet I almost missed them, she added, “You called. Don’t even know me, I cuss you out, and you ask if I’m okay.”

I closed my eyes.

“You’re trouble,” she whispered.

I smiled in the dark.

She yawned again, sighed like she seemed to always do after revealing her exhaustion, and asked me with the smallest voice to tell her something about myself, something I’ve never told anyone.

Something she could keep.

“Please,” she begged. “Then I need to go to bed. I start my new job tomorrow and I don’t want to look like a redheaded zombie.”

I was reluctant to oblige her request, to share a secret and to let her go.

I wasn’t done. I wanted more.

But I also wanted to give her something. Something she could keep, ’cause I felt like I was taking and taking from this girl and she didn’t even know it.

I rolled onto my side and stared at the wall, the phone trapped between my ear and the pillow and a smirk on my face.

I pictured her, red hair and glasses.

“I fucking love popsicles,” I confessed.

It wasn’t much, but I knew she wouldn’t think that.

She was silent and smiling, I was sure.

And I was right.

I heard it in her voice.

“Good night, Trouble.”

Chapter Six

SYDNEY

Day three, post-Marcus.

I was excited and nervous and strangely okay.

As long as I didn’t think about the conversations I wasn’t having.

And I didn’t have a lot of time to think about those conversations. My day was jam-packed with information I needed to process, new faces and names, daily specials, menu items that were still listed but weren’t technically offered anymore, since we were waiting on new updated menus to arrive, and table numbers, which for some reason seemed to be really tripping me up, due to the randomness and inconsistency of their layout.

Table 23 was next to Table 4. Booth 7 butted up against Booth 13.

I questioned this madness, earning myself a giggle and nothing more from Tori and the other two waitresses I had met when I first arrived.

Shay, short for Shayla, a cute little brunette with a brilliant smile and killer taste in hair accessories—she wore pins with jeweled crossbones on them. They were right up my alley. And Kali, a single mom whose baby daddy ditched her to pursue an affair with his boss’s wife, one that was still going on and apparently not a secret in Dogwood Beach, the baby daddy being in politics and his boss running for governor, making the scandal newsworthy in a big way.

She was bitter when she spoke of her ex, but her face lit up when she mentioned her son, Cameron.

He sounded adorable.

I also met Sean, or Stitch, as everyone called him. He was the cook at Whitecaps and attractive in an entirely new way to me.

I had never before found rough men good-looking. Men with long hair, thick shapeless beards, and tattoos decorating practically every visible inch of skin. Men who had a pack of smokes poking out of their front pockets and who wore chains on their jeans and jewelry around their necks. I’d never looked at them twice. They were hard and intimidating.

But Sean was hot in a big way. A new way. And the fact that he had let the girls nickname him Stitch for accidentally cutting himself so many times and didn’t seem to mind them poking a little fun, that, for some reason, made him hotter.

I was getting the hang of things, learning the absurd seating layout and making new friends, and I was doing all of this with my mind the farthest from Marcus it had ever been.

It was a great first day.

No worries. No drama. No monumental mess-ups. Nothing particularly interesting going on.

Until I heard Shay make a noise at my back that sounded an awful lot like a mix between a gasp and a squeal.

It was worthy of a head turn.

“What’s up?” I asked her, watching her big brown eyes move with something behind me, her lips pulled between her teeth and her cheeks flushing red.

I was facing the kitchen now, and the back of the restaurant.

She was tuned to something at the front by the doors and looked like she wanted to climb on the bar and do backflips off of it.

Tori walked up beside me and noticed Shay’s big eyes, held smile, and flushing cheeks immediately.

“You look like Tom Hardy just stepped in here, Shay. What gives?”

She turned her head at the same time as me, then muttered a soft yet unquestionably irritated, “Shit,” under her breath.

I wasn’t sure what she was seeing. I knew what I was seeing.

Two men sauntering through the restaurant toward a booth by the window, the one closer with short tan-colored hair and blue eyes that smiled, a shaved jaw, and sharp, muscled shoulders. He wore a white tee under an opened button-up with khaki shorts and boat shoes, and the skin on his face and neck and arms was kissed a deep golden brown.

He was all boy-next-door charm and good clean fun. Very easy on the eyes. While the man behind him screamed secret sex in your parents’ bed and stolen touches under the dinner table.