Natalie’s sobs had just hit the ugly-cry stage when her phone rang. Still parked at Jem’s apartment block after that disastrous dinner, she fumbled around the passenger seat, eventually reaching under an inflatable frog—a festival prop—to pull the vibrating cell out.
“Hey, Nat, do you remember where we left that paper bag full of bolts?” Sam’s cheery voice sounded from the speakers. “Once I find it, I thought I’d go grab a tub of Strawberry Sensation if you’re still up for it.”
She opened her mouth to reply, but a sob came out instead.
“Nat?” Sam’s tone changed to concern. “Are you alright?”
“I’m okay,” she gasped, but couldn’t manage much more.
“I’ll come get you. Are you still at Jem’s?” He’d given her a lift from there once before when her car was on the fritz, so he knew where it was.
“Yeah.”
“I’ll be there in five.”
She dropped the phone atop a pile of candy wrappers in her console and rested her forehead against the steering wheel. Slapped the dashboard three times.
How could she have let this happen? Jem reentered her life and here she was again, crying in her car. Maybe this time she’d learn her lesson.
Vehicles zoomed past, and she sat up. Sam would be here any minute. She dug through her glove box for a tissue and found only her emergency stash of personal products. Well, this was a different type of emergency, but an emergency nonetheless. She wiped the mascara from her cheeks and blew her nose, then hid the mess back in her glove box.
Headlights spilled over the dark asphalt ahead, and a rusty Chevy pulled in beside her. She walked around to where Sam wound down his window and surreptitiously swiped her sleeve past her nose.
Sam had donned his red flannel shirt again. It matched the faded paint on his truck. He leaned out the window and scanned her. “This looks serious. Do we have a Dreamy Dark Chocolate situation on our hands?”
She leaned on the hood of her car. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have called you. You’ve still got so much to do.” And she was crying over her ex. In front of the guy she’d gone out with this week.
“I called you, remember? And it’ll keep. Get in. It’s cold out.” He reached across and popped the passenger door handle.
She slid into the warm vehicle and glanced around. “So this is how you roll.”
Dress-up costumes covered the back seat, a layer of sports equipment sprinkled on top. A crate of snack foods leaned against the left rear window, and a black duffel bag with drumsticks poking out was jammed into the foot well.
Something crunched beneath her foot, and she tried not to look.
“You never know when you’ll need a feather boa and a hockey stick.” He backed the Chevy onto the road. “Your dad okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Jem? Oliver?”
“They’re fine . . . physically, anyway.” Well, except for Olly’s flu. She picked a piece of lint from her sweater. “It’s not a very interesting story.”
Sam tutted and shook his head. “Everything about you seems to be interesting. And you and Jem have a . . . well, a unique situation.” A tactful way to put it, without a hint of malice for her ex. Her esteem for him rose another notch.
She gave a short, humorless chuckle. “You could say that.” She paused, trying to think of a way to be honest without saying, “I’m crying about my ex and the woman he moved on with.” She smoothed a hand over her jeans and tried. “Obviously my relationship with Jem is long in the past.” Because kissing didn’t count as a relationship. “But working for him reminds me of a pretty rough year after our engagement ended.” She twisted her fingers together. Should she say more?
“And . . .
“And?”
He slid her a look. “You’ve worked for him for weeks. There must’ve been a trigger that made tonight harder.”
She bit her lip. “Oliver’s mother is back in town. And that makes bad memories . . . amplify.”
“Ouch.” He glanced at her.
She sighed. “I’m sorry. You don’t want to hear about this.”
“Hey.” He nudged her with his elbow. “What kind of friend would I be if I didn’t?”
She came uncorked. “I mean, we were long over when Chloe became pregnant, but that doesn’t mean . . . It’s still not an easy thing if your ex-fiancé has a baby with someone else, right? Especially someone so perfect. I don’t know. Maybe I did overreact.” She sniffed and tucked her cold hands beneath her thighs. “I said I’d tried to forgive him, and Jem got mad. He said all I’d tried to do was forget. I don’t even get what the difference is.”
Sam flashed his turn signal in the opposite direction of Bloop.
“Where are you going?”
“If we’re going to get deep, yogurt won’t cut it. I need real sugar. I need a Macca’s soft serve.” He pulled into a McDonald’s drive-thru line behind a dusty van and faced her. “So you want to understand forgiveness? Nice to see you picked an easy one to test me on.”
She smiled. No wonder kids found him easy to talk to. “More or less.”
“Any part specifically you’re struggling with?”
“I’ve tried it. Every day I tell myself that I forgive him, that I’m past this. It doesn’t work.”
“What would make it feel better? Besides rewriting the past.”
“I’d want him to feel the same thing I felt!” The words burst out with more venom than she’d like. Rein it in. She took a calming breath. “But I know it wouldn’t help. I’m not normally this bitter.”
Sam passed a few coins through his window to the drive-thru operator and accepted two cones. He passed her one and took a generous lick of his own.
When he’d parked the car in the lot, he gave her his full attention. “You’re right, it wouldn’t help. It would be fair, but it wouldn’t bring back what you’ve lost. It would just make two sad people and wasted years.”
She took a lick from the top of her soft-serve swirl. “But how do you just let something like this go?”
“First of all, I think we should establish that no one’s equating forgiveness with necessarily trusting Jem.” Sam waited till she met his eyes before continuing. “When a person hurts you, you don’t have to give them the chance to do that again. Jem’s right. It’s different from forgetting.”
She licked a drip that threatened to spill from her cone. Sam had finished his in about three bites. “But how do I get past the I-hate-Jeremy-Walters stage?”
“Have you tried saying it out loud?”
She blinked. “What?”
He twisted her cone to show her another imminent drip. “Say it out loud. ‘I forgive Jeremy Walters.’”
“I—” The words stuck in her throat. She breathed out a shaky laugh. “This is ridiculous.” She’d thought the words a hundred times. Why was it so hard to say them?
“Harder than it sounds, right? Pray about it. Forgiveness doesn’t come naturally.” He turned the ignition. “No one ever said it was easy. Only possible—with some divine help.”
He dropped her back at her car and said goodbye with a friendly wave.
Natalie jumped behind the wheel and cranked the engine. A headache from crying pounded on the back of her eyeballs, and she had a week’s worth of sleep to catch up on before the barbecue tomorrow. She could deal with the Jem problem after a solid eight hours in oblivion.
She zoomed along the dark streets toward home and cranked the radio. The Fray’s soothing lyrics calmed her nerves.
Red-and-blue lights flashed in her rearview mirror.
She bit back a curse and slowed until she found a spot to pull over. Footsteps crunched in the gravel behind her as she rolled down her window. “Sorry, Officer—” Her words halted as she looked up at the man by her window. “John? What are you doing?”
“I volunteered for a shift and sent an officer back home to his family.” He gave a grimace that was maybe intended to be a smile. “Nothing like a good deed to cheer you up.”
“He just wanted to impress you, you know.” The words escaped before she could stop them.
“With what? His former lover, burned food, or the child sick on sugar?”
“Would it kill you to tell him he’s done a good job? Or at least tried to?” Mad as she was, even she could see that.
John set his jaw. “When he does a good job, I’ll tell him.”
“Are you just trying to punish him for leaving you?” Realization slapped her as the final word left her mouth. Hypocrite. She swiveled her gaze to the road ahead. “Forget it. Just write me the ticket.”
John handed her the fine and crunched his way back to his car.
Tears streamed down Natalie’s face as she completed the short drive home, then wet the pillow beneath her cheek as she fell asleep.
The fabric was still damp when her ringtone jerked her awake. The alarm clock beside her bed glowed 1:53 a.m.
She snatched up the phone. “Hello?”
“Natalie.” The shudder in Lili’s voice catapulted her out of bed and halfway into her jeans before the teenager finished her sentence. “We’re on our way to the hospital. Olly’s really sick.”