7

Rachel pulled open the door to The Drip, her gaze immediately latching onto Lee and Sharon. They hunkered down in a booth in the back, too busy canoodling to notice her. Yes, canoodling, an old-fashioned word, but apt. There was no other word for what they were doing.

They sat on the same side of the booth, their heads bent together as they conferred over a sheet of paper. The lowering sun burnished Lee’s brown hair, providing a beautiful contrast with Sharon’s blonde locks, glowing softly golden in the late-afternoon light.

Didn’t Sharon ever have bad hair days? It didn’t seem natural.

The barista with the perfect cheekbones took Rachel’s order.

“Rachel!” Lee’s voice boomed. He waved broadly. “We’re back here.”

As if she could have missed them.

Rachel lifted the piping hot mug and slid her feet slowly across the floor as she glided toward their booth, trying not to spill the coffee that apparently had been brewed inside a volcano.

Lee whispered to Sharon, who laughed and rested her head on his shoulder.

Rachel eased her cup onto the table and slid into the booth across from the couple.

Lee leaned back and shifted his arm to the seatback behind Sharon.

Sharon blushed and fluttered her eyelashes. “I’m so glad you’re here, Miss Cooper. I don’t know what we were thinking, planning a wedding on such short notice. We’re absolutely in over our heads, just as Mom said.”

Lee snorted. “Your mom says a lot of things.”

Rachel leaned to sip from her mug without picking it up. “I don’t know how much help I’ll be. I’ve never planned a wedding.”

“No, but you’ve lived in this area longer than either of us.” Lee scratched a sideburn as lush and full as a Civil War general’s. “We thought you might be able to help brainstorm venues.”

“My mom’s flying down from Indiana to help with some of the other stuff later next month,” Sharon clarified. “But she says we need to book a venue as soon as possible.”

“And we all know my mom won't help,” Lee said. “Unless ‘help’ means bully us into picking the most expensive place possible and then disappear with the deposit money.”

Rachel wondered if Lee’s mother would even be invited to the ceremony. It didn’t seem likely, given her spotty history with sobriety—not to mention reality. Old Rachel would have asked right then. New Rachel understood that she had lost some of her right to pry into Lee’s affairs.

And yet when her gaze caught his and held, he seemed to guess what she was thinking.

Rachel lifted a brow. “And you’re not having the wedding in Indiana…why?”

Sharon’s hands fluttered in front of her. “Oh, I’m not from Indiana. My parents just relocated there because of my dad’s work. He’s an engineer. I’m actually from Illinois. But since my parents don’t exactly live in my hometown anymore—and since I don’t know anyone where they live—well, it made more sense to have it here, with most of our friends and family.” Sharon snuggled closer to Lee.

“Family.” Lee snorted. He met Rachel’s eye. “Mom doesn’t know. And Sharon hasn’t met her yet.”

“Are you—” Rachel hesitated, trying to word her question correctly. “Is there a plan to tell her?”

Lee ran his free hand through his hair, leaving half of it standing on end. “I really don’t know. You know how she is.”

Sharon smoothed his hair and bestowed a melting smile. “One crisis at a time.”

Rachel lifted her mug and blew into the steam. The couple across the booth seemed to have momentarily forgotten her. She cleared her throat. “So. Wedding venues.”

Sharon jumped. She turned a delicate shade of pink. “Yes! Wedding venues!”

“Do you have any ideas?” Rachel set her coffee on the table and fished in her bag for her phone, fully prepared to start an internet search. “Are you looking for indoor, outdoor, or what?”

Lee shrugged. “As long as we wind up married, I don’t really care—”

“Shush,” Rachel tutted. “I already know you won't be of any help.”

“I mean, I don’t want to get married underwater in scuba gear—”

Rachel sighed. “Here we go.”

“—because how could anyone hear the vows?”

“Not to mention that no dive mask will seal over your hairy face. You’d have to shave for sure.”

Lee ran a hand over his grizzled chin. “Never!” He squeezed Sharon tighter against his side. “Cross ‘underwater ceremony’ off the list.”

Sharon fluttered her eyelashes adoringly. “What list?”

“OK,” Rachel interrupted, pulling her Resolutions Notebook from her bag and flipping to the blank pages in the back. “Let’s make one.” She drew three columns, labeling them Yes, No, and Maybe.

“Why write them down if we know we don’t want them?” Sharon asked, reading the columns upside-down and blinking hard.

“So that you can remember which ones you definitely eliminated and keep yourselves from going back to them later.”

“That’s smart.” Sharon gazed at Lee. “Now I see why you wanted to ask her.”

Rachel drew dividing lines between her columns, head down to keep Lee from spotting her satisfied smile.

By the time the sun had set, they’d filled each column with possibilities. Sharon and Lee divided between themselves the responsibility of making calls to check if any of the possibilities were available on the date they’d set.

“Which you really should have done before setting the date,” Rachel told them, “although I suppose it’s too late to talk about that now.”

Lee swirled the dregs of his coffee. “For someone who’s never planned a wedding before, you seem to know a lot about this.”

Rachel sniffed. “It’s common sense.”

Lee closed his eyes, flared his nostrils, and drew in vast quantities of air.

Sharon bit her lip, her eyebrows drawing together. “I’m sorry if this is tedious for you,” she said, voice thinning. “Oh, dear. I didn’t think—”

Rachel swallowed hard. She had to find a way to backpedal before Sharon started to cry.

Lee placed an index finger on Sharon’s forehead, right at her hairline. He traced it toward her eyebrows, down her nose, over her lips, to her chin. By the time he reached her neck, Sharon was giggling. Lee’s whiskers twitched in an answering grin.

Rachel half expected their eyes to morph into throbby little cartoon hearts. Where should she look? She picked up her coffee, took a test sip, found the contents stone cold, and gulped them down anyway. Anything to distract from the show across the booth.

She’d walked into this situation ready for anything: ready to worry over the future of their friendship; ready to force herself to dismiss such feelings; even ready to fight her innate mother-hen protectiveness toward Lee.

Instead, Rachel experienced the last emotion she’d expected.

Jealousy.

~*~

Lying in her bed that night, jiggling her foot to the throb of her upstairs neighbor’s music, Rachel sorted through the tangled threads of her emotions.

She hadn’t read Anne of Green Gables obsessively as a girl for nothing. She knew there was a book of revelation in everyone’s life.

This was hers.

She was jealous.

She rolled over, pulling the duvet with her.

It’s not that she was jealous of Sharon and Lee specifically. She didn’t want Lee. Not in that way. Regardless of what he may or may not have felt for her over the course of their relationship, her feelings for him had always been clear. She wasn’t jealous romantically. It was more complicated than that.

She saw Sharon beaming, with her head tucked into the crook of Lee’s arm, happy and content. She watched Sharon smoothing Lee’s hair. She traced the tip of Lee’s finger as it trailed down the center of Sharon’s face. That comfortable protectiveness—that safe and giddy warmth. Had she ever felt that?

Rachel rolled the other way.

Caught in the endless cycle of school and church and Lee and Ann and Lynn, Rachel had never worried about dating. Now, with Ann living across town, Lynn increasingly busy, and Lee getting married, she recognized a void.

She wanted someone.

It’s not that Rachel didn’t have options. She could have had Call-Me-Matt if she’d wanted him, but something hadn’t been right there. Much like Myla’s dad had started doing recently, he’d had an alarming tendency to turn up when she least expected him. But even though Matt had turned out to be perfectly safe and normal in the end, she still hadn’t wanted him.

She wanted someone she could feel comfortable with. Someone whom she could make laugh, whom she could take care of, and who felt safe with her. Someone who was easy for her to read, who made her laugh, took care of her, and made her feel safe, too. Someone who was a bit further along spiritually and could help her grow without being condescending or making her feel dumb.

But why would someone like that—someone who had it all together—want someone like her?

Ian had wanted her—once upon a time. Unfortunately, he hadn’t contacted her lately. Perhaps that ship had already sailed.

She rolled over again, her legs twisting in the sheets. Reaching for her phone where it rested atop her Resolutions Notebook on the nightstand, she checked the time. She really should be asleep by now. Replacing the phone on her nightstand, she sank backward against the pillows, groaning as the upstairs neighbor switched to a new music track—one with a huge drop and heavy baseline.

She sat up again. This would never do.

Flicking on her bedside lamp, she flopped her legs over the side, jammed her feet into her slippers, and shuffled three steps to her bookshelf. She ran her fingers sideways across the spines of the well-loved volumes. Dickens, Hardy, Wharton, Hawthorne, Austen—not tonight. Too much work. Sayers, O’Connor, and Parker she likewise pegged as too brainy for a sleepy-time read.

Then her finger slid across side-by-side copies of Jane Eyre, one well-worn and one new and uncreased. She tapped the spines lightly. In the past, this book had been her go-to relaxation read. Unfortunately, certain events last fall had poisoned it, possibly forever. She could no longer think about Jane or Rochester or even Grace Poole without calling to mind the whole self-induced juggernaut of embarrassment involving Lee, Call-Me-Matt, the Memento Killer, and Detective Ian Smith.

She had broken her ankle, suffered a life implosion, put the worst possible spin on a series of anonymous gifts, assumed a serial killer was stalking her, and nearly torpedoed all her personal relationships at the same time. Then had come the actual drama surrounding the school drama, Murder Came Knocking. Rachel had steamrolled through rehearsals while nearly missing a suicidal student’s cries for help. Along the way, she’d miscommunicated with almost everyone in her life and had hardly managed to hang on to some semblance of a relationship with Lee.

And now here she was, once again facing an emotional crisis. At least this time, she was actively working for a different outcome. With the Resolutions guiding her, she had not pitted herself as the central character in some imagined drama or jumped to any relationship-ruining assumptions.

Not yet.

Abruptly, her upstairs neighbor’s music shut off. Heaving a sigh, Rachel retreated to bed without a book, reaching instead for her Resolutions Notebook. She ran her finger down the list of resolutions.

Resolved: To stop reading into situations and creating groundless, alternate storylines in my head.

So far, so good. She hadn’t managed to turn Lee and Sharon’s wedding into her own personal drama. Nor had she overreacted to running into Maya’s dad repeatedly. So…check.

Resolved: To start paying better attention at church.

Check…ish. Her mind still wandered during sermons, but she was scratching down most of the points in her notebook and thinking about how to apply them. It wasn’t a perfect system, but she showed progress.

Resolved: To master the flying teep kick.

Definitely still a fail. But she hadn’t given up. That had to count for something.

Resolved: To sort out my romantic relationships and finally settle down with a good man.

Rachel couldn’t even pretend to give herself any credit here. In fact, until she’d seen Lee and Sharon canoodling in the coffee shop, she’d sort of forgotten about it.

It didn’t help that the men in her life weren’t cooperating. Ian Smith never made a clear move, Lee was getting married, and Call-Me-Matt had rendered himself ridiculous with his smothery attention and constant barrage of over-the-top flirtation. Even if he did one day come back to church and somehow manage to change her opinion of him, she would always remember that at one point, she’d considered him a serial killer. That probably wouldn’t serve as the foundation for a healthy relationship. Although it would make for an entertaining story when people asked how they'd met: “Actually, I thought he was stalking me and possibly a serial killer who wanted to choke me to death with a pair of my own leggings. But then it all worked out. Haha!”

As for Myla’s dad—no. She had The Resolutions to keep her from obsessing over what running into him repeatedly over the past few days might mean. Not that she worried about him the way she’d worried about Matt. Craig Crocker was a known quantity.

Safe, but not an option for her. She wouldn’t date a recently-divorced former student’s parent, no matter how winning his smile. So she didn’t need to worry about it.

What a relief.

Rachel closed the notebook, snapped off her bedside lamp, and buried her face in the pillows. If she were to have a prayer of keeping this last resolution, she needed to be more proactive.

The problem was that she really didn’t know that many single Christian men.

She didn’t know many single men, period.

In that moment, she had an epiphany. She rolled back over, snapped the light back on, snatched up her Resolutions Notebook, and scrawled down a sub-resolution.

Under Resolution Four she scribbled a note.

Try internet dating.