“You’ve been glancing at your watch a lot this week,” Gabe said. “More than usual. Is something going on?”
“Nope. I was just wondering which class Connor’s teaching right now. He was telling me about his different classes yesterday. The catatonic group. The loud-talking group. The I-couldn’t-care-less-about-art group. And so on.”
“You like Connor, don’t you?”
“Why do you say that?”
“When you talk about him, you get a . . . dreamy type of expression on your face.”
“A dreamy type of expression?”
“Don’t look so surprised. You and I both know that you’re starting to get into him.”
“I . . .” Did she know that? She supposed she did, but she’d been skirting around it in her thoughts.
“Spill.” There was nothing Gabe enjoyed more than receiving the inside scoop on the relationships of his friends and family. He prided himself on remaining in the know.
“He’s an awesome guy,” she stated. “There’s never been any doubt of that. He’s always been an awesome guy.”
“But you didn’t have romantic feelings for him until now?”
“I never gave myself permission to have romantic feelings. Then, yesterday, there was this moment when he came out of the dressing room wearing a blazer. It parted to the sides when he stuck his hands in his pockets and—boom.”
“Boom?”
“I felt this incredible bolt of magnetism, which kind of pinned me to the spot while I attempted to breathe and talk over it.”
“The blazer did you in.”
“The blazer did me in,” she agreed.
“You realized that the awesome guy isn’t just an awesome guy. You suddenly saw him as boyfriend material.”
“In a word . . . yes. It’s disorienting when the friendship feelings you’ve had for ages suddenly morph into a bit of a crush.”
“It’s best to fall in love with a friend.”
“And you make this pronouncement based on your twenty-three years of life experience?”
“I do. I’d be thrilled if you’d date a guy as good as Connor.”
She leaned against the counter, sweeping away invisible dust with her fingers.
“Your dad was good in some ways, but deceitful in others,” he noted.
She rolled that around. She’d trusted Gabe with her family history, and he’d trusted her with his. “Nicolas, my first long-term boyfriend, was good. It’s just that we went to different colleges.”
“The common and tragic end of most high school romances.”
“My second long-term boyfriend was also good, just more in love with his fraternity than me. Eric was good, but a workaholic who wasn’t ready for commitment. Nate was mostly good, but he got complacent.”
“Nate took you for granted, which was irritating to watch. Wouldn’t it be nice to date someone who’s just good, without fine print? Not good but a workaholic? Or good but complacent?”
“I can’t expect perfection! I’m not perfect.”
“I think that you and Connor are at similar levels of perfection. If you were houses for sale, you’d be listed at the same price.”
She snickered.
“I say go for it and don’t waste time.” Gabe put the “10” drawer back in the calendar. “Otherwise someone else is going to take him off the market.”
“You’re forgetting one hugely important obstacle—” Oh my word! Her senses jolted as if she’d stuck a paper clip into an electrical socket. “I think Luke Dempsey just walked past the shop,” she hissed.
The two of them sprinted to the front window. All she could see now was the man’s retreating back.
She cupped her hands around her eyes and pressed them to the glass, not caring that she’d have to clean the glass later. “We need to go see if that’s him.”
“He’ll notice if someone seven feet tall follows him. You go after him, fast, and text me if he goes into a store. Then I’ll pretend to browse there, too.” He opened the door and pushed her through.
“Lock up if you need to,” Shay said to him. “This is a tremendously rare opportunity.”
“Hurry!”
Biting wind hit her in the face. Beneath the apron, she had on nothing warmer than the zip-up fitted sweatshirt she’d worn to work, but she couldn’t think about a trifling thing like hypothermia at a time like this.
Misty River didn’t have many claims to fame. The cinnamon rolls at Sugar Maple Kitchen. Fried chicken at The Junction. Polka Dot Apron Pies. And the Miracle Five.
Almost twenty years ago, five middle school kids from Misty River had been trapped underground by an earthquake while on a church mission trip to El Salvador. One of them, Luke Dempsey, had an early model cell phone with him. He called his parents and told them they were buried alive in the building’s basement, but that his brother—who’d been right behind the others in the hallway when the earthquake struck—wasn’t with them.
His parents had alerted news media and the story of the trapped kids had zoomed around the world—catching the hearts and concern of people in every country. Eight days later, a rescue team finally reached the kids and got them away safely because the wall protecting them did not fall. Later, engineers could not explain how that had occurred. By rights, the wall should have crashed, and they should have been crushed.
They’d been dubbed the Miracle Five.
Four of them—Natasha, Genevieve, Sebastian, and Ben—had toured for months afterward, telling their story to crowds of people. Books had been published about them. A hit movie had been released.
When Shay’s mom had played that movie for her on their VCR, Shay had been mesmerized. Not only by the drama and inspiration of their story but by the astonishing fact that these world-famous kids were from Misty River. They were just a few years older than she was, in fact.
She’d been a fan ever since. Over the years, she’d spotted and even had the chance to talk with some of them. Natasha and Genevieve sometimes stopped by Papery as customers, which never failed to leave her starstruck.
The only one of them who’d immediately retreated from the spotlight was Luke. Understandably so. Luke’s younger brother had not survived the tragedy and that loss had sent Luke on a path of destruction that had eventually landed him in jail for theft.
He’d been serving out his sentence for the past seven years. It had been big news in Misty River when he’d been released last month and returned to his hometown. Local gossip suggested that he was renovating his apartment on the upper floor of an industrial building a few blocks away. It was hard to know whether that was true because he was more reclusive than the Loch Ness Monster.
She’d never seen him this close. In fact, the last time she’d seen him had been when she was a kid and he’d crossed the street three cars in front of her mom’s car. On that occasion, she’d suctioned herself to the front windshield like a gecko.
She trailed him as he turned off the square, walked half a block, and entered Rocky’s Hardware Store. Feeling like detective Veronica Mars, she slowed, then slipped in after him. She glanced down each aisle the way she’d once done when searching for her mom in the grocery store.