Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 76517 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 383(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76517 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 383(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
“Are you hungry?” She lifts the pizza box.
“I could eat.”
I follow her inside, where she sets us up at a little folding card table before uncorking the bottle of merlot and pouring it into two plastic cups.
“All of my kitchen stuff is in storage,” she says. “We didn’t want to move in completely until the place was done. Hope you don’t mind drinking out of this.”
She places the cup in front of me, then grabs paper plates and napkins.
“Hey, I just wanted to say I’m sorry for earlier,” she says, taking the chair across from me.
I grab a slice. “We’re good.”
No need to rehash anything—that’ll only open the door for more questions.
“We are?” Her blue eyes glint.
I nod, following with a generous swig of wine.
“It’s been hard, these last few months,” she says. “Losing my best friend so suddenly . . . wrapping my head around the fact that the life we planned is no longer an option . . . finding out he lied to me about the bank account . . . not being able to ask him why . . .”
“I bet.” I take another bite and glance out the window beside us. I wouldn’t know the first thing about consoling a broken heart. I’ve never been on that side of the equation.
She leans back in her seat, running her palms along the tops of her thighs. “You know, sometimes I try to convince myself that there was some kind of mix-up at the bank. That maybe he put my name on the paperwork, but there was some clerical error, and someone else messed up.”
“Wishful thinking.”
“It’s just . . . he was so perfect,” she continues. “And I can’t stress enough how perfect he was. I’d never met anyone like him. He put me on a pedestal, as cliché as that sounds.”
I take another drink, my gaze meeting hers over the rim of the plastic cup.
Anneliese tucks her chin lower. “Now that I say that all out loud . . . I realize how obvious it all seems. But it was so real. At least to me, it was.”
I press my lips flat. There’s nothing I can say to change what Donovan did.
“You said he did this to other women?” she asks.
“I heard about a few over the years,” I say. “Third-, fourthhand. Mostly from distant cousins or mutual acquaintances. Gossip doesn’t take long to spread around here.”
Every time I’d get a random email or text from a long-lost somebody, they always felt the need to update me on the latest with Donovan, which almost always included some kind of relationship drama that had blown up in his face or one of his pretty little liaisons looking for him after he’d borrowed some cash and then fallen off the face of the earth for a bit.
“What did he do to them?” Her eyes search mine.
“Same kind of thing he did to you,” I say. “Took their money and got the hell out of Dodge.”
Her shoulders deflate, and her lower lip trembles, but only for a moment.
“He gave me a ring,” Anneliese says, tracing the empty space on her left ring finger. “He asked me to spend my life with him. We picked out a wedding venue and sent our save-the-dates. What was his end goal? Why go through all of that?”
“It’s not worth it,” I say, “to speculate like that.”
“Just trying to connect the dots . . . see if I missed any warning signs . . .”
“Why? So it doesn’t happen again?” I shake my head. “People like Donovan are good at what they do because they’ve mastered the art of manipulation. There’s no such thing as staying one step ahead of them—you can only get away from them.”
“Is that what you did?” she asks without hesitation.
That’s what I get for engaging in this conversation.
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to use you as a sounding board for this mess,” she says. “I haven’t really made a lot of friends since I’ve been here, and that’s my fault. I mean, I have Flo, but I don’t want her to feel like every time we hang out it’s a therapy session.”
“Who’s Flo?”
“She owns the bookshop . . .”
“Ah. I see.” I take another drink. She hasn’t touched her pizza or her wine—nor has she taken her eyes off me since she sat down.
“Berlin came into the shop this afternoon.” She changes the subject. “She told me you were a writer. What do you write?”
“Haven’t been one of those in a long time.”
“What did you used to write?” She rests her elbow on the table and her chin on the top of her hand.
“You going to eat?” I point to her untouched dinner.
Being the center of someone’s attention has never been my thing.
Anneliese sits up, reaching for her wine. “Yeah. I just thought it was neat that you and your brother were both writers.”