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“You and ice cream?” I deflect from my inner thoughts. “Still going after all these years? How did that happen?”
“Supply and demand.” Hunter shrugs. “It isn’t rocket science.”
Not helping me out here, Hunter. “Having the community behind you always helps.”
“Having an excellent product in a niche market is even better. We’re totally organic, from the vanilla we source from Madagascar to the organic nuts in our Nutticrust. You should come try some.”
“You should ship some to the west coast.” I’m not going to help him out here. It’s tit for tat. “Massive market.”
“I bet. At the moment we’re in all the northeastern states. Logistics to California is tricky, and then there’s the issue of milk supply, you know? Only so much organic milk going around and—” He breaks off and purses his lips.
This is going fantastic. We’re back to Collingwood Farm already and we’ve covered the basics. There isn’t much left to talk about. Work—tick. Weather—tick. Food—tick. The waitress can bring the freaking wine already.
I check my phone for the time and in my peripheral view see the waitress close in on us with the chardonnay and nachos. Thank God.
After the obligatory swirl and taste, the waitress pours and leaves us again. I dig into the nachos, too hungry to care.
“What’s Kyle up to nowadays?” Hunter asks as he dips a nacho in some guac.
“He’s a partner in a start-up and works pretty much twenty-four-seven.”
“I suppose you can’t be in the Bay Area and not be involved in a start-up,” he says, arresting my gaze. “Is he in tech?”
“Software development. And he’s into women. Lots of women.” Makes you think it’s a San Francisco thing.
“Ah.” Hunter sips his wine, never breaking eye contact with me.
“And Raiden? I think about him every now and then.” Raiden had crept deeply into my heart in a brotherly kind of way, wired and naughty as he was. Still probably is.
“Raiden is finally back in Vermont after thirteen long years, and I think he’s there to stay. At least I pray he’s there to stay.”
This is news. “I didn’t realize he’d left.”
Hunter shifts in his seat, turning the wine glass stem between his long, strong fingers. “He ran away a couple of days before I was due to come to Stanford.”
Raiden had always been on the brink of something, but this is unexpected. That he would have been so desperate to actually run away… “I didn’t know.”
“I never told you.”
“Why?”
“Because coming here to study would never have worked. Raiden was missing for three days. It was chaos. My younger brothers—” Hunter broke off and shook his head. “Telling you wouldn’t have made a difference to the circumstances, and it only proved that I needed to stay close to home.”
For his family. For his three brothers.
I never came first in anybody’s life. I was just not worth it. My gaze drops to my hands where I’m working deep grooves into my palm’s lifeline with a thumbnail. The handful of nachos floating around my empty stomach compresses into a neat little taco as my stomach tightens.
We’d been so stupidly young and I had waited for Hunter. Like a fool. Like my mom. And then, when I got rebellious and lost all faith, I made my biggest mistake by marrying Brad. Now, my relationship status is basically a dumpster fire.
The thing that eats me is that there’s no knowing whether we would’ve worked out if he’d managed to come to California.
His hand covers mine in a warm squeeze. “Stop doing that. You’re hurting yourself.” He waits for me to still before he pulls away, but the heat of his touch now burns more than the workings of my thumbnail does.
Screw him for still noticing my age-old self-soothing crutch. And screw him for never telling me about Raiden. I’m not sure if it would have changed anything, but—
“It is what it is,” I say on a swallow. “Water under the bridge.”
The waitress arrives with the rest of the starters, but for some reason I’ve lost all my appetite.
