Page 38 of While You Were Trending

I don’t wait for Mabel’s reply.

I have a meeting to get to.

And I don’t trustniceDeclan.

He made it too clear while I was dating Alex that I wasn’t worthy. And after these past four years—I’m done with people who don’t think I’m worthy.

No matter how much thisnice Declanact is making me feel like I’ve been forgiven for what I did to Alex. How much it’s soothing a part of my soul to have simple kindnesses shown to me by someone who hated me in the life I lived before Makepeace.

As Olivia would say, he’s offering emotional table scraps.

I don’t settle for those anymore.

Especially from people with an agenda.

7

HOME UNIMPROVEMENT

Declan

Pip Makepeace is trouble.

She mishears half of everything I say. She makes us wait to record until she’s slathered on sunscreen. She makes us wait again while she runs inside to get her dead husband’s ashes so that he can be in the shot too. She puts a can of sardines in a decorative watering tin in the garden that she says are for the garden dragons, but the twinkle in her eye—it’s something else.

Definitely something else.

And then she catches Shade, the director-slash-cameraman that Eddie likes to work with, not actually recording the footage of her talking about the history of Makepeace, and she makes him do it again, then show her that it’s actually captured.

Shade caught on quick that the only way we’ll have peace to record is if we give Pip what she wants, and I get the feeling he’s not opposed to using the footage.

Blurred out. Definitely blurred out.

Or possibly as a voice-over.

Pip’s stories about the winery’s history are fascinating. Internal family battles over control in the early years, when Dean Makepeace and his brother were kids and the winery was in their parents’ and grandparents’ hands, hard years with wildfires and droughts, harder years when Dean turned into a cheapskate who always hired the lowest bidder, which, she says, is why the fermentation building tried to eat Cricket a few months ago.

But for all of the trouble Pip is, she’s nothing compared to the trouble that arrives as Cricket’s finally about to start the tractor in the barn.

“Ginny? Ginny, Mommy’s home! I’m here to help!”

My throat constricts and my heart winces and my balls shrivel at that voice.

Cricket, a brunette with big brown eyes and a ready smile, pops her head out of the tractor window,notsmiling. “Freida?”

Heath, Cricket’s boyfriend, whom I’ve been told is the resident handyman around here, growls from the sidelines as he shifts his attention from the motor that we’ve been tweaking and looks at Freida Rhodes.

Fuck.

She shouldn’t be here.

Freida beams at them. “Yes, yes, I’m here. Where’s Ginny? I saw her car parked right outside.”

Cricket squints at her. “You saw…Ginny’s car…here?”

“Oh, this is about to get good,” Shade whispers.

“Turn it off,” I mutter to him.