Page 69 of While You Were Trending

I thought it was bullshit at the time, and I’m even more convinced it was bullshit now.

Lavender returns, shuffling at a snail’s pace. All of us watch her progress until she plops two bowls of oatmeal on the lone table in here that someone must’ve put back up after I toreeverything down the other day. “Eat up, dudes. You’re gonna need your strength to keep up with all of these ladies around here.”

“Maybe they need their strength to keep up with me,” I say.

She snorts. “My dad says you’re retired. And a TV star now. Your muscles are just for show.”

“How old is she?” I ask Ginny, who’s still stroking my dog in ways that are making me inappropriately jealous.

“Hello, I’m right here, and I’m seven,” Lavender says.

“She’s grown up around adults,” Ginny tells Flow.

“Do you know how to fight dragons?” Lavender asks me.

“I do not.”

She sighs and shakes her head the way my grandma used to when I’d tell her I didn’t know how to play her favorite card game. “Yep. Useless. And terrible taste in pets. Ginny, can I go help Olivia and Samantha?”

“We have to get you to school, kiddo,” Ginny replies.

“You’re leaving the winery?” I ask her.

“No,” is all I get in response.

Her sundress today hugs her waist and breasts and has one of those full skirts that would flare out if she spun in a circle. It’s the same blue as her eyes, and now it’s covered in dog fur.

Not that I expect her to mind.

She never minded the small stuff.

I clear my throat. “We’re working on the barrel lift today,” I tell Ginny.

“I know.”

“Is it loud?”

She squints at me. “Loud?”

“Flow’s still afraid of garbage trucks. And any loud trucks, actually. I was going to put her in her crate in the apartment, but if you wanted to hang out with her?—”

I cut myself off as Ginny makes real eye contact with me. “If you need me to watch your dog, you can just ask.”

“I just thought, since you two seemed to miss each other, you might like that.”

She folds her arms and keeps looking at me, giving me the same bland expression I’ve seen her use on her mother.

My heart sinks.

It shouldn’t.

I shouldn’t care. Her life is here. My life will take me elsewhere soon enough. I’ll think about her when the documentary airs, and otherwise—otherwise, I need to get over this crush.

It’s going nowhere.

I clear my throat again. “She’ll be fine in the apartment.”

Shade’s in the small cottage that they call the mother-in-law house, near the Victorian mansion, and I’m across the fields in the basement of the caretaker cottage where Heath and Cricket and Lavender live.