Page 86 of The Wedding Favor

“I mean, Gil and I can’t run this place on our own. You know Gil isn’t supposed to deal with the customers.” Gil wasn’t exactly a people person. He’d help in a pinch, but he mostly stuck to the back and the business end.

A fissure of panic snaked down my back and I rubbed my palms on my thighs. I really, really needed to figure my life out. “I haven’t put in my notice.”

Ellie waved a hand. “Please. We all know you’re going. I want to find someone who can fill your shoes.” She winced. “I don’t mean your actual shoes. Your shoes are… unfillable. We just need a new server with their own shoes, okay?”

“Sure.” I nodded dumbly.

After the meeting ended, instead of hiding in the corner in silence, I asked if I could talk to Ellie in private. We holed up in her tiny office. There was just enough for a desk and two chairs. I plopped down on one of them.

“What’s up?” Ellie asked.

I swallowed. “Is there such a thing as employer-employee confidentiality? Like lawyers?”

She leaned forward and stacked her arms on the desk. “Sure.”

“You promise?”

“Scout’s honor.”

“Okay.” I took a deep breath and blurted it out. “I’m not going to Austin in the fall.”

She frowned. “But Mae has been talking about it for months now.”

“I haven’t quite told Mae yet.”

“But why?”

“I don’t want to get a counseling degree. I don’t want to live in Austin. But I also don’t have any idea what I’m supposed to do. Because I know she’ll be disappointed.” Not that she’d ever say that to my face. Instead, she’ll say she’s fine, but she’ll make that face with the sad eyes that will haunt me for months. “I wanted to have a plan before I told her. It’s just taking a little longer to get the plan… in order.”

“Oh, honey, you could never disappoint her. She loves you,” she said in a gentle voice.

“You don’t get it. She’s excited about this and, I don’t know, I let it go for too long and now she’s dealing with moving to Chicago…” I slumped and stared at my hands. “I feel like it’s not going to go well when I tell her.”

Ellie stood and rounded her desk. Leaning on the edge in front of me, she gave me a steady, thoughtful look. “Listen, I know something about disappointing people. But if they’re the kind of people who love you, they’ll get over it. Mae will understand.”

“You say that like it’s easy.”

“Maybe the hard part is the prospect of having a real conversation.” She waved a hand between us. “I think this is the most honest you’ve ever been with me.”

“I’m honest with you,” I lied.

She smirked. “Eventually you have to realize you get to make the choices about your life. Sometimes that means disappointing people. But if those people give up on you from something like that? They were never your people to begin with.”

“So, what you’re saying is I have to be all honest and vulnerable with Mae?”

“Exactly.”

I groaned. “That sounds awful.”

“Being an adult is fun.” She nudged me with her foot. “Are you sticking around Two Harts, then?”

“For now?” I said, but it sounded more like a question.

“Maybe it’s a good thing you don’t have a plan. It leaves you open to all kinds of opportunities you wouldn’t have thought about. Some of the best things in my life came after I went off script.”

Before Ellie had ended up in Two Harts, she’d lived in California where she’d been trying to find work as an actress. As the story goes, one day, she’d had enough of the constant hustling, so she packed up her life and her three-year-old and started driving. She’d stopped in Two Harts to see her brother before heading to her parents’ home in Oklahoma. Instead, she got a job at the Sit-n-Eat and never left.

“I’m not really a ‘go off script’ kind of woman,” I said.