Page 8 of Never Enough

But my stupid, traitorous heart doesn’t know the difference. She’s just fluttering in my chest like a damned floozy.

“So Halloween,” I repeat, forcing lightness into my voice. “That's when the great Blankenship emotional awakening happened. Angels sang. Choirs wept. You looked upon me and thought, yes, her. The one who spilled queso on my boots at the Fourth of July cookout.”

“Those were good boots.”

“They were fine.”

“They were Luccheses, Gracie.”

“And boot snob, I’ll add that to the ever-growing list of things I didn’t know about you.”

He cuts me a look that would be withering if I weren't completely immune to it. I've been weathering Henry Blankenship's withering looks since middle school. They bounce off me like hail off a tin roof.

“Something like that,” he says, dry as a creek bed in August. But there's warmth underneath it. Buried deep.

I stare at my hands in my lap, picking at a hangnail that doesn't exist. My nails are short—baker's nails, practical, permanently scented with vanilla extract, no matter how many times I wash them. They are not the nails of a woman whose romantic life is in order. They are the nails of a woman who woke up this morning worried about her sourdough starter and is now in a truck with her accidental husband, discussing their fabricated love story.

“And before that?” I ask. “Before the alleged Halloween awakening? If anyone asks about the years prior? Because people will ask, Henry. People in this town have long memories and nothing to do.”

He shrugs, casual as anything. “We were friends.”

I laugh—a soft, incredulous sound that escapes before I can stop it, pushed out of me by the sheer absurdity of that word applied to whatever Henry and I have been doing for the last two decades. “Henry, you barely spoke to me for years. You'd show up at family dinners and sit at the opposite end of the table. You once handed me a plate of potato salad at the Labor Day picnic without making eye contact, like I was a stranger at a buffet.”

“I made eye contact.”

“You made eye contact with the potato salad.”

“There was a lot going on at that picnic.”

“There was corn hole and Bud Light. That was the entire event.”

He exhales through his nose. Long. Controlled. The exhale of a man constructing a sentence he's not sure he wants to release into the wild.

“Gracie, there’s a whole lot you’re not ready to hear yet. So you’re going to have to just trust me on some of this.”

“What the hell does that even mean?”

“We tell them we were friends until we were more than friends. Happens to people all the time.”

I just stare at him because suddenly I feel even more out of my depth than I was five minutes ago. I need my life to slow down for a damn minute so I can catch a breath.

“So,” he says, and his voice is back to business, steady and sure, the emotional detour apparently concluded without ceremony, “Halloween. That's our starting point. A few months of sneaking around. Then we went out of town. Got married.”

“When exactly did we supposedly elope? Because the timeline matters. If we say too recently, people will wonder why we didn't mention it. If we say too long ago, people will wonder how we kept it secret.”

“When was your last day off from the bakery?” he asks.

“I had Sunday and Monday off.”

He gives a decisive nod. “That’s perfect. You hang out with anyone?”

Just some fictional characters and my vibrator but I’m sure not saying that out loud. “No.”

He slants me at look. “Great. That’s when we did it. Took a romantic trip on Sunday and impulsively got married on Monday morning.”

“And what? Just didn’t mention it to anyone until now?”

“Not if we wanted to wait and tell everyone together. We can say we were planning to wait until the big anniversary party in a few days. But then dipshit showed up and ruined the surprise.”