In all the years she’d known him, she’d never let Gabe see her cry. Even when he’d broken her heart that summer after high school, she hadn’t let him see her melt down. It wasn’t as if it had been unexpected. That’s what Gabe Flanagan did in high school. He broke girls’ hearts. Everyone knew.
Still, they’d been there for each other through high school, college, their first jobs, various ups and downs. They’d go weeks without speaking, texting or emailing, and then she’d call him to tell him she’d just burned her mouth on a hot pepper or he’d send her a silly puppy video off the internet at 2:00 a.m.
She’d known their friendship had needed to change. They were proper adults. Gabe needed to be free to get on with his life. He’d sell his place and move into something grander, more expensive. He’d meet other up-and-coming, hard-driving entrepreneurs. People who got him. People he got. He’d come to rely on her, the hometown girl, to be there when he didn’t have time or want to take time to socialize. She was easy, familiar and there.
She’d needed to figure out her life, but she resisted confronting how she’d managed to find herself out of another job. She’d had a five-year plan, but she’d kept having to restart the thing.
Back to Go, Gabe would tell her. You can do it.
By that day in his apartment, even he had lost patience.
And he’d lost faith in her.
After her shower, she’d put on clean clothes, including socks and shoes, dried her hair—Gabe had actually owned a decent hair dryer—and hung up her towel on a peg next to his threadbare towel. He had pegs, not towel racks. She didn’t know why she’d noticed that or what it said about either of them. Probably nothing. When she’d emerged from the bathroom, she’d felt more in control of herself, but Gabe was gone.
That was when she’d found his note on the counter where he kept his recycling schedule, take-out menus, pens, stamps, paper clips, notepad and phone charger. There was a clear block with a photograph of the covered bridge in their hometown, a mile up the river from where he’d grown up with his brother and their unreliable but otherwise wonderful parents. They’d had dogs, cats, gerbils, hamsters and at least one cow. And chickens. Felicity was positive she remembered chickens.
After dashing off her response, she’d returned the Sharpie she’d borrowed to its mates. She wiped crumbs off the couch, folded the throws she’d used during her stay, fluffed the cushions, ran the vacuum and took her dirty dishes and various leftovers into the kitchen. She’d loaded the dishwasher, run the garbage disposal and taken out the trash, including her pizza boxes. She’d packed up her meager belongings, folded her blankets, put her sheets and towels in the wash—of course he had an in-unit washer and dryer—and gathered up her garbage. Twenty minutes later, she was on her way in the February cold.
By the end of the week, she had a job with a successful event planner in Boston. She’d meant it to be a temporary job—an ultra-temporary job, for that matter—to make ends meet and get herself on firmer financial footing. She wasn’t going back to Gabe’s couch, or moving in with her parents. But a few weeks turned into a few months, and then it was summer...and fall...and finally she’d realized she’d found a career she truly enjoyed and was good at. Serendipity, desperation, strategic thinking, accident—whatever it had been, she’d never looked back to emerging markets, municipal bonds and any of the rest of it.
She scraped the brownie batter into a pan and placed it into the oven to bake. A peace offering, maybe. An acknowledgment that their fight three years ago was in the past and their drift apart had started before she’d stalked out of his apartment. For better or worse, they’d both changed since then, and there was no putting the Humpty Dumpty of their broken friendship back together again.
Gabe didn’t return from his walk before she got the brownies out of the oven. She set them to cool on the counter and disappeared into her bedroom. She shut the door, something she seldom did when she was home alone. She checked her messages, tossed her phone onto her nightstand and grabbed a book she’d started the other night, reading to the faint, tempting smell of brownies.
* * *
Gabe figured he deserved every backhanded, aggrieved and otherwise vengeful comment and act on Felicity’s part. He’d hurt her three years ago. He saw that now. He hadn’t just pissed her off. They’d been friends—the best of friends—and he’d thrown a bucket of ice water on that friendship. So had she, but she wasn’t looking at her role in their estrangement at the moment and might never get there. She was the injured party. That was how she saw it.
He hadn’t been dishonest. Just the opposite. He’d been honest, maybe brutally so from her point of view. He hadn’t taken into consideration her ego, her emotions, her hopes and her dreams. He’d flat-out let her have it without regard to anything except knowing he was right.
He had been right, too.
What did he want now?
He had no idea. Part of him wanted to pick up the pieces of their friendship—to get her back, counseling him, seeing through him, speaking her mind without any of the filters he so often encountered in other people. Hearing what was on her mind. Seeing through her, telling her what he thought. He’d never had that kind of open give-and-take with anyone else. For him, it defined a real friendship, and
