She shook her head. “Your brain makes mine shrivel every time we interact. Why are you doing this?”
“Let’s just say I’m trying to turn a skeptic.”
“Oookay.”
“The first step is to define romance, and then define love.”
“That’s easy.”
“Oh, really?” I drawled. “Go for it. Give me a one-line definition of romance, right now.”
She opened her mouth to speak, paused, then closed it again. The skin between her brows wrinkled. “Well . . . maybe it’s not easy.”
“Ha!”
“Romance is . . . you know . . . it makes you feel special, I guess?”
“That was a question, not a statement.”
She shrugged. “I honestly haven’t thought of romance in like eight years. I have four children. Romance just doesn’t rank.”
“So?” I cried. “All the more reason to get some more of it in your life.”
Leslie tilted her head, a comical expression on her face that basically screamed, You have no idea what you’re talking about.
I leaned forward. “Look, I get it. I’ve never had kids. I don’t know what it’s like to be up all night and all day with screaming children. Or to share that much of yourself. So much of yourself that you aren’t sure there’s enough left over for your husband.”
Her gaze slowly softened. This was too easy. I’d read enough second-chance romances to be a professional at this.
Leslie looked down at her hands. “Yeah. I guess it does feel like that sometimes. But that doesn’t mean I’m dying for romance. I’d really just rather he run the vacuum without me having to ask him to do it. Can the man just do a chore without me initiating it?”
“So, let’s break this down.” I straightened, pen at the ready. Ink spilled frantically across the page titled Leslie while I wrote. “Your idea of romance is doing chores?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t not say it.”
“Don’t double-negative me.”
“Then tell me what you think is romantic.”
She threw her hands in the air. “I have no idea, Lizbeth!”
“How do chocolates sound?”
Her nose wrinkled.
I crossed that off. “Okay, not that. How about flowers?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s just something else to keep alive and feed.”
“Definitely not that.” Crossed it off. “How about dinner and dancing?”
“He’d trip and fall on top of me, and we’d both break an ankle. Then my mother-in-law would have to live with us and we’d get divorced. No thanks.”
“Do you watch rom-coms?”
“No.” She scoffed. “They’re too unrealistic. Like a good mother of four, I watch animated animals through a streaming service. At the end of the day, I try to pretend like I’m a single woman and go to bed at seven thirty after a glass of wine.”
“Sweet baby pineapple, Leslie. Give me something here.”
She spread her arms. “I am, Lizbeth. This is the most romantic my brain gets. This is the most I’ve thought about romance in . . . years. My life is not like yours. I don’t have the mental space to prioritize it.”
My shoulders slumped. While not ideal, it still all helped. I couldn’t let JJ ever talk to her, though. They’d agree on far too much.
“Well,” she sighed as she stood. “Good talk. I need to go root through my laundry and find where I misplaced my life.”
“Best of luck.”
She snorted. “I need it. Also.” She pointed dramatically to the porch. “I almost died on that ice.”
“I’ll fix it.”
After she left, I stared down at the paper with a frown. I wasn’t naive. I knew romance wasn’t a priority for some people, and I knew a lot of people thought it was frippery. Silly. A way to escape troubles. Which it was.
But it was also more.
How do I get JJ to see that? And, of course, there was a deeper question: Why does he need to?
That was the question I didn’t want to answer.
I straightened with a sigh. A slightly acrid smell filled my nose, then disappeared. I glanced around, saw nothing, and sniffed again. Must have imagined it.
My morning had consisted of making coffee and creating this binder. Using my brain to reduce romance to a ledger had been a fun challenge. Programming required far more creativity than most people realized. Organization was important, but so was flexibility when it came to data. Today felt good.
Hopefully, work at Pinnable would feel equally good.
I took my binder upstairs, set it lovingly on my bookshelf, and studied the titles. Sometimes, I just liked to look at them. When I lived with Mama and Dad, we never had money for books. I’d grasped onto them at the library like they’d save my life.
And they had.
I wound down the stairs and headed out the back door and into the storage shed, where I searched for the bag of ice salt. After almost ten minutes, I located the bag, plus a trowel and shovel, and headed carefully to the front with Leslie’s words ringing in my mind. In the breeze, snow had drifted back onto the porch and stairs in front of the store.
The strange smell came again, like . . . burning tires.
“What is that?” I murmured.
A quick glance around Main Street revealed nothing. I set the salt down and reached for the shovel. The snow on the stairs thawed quickly, so I stepped up onto the porch. My eyes caught a flicker inside. When I turned to peer through the window, my heart dropped to my stomach.
Flames consumed the far wall of the shop.
10 JJ
The scent of snow and fresh apples lingered in the air as I wheeled around the grocery store in Pineville, trying to not think about Lizbeth. Her quick-to-smile lips. The light that carried her around. She had alabaster skin with freckles I found a step beyond charming.
And distracting.
I stood in the middle of the vegetables and frowned at a rutabaga for who knew how long. A quick glance confirmed no one seemed to have noticed.
