“Okaayyyy.” I creep past her. In the cool foyer, I’m hit with the smell of summer: dusty shelves, sun-warmed verbena, sunblock, the kind of salty damp that gets into the bones of old Maine houses and never quite dries out again.
From the end of the first-floor hallway, back in the open kitchen–slash–living room (part of the extension, of course), I hear Cleo’s soft timbre followed by Parth’s low chuckle.
Sabrina kicks off her shoes and drops the keys on the console table, calling, “Here!”
Cleo’s girlfriend, Kimmy, comes bounding down the hall first, a blur of curves and strawberry blond hair. “Harryyyy!” she cries, her tattooed fingers grabbing for my face as she plants loud kisses on each of my cheeks. “Is it really you?” She shakes me by the shoulders. “Are my eyes deceiving me?”
“You’re probably confused because she got a new face on Etsy,” Sabrina tells her.
“Huh,” Kimmy says. “I was wondering what Danny DeVito was doing here.”
“That probably has more to do with the edibles,” I say.
Kimmy doesn’t cackle; she guffaws. Like every one of her laughs is Heimliched out of her. Like she’s constantly being caught off guard by her own joy. She’s the newest addition to our little unit by years, but it’s easy to forget she hasn’t been there since day one.
“I missed you so much,” I tell her, squeezing her wrists.
“Missed you more!” She claps her hands together, her red-gold bun wobbling like an overeager pom-pom. “Do you know?”
“Know what?”
She glances at Sabrina. “Does she know?”
“She does not.”
“Know what?” I repeat.
Sabrina threads an arm through mine. “About your surprise.” On my right, Kimmy catches my other elbow, and together, they perp-walk me down the hall.
“What surpri—”
I stop so hard and fast that my elbow hits Kimmy’s ribs. I dimly register her grunt of pain. My senses are fully concerned with the man rising from the marble breakfast bar.
Dark blond hair, broad shoulders, a mouth improbably soft when compared to the hard lines that make up the rest of his face, and eyes that shine steel gray from afar, though, from experience, I know are ringed in mossy green once you get up close.
Like, for example, when you’re tangled with him beneath a blush sheet, the diffused glow of your bedside lamp painting his skin gold and giving his whisper a texture.
His shoulders are relaxed, his face totally calm, like being in the same room as me is not the worst thing that could have possibly happened to either of us.
Meanwhile I’m basically a walking, breathing bottle of soda into which a Mentos has been plopped, panic fizzing up, threatening to spew out between my cells.
Go to your happy place, Harriet, I think desperately, only to realize I’m literally in my happy place, and he. Is. Here.
The very last person I expected to see.
The very last person I want to see.
Wyn Connor.
My fiancé.
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Photo by Devyn Glista/St. Blanc Studios
EMILY HENRY is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of People We Meet on Vacation and Beach Read. She studied creative writing at Hope College, and now spends most of her time in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the part of Kentucky just beneath it.
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