The One That Got Away by Melissa Pimentel (21)

Now

I got back to the house just in time for Mrs Willocks’s afternoon tea. The smell of freshly baked scones greeted me as I walked through the door, and she immediately thrust a cup and saucer into my hands, overlooking the fact that my arms were already laden with shopping bags full of fresh flowers. ‘They’re just in the parlor, love,’ she said, shooing me down the hallway. ‘There’s milk and sugar on the sideboard. I’ll be in with the cakes and what-have-you in just a tick!’ And with that, she scurried back into the kitchen. Poor Mrs Willocks still seemed deeply unsettled by the presence of guests.

I walked into the parlor to see everyone perched on various upholstered surfaces, saucers balanced on knees or placed on nearby tables. Ethan was, unsurprisingly, sitting between Taylor and Madison, the three of them deep in discussion about something (my guess was either sex or the Internet). My dad and Candace were playing cards with Bob and Barbara at a little table in the middle of the room, Dad’s mouth pulled tight as he looked at his dwindling pile of chips. ‘This game is rigged,’ I heard him say.

‘That’s what they always say,’ I said, swooping down to give him a kiss on the top of the head. ‘Bob’s got a full house,’ I whispered in his ear, and my dad sighed and placed his cards face down on the table.

‘Ruby!’ Piper exclaimed, leaping to her feet and thrusting her cup and saucer into Charlie’s free hand. ‘You’re back! Tell me everything. Is it a complete disaster? It’s a disaster, isn’t it?’

‘Piper, let your sister take a breath,’ Charlie said. ‘She’s only just come through the door.’

Piper shot him a dirty look. ‘Do you not get that my wedding is tomorrow?’

‘Hey, easy there now,’ I said. ‘Nothing is a disaster.’ I placed the cup and saucer on a side table and dumped the bags on the floor before flopping into an empty armchair. The truth was, I was exhausted. The wedding, while not a disaster, had been on the cusp of becoming one. Piper had been right about the wedding coordinator – she had been completely incompetent. Now, after shouting, bribing and cajoling my way across the North East, I still wasn’t entirely sure that it would all go off without a hitch tomorrow. I still had to arrange the bouquets – the florist had indeed been a madwoman, and had simply handed me several carrier bags filled with flowers, and shoved me out the door – and the photographer was claiming that he had shingles. Not that I was going to share any of that with Piper. ‘Everything’s fine,’ I said, in the voice I used to soothe nervy clients. ‘It’s all under control.’

‘Thank God,’ Piper said, sitting back down on the sofa and grabbing her cup and saucer back from Charlie. ‘I knew you could do it.’

‘Yep! It’s going to be great!’ My phone bleeped in my bag and I was thankful for the distraction. It was a text from Jess.

‘I’ve got to take this,’ I said apologetically. ‘It’s work.’ I grabbed the bags and hurried out of the door.

‘Clock never stops for you, does it, kiddo?’ my dad called after me as I ran up the stairs.

I shut the door to my bedroom and sat down on the floor. I pulled the flowers out of the bags and laid them out in front of me – two hundred white peonies, huge bushels of baby’s breath, the occasional sprig of greenery, and finally – bizarrely – a packet of rosemary. I looked at it all in despair. Craftiness has never been my particular forte – I once glued my thumb and forefinger together when trying to fix a table leg – so I was pretty stumped as to how I was going to make four bouquets and a dozen table arrangements that would pass muster with Piper.

I decided to channel the ‘homespun and rustic’ trend. I grabbed a few peonies, stuck a wad of baby’s breath next to it and tied it together with a piece of twine. It looked lopsided and sad. I sighed and leaned against the side of my bed. Maybe if I had a little glass of wine, it might get my creative juices flowing . . .

I was searching through one of the bags for the bottle of red I’d stashed in there from the shop, when there was a knock at my door. ‘Yes?’ I called.

‘It’s Maddie,’ came the voice from the other side of the door. ‘Can I come in?’

Shit. Just what I needed at this particular juncture in time. ‘Just a second!’ I started frantically shoving the flowers back into the bags – if she reported back to Piper that I had a small, unkempt greenhouse up here, I was toast.

I pushed the bags under the bed and opened the door. Madison was standing in front of me holding a pair of gardening sheers and a large spool of white ribbon. ‘I thought you might need a hand,’ she said in a conspiratorial whisper before pushing her way into the room.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked innocently, even though the jig was very obviously up.

‘I saw the bags of flowers,’ she said. ‘I’ve been on enough sets to know a botanical nightmare when I see one. Don’t worry,’ she added when she saw the look on my face, ‘I didn’t say anything to Piper. Ignorance is bliss and everything.’

‘Where did you get the gardening sheers?’

She shrugged. ‘Mrs Willocks is the type of person who has an emergency flower-arranging kit on hand. I just asked.’

‘Good thinking,’ I said, quietly seething. As if it wasn’t bad enough that I had to spend the rest of the afternoon frantically pulling together flowers, I now had to do it in the company of my ex’s new love interest, who – and I was already certain of this without seeing her hold as much as a stem – was much, much better at this sort of thing than I was. Probably better than me at most things, I thought, being a multitasking hyphen-happy millennial.

‘Should we get to work?’ She folded her long legs under her like a particularly elegant piece of collapsible garden furniture and pulled the bags of flowers out from under the bed. ‘Oh, this will be a piece of cake,’ she said, inspecting the peonies. ‘I’ll arrange and you tie – deal?’

‘Deal.’

We settled into a rhythm within minutes. As suspected, she was very, very good at flower arranging. Watching her work was like watching Blake Lively’s Instagram account come to life, and each bouquet she handed me was beautiful, perfectly rounded and symmetrical.

‘So,’ she asked, after snipping the ends off another bunch of baby’s breath, ‘have you known Ethan a long time?’

Here we go, I thought. Nothing’s free in this world, not even flower arranging. ‘Yeah,’ I said, trying to keep the guarded edge out of my voice. ‘We used to know each other really well, but we lost touch over the years.’ There, that was ambiguous enough.

‘He’s such a cool guy,’ she said. ‘Did you know he just set up a charity to provide Internet access in sub-Saharan Africa?’

‘Yep, he’s quite a guy,’ I said quietly. ‘Could you hand me the ribbon?’

‘So were you guys just friends, or were you together together?’

I groaned inwardly. How was this turning into a very special episode of Oprah? ‘We were together for a little while,’ I said. ‘But like I said, it was years and years ago. Before this wedding, we hadn’t seen each other in a long time.’

‘Do you mind if I ask why you guys broke up?’ I do, I really, really do. ‘Sorry,’ she said, with a small apologetic smile. ‘I know I’m being super nosy, but I’m just curious. It feels like you guys would be such a good fit, you know?’

I raised an eyebrow. ‘You think?’

‘Sure! You’re both funny and cool, you both have these glamorous jobs –’

‘His job is a little more glamorous than mine,’ I pointed out. ‘And yours isn’t exactly unglamorous, either.’

She waved me away. ‘I basically work in tech sales,’ she said. ‘People only think it’s glamorous because it has something to do with fashion.’

‘Well, yes,’ I said, ‘that and the fact that you’re ridiculously gorgeous and are apparently running a small empire at the age of twelve.’

‘I’m twenty-three!’ she said. ‘That’s basically ancient in my industry. I’m like an old granny now.’ We both let this idea sink in – if she was an old granny, I was literally Methuselah. ‘So,’ she said finally, ‘you really don’t think there’s anything between you and Ethan anymore?’ She busied herself with the next bouquet, but I clocked her watching me out of the corner of her eye, half coy, half shy.

‘Definitely not,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Like I said, it was a long, long time ago. Ancient history.’

I saw her smile and my heart felt like it had been sucker punched. ‘Cool,’ she said. ‘Can you hand me that bunch of rosemary? I think I might stick a sprig in each of the bouquets. You know, “rosemary, for remembrance”.’

She was the last person I expected to be quoting Shakespeare at me. She saw my expression and laughed. ‘I minored in English Lit,’ she explained. ‘All of my friends made fun of me for it, but I just loved books too much to just go to school for business and coding, you know? I actually did my thesis on the significance of flowers in Elizabethan literature . . .’

I watched her face light up as she talked about the varied symbolic nature of the rose and realized that I actually liked her. She wasn’t just some beautiful young girl with cotton candy for brains – she was smart, and funny, and thoughtful. All of which should have made the fact that Ethan had obviously fallen for her easier, but instead just filled me with a heavy, sluggish sadness.

We were nearly finished with the table centrepieces when there was another knock on the door. ‘You guys alive in there?’ Ethan opened the door without waiting for a response and grinned down at the two of us on the floor. ‘Well, isn’t this picturesque?’ he said with a smile.

‘Shut the door!’ Madison and I chorused.

‘Okay! Okay!’ he said, stepping in and closing the door behind him. He produced a bottle of wine and a corkscrew from behind his back. ‘I thought you guys might need a little liquid encouragement.’

‘We really, really do,’ I said gratefully. ‘There are a couple of glasses by the sink.’

He retrieved them and poured each of us a glass of red. ‘So how’s it all coming?’ he asked me. ‘Have you glued your fingers together yet?’

He’d been on the phone with me during the table leg incident of 2005. In fact, he’d been the one to tell me to pour nail polish remover over my fingers to unstick them, getting the instructions out in little burst in between bouts of laughter. ‘No glue involved, thankfully,’ I said. ‘Plus, Madison has basically been doing all the work. I’ve been demoted to string-tying, and I know that as soon as she’s finished she’s going to go back and retie all of the ugly bows I’ve made.’

Madison smiled at me sheepishly. ‘Guilty as charged,’ she said with a laugh. ‘Hey,’ she said, turning to Ethan. ‘I was thinking we could go through that stuff we were talking about. Once we’re finished, I mean,’ she added, shooting me a glance. ‘Stuff’ was clearly a code word for sex. I sagged inwardly at the thought.

‘Sure,’ Ethan said with an easy grin. ‘Happy to.’ I’ll bet you are, I thought to myself. Pervert. ‘But I don’t want to take you away from the flowers or anything. I can see important work is being done here.’

‘I think I can take it from here,’ I said quickly. ‘There are only a couple of centrepieces left to do, and we can do the bows tomorrow. Or you can, I mean.’

‘Are you sure?’ Madison asked, but it was clearly rhetorical as she was already climbing to her feet and dusting herself down. ‘I mean, I don’t want to run out on you or anything.’ She very clearly wanted to run out, but that was fine by me. As long as they left the wine, I was happy for them to clear out as soon as possible.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to break up the party,’ Ethan said as they headed out. ‘You sure you’re okay up here?’

I tilted my glass towards him in salute. ‘Never been better.’

‘Well, if you glue yourself to anything, you know who to call.’ He paused in the doorway for a minute. ‘You still do that thing, huh?’

‘What thing?’

‘That thing where you tap your teeth with your fingernail when you’re concentrating on something.’

‘I don’t do that!’ I said, even though I knew that I did. It was one of my more annoying habits – I even annoyed myself with it. But I remembered now that Ethan used to think it was cute. Or at least he said he did.

‘Don’t try to deny it,’ he said. ‘You should knock it off, though. Bad for the enamel.’

‘I didn’t know that you were a dentist now, too. So many strings to your bow – watch out you don’t hang yourself.’

‘I’m a true Renaissance man,’ he said. He slipped out of the room, shutting the door behind him.

I leaned back against the bed and took a long sip of wine. The floor around me was littered with the snipped ends of stems and little bits of twine, and I noticed a damp patch spreading on the carpet from where I’d placed a chill box full of greenery. I’d have to clean up before poor Mrs Willocks saw the mess and had a heart attack.

I closed my eyes, sank the rest of the glass, and tried not to picture the sort of stuff now inevitably being discussed in a room nearby.

I am a fortress, I thought to myself. An impenetrable fortress. In a couple of days, I’ll be on a flight back to New York. Back to my apartment. Back to my job. Back to normal.

The thought didn’t give me as much comfort as I’d hoped.