Chapter 27

Elle

Eight-year-old boys in a bowling alley are like an unconfined litter of twelve-week-old puppies. They boil and bubble around and over each other, they race off before you can stop them to God knows where, they are fearless and dopey, totally lovable and totally terrifying.

It’s a good thing I came along, because even under ideal circumstances this is not a one-parent job.

We bowl in two adjacent lanes. Sawyer and I each take a lane and five boys. Madden and Jonah told us ahead of time they wanted to be together, so I read off two lists of boys’ names so the boys won’t fight about who goes where. I take Madden and Jonah and three other boys, Griggs, Emmett, and Caden. The boys immediately begin fighting about turn order and bragging about their past bowling exploits.

Once we’ve got their names entered into the bowling computers and the gutter guards up, things settle down, and the boys begin to bowl with singular focus. Which frees me up to take in my surroundings. They’ve redone this alley since the last time I was here—faux wood lanes, big screens everywhere blasting entertainment, fresh carpeting, and a startling amount of neon.

Sawyer steps down the runway into a low lunge or stretch or whatever you call it when you step out to release the ball—I know squat about bowling. He’s so graceful in motion. He has dexterous fingers for someone with such big hands, and a surprisingly athletic and nimble body considering the amount of muscle he packs.

Mmmm.

The ball rolls true down the middle of the lane and hits the pins dead center.

Strike.

He turns toward me and winks, as if he knows I’ve been watching him lustfully.

“Your turn, Ms. Dunning,” Griggs says.

I yank my mind back from where it’s gone and send the ball down the lane with considerably less grace than my next-door neighbor, but the boys couldn’t care less. They’re too busy trying to beat each other to worry about the adults.

After a while, Sawyer and I drift out of our respective games and stand back, surveying our fiefdoms.

“You throw a good party, Paulson,” I tell him.

His expression fills with regret.

“What’s wrong?”

He shakes his head and ducks his chin. “Nothing.”

I narrow my eyes at him—then get it, suddenly. “Lucy?”

Startled, his eyes come up to meet mine, dark with grief.

“You must miss her a lot, times like this. Birthdays, holidays.”

His gaze shifts again, off beyond the neon horizon. “She wouldn’t have forgotten about driving the boys from the bowling alley back to the house.”

I’m about to reassure him, to insist that anyone could have forgotten about that (or maybe I just mean I could have), when he bursts out, “Hell—she wouldn’t have had a party at a bowling alley to begin with.”

“She wouldn’t have?”

Part of me hates that he’s still so in love with Lucy, but the other part is aware that it’s unusual for him to reveal his feelings like this, and I don’t want him to stop.

He takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, then opens them again. “She would have done it at home. There would have been a theme, and decorations—one year it was a pirate party, and she turned the dining room table into a pirate ship with giant cardboard waves rising from the floor. She painted the waves with this blue glitter paint. She had the boys make homemade eye patches and homemade swords and scabbards, and then she let them climb up on the table and have sword fights. The boys loved it. That was how she was. She didn’t do anything halfway—” He stops. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

My insides are all twisted up in sympathy and over-identification—I can’t help thinking of Jonah, who had, and lost, Lucy, and imagining what it would be like for Madden if something happened to me. My heart lurches horribly at the thought.

Plus, on top of all the other emotions, there’s this ugly knot of envy, because—well, because despite everything, I like this guy an awful lot, and he’s madly in love with a dead woman who might also turn out to be Martha Stewart.

Cardboard waves? Glitter paint?

I’m. Just. Not. Crafty.

Madden comes running up. “Mom, Caden and Alexander are in the arcade—are they supposed to be in there?”

“Not really.” Sawyer sighs. “I’m sorry.” He rubs his forehead. “I didn’t mean to go off like that.”

“She sounds amazing.” She does, and what else is there really to say?

“She was.”

We stand there a moment. His eyes are still sad and abstracted, like he’s looking far into the past. He tugs one earlobe, frowns, then seems to come back to the present. “I’d better collect Caden and Alexander.” He shoots me one more look—one I can’t read—and jogs off to retrieve his wayward charges from the arcade.

I stand, watching him, dazed.

I don’t think Trevor ever would have talked about me that way. Like the most ordinary things I did were infused with magic.

I drag in a shallow breath, then another. I’m shaking, I realize. But it’s not because of how much I wish Trevor had felt that way about me.

It’s because of how much I wish Sawyer did.

Elle Dunning, what are you doing????