Gianna had no doubt he had charmed them, the way he charmed everyone, the way he’d charmed her six months ago when she showed up at the quaint Italian restaurant he’d suggested for their very first date and found him waiting at a table in the back, dressed in a suit, brown hair freshly trimmed, a corked bottle of Brunello already sitting in the center of the table.
“I saw on your Match profile that you liked Tuscan wine, so I took the liberty,” he had said, gesturing to the bottle.
She’d thought, Now this is a date.
He pulled her into his arms as soon as she knocked and proceeded to ask about her night, as well as how Val’s first IVF appointment had gone on Monday and how Val had liked the nanny she’d interviewed to help out with Luke and Bryan, the two-year-old identical twins she already had. Gianna had mentioned both events earlier that week in passing, and Peter—attentive Peter—had taken note, something she not only appreciated but found extremely attractive, as she’d dated men in the past who couldn’t even remember her best friends’ names, let alone what was going on in their lives.
He truly was a catch.
So, what was it, then, she wondered—for the millionth time—as she stared into his pale blue eyes while they shared a brandy nightcap on his leather couch in front of a waning fire? Why weren’t her feelings for him stronger when all the boxes seemed to be checked?
She went back to what she always went back to—that maybe what she was searching for wasn’t real. Maybe all women felt exactly as she did about Peter and walked down the aisle anyway. Maybe she was just an overthinker, never fully satisfied, which was advantageous when it came to her career but didn’t help when it came to love.
For a brief second, her mind drifted to Charli Anderson and Jack Logan. She could still see them sitting at the fireside table they always waited for in the back of Hayden’s when they used to come in. Jack’s green eyes were always zeroed in on Charli like she was the only one in the room. It used to seem he got more enjoyment out of watching her savor bites of the Chocolate Mint Cloud Cake they always shared than he did eating it himself. Charli would reach over and hold his hand or bring her napkin up to her mouth to stifle a laugh from something Jack had said. They’d seemed to have what she was looking for—that indescribable factor—a true soul connection. Then again, who knew what their fate would be.
She and Peter both set their glasses in the sink and made their way down the long hallway to Peter’s bedroom, where they undressed, then made love quietly in the dark.
After, Peter rose to use the bathroom, and Gianna lay there, her mind racing, her breath turning jagged. Calm down, she told herself. It wasn’t like she had to make any major decision about spending the rest of her life with him tonight. Or any time in the near future. For now, her only job was to keep “gathering information,” as Linda had advised her in countless sessions.
She took a deep breath in and noticed then that her lips were dry—probably a combination of the sun that day and the booze she’d drunk that evening. Lip balm. She needed lip balm.
She pushed back the covers and sat up, fumbling for the light switch on the wall, then the knob on the drawer of Peter’s bedside table. He had to have a stick around here somewhere. She opened it up to take a look.
And that was when she saw it. Sitting right there in plain view.
two
NOW
“TODAY’S THE DAY!” exclaimed Peter, as Gianna stepped into his kitchen, lured from the bedroom by the smell of coffee. She was still in her pajamas, hadn’t slept a wink.
Peter, on the other hand, looked perky as could be, whistling and tapping two spoons on the counter as if they were drumsticks while he waited to flip the pancakes she could hear sizzling on the stove.
“I used to want to be a musician,” he’d told her once. “Back before I understood there were realistic dreams, and then there were pipe dreams.”
The day? Gianna froze for a brief second, wondering if he meant the day he was going to propose. But no man would announce that, she quickly realized. Not even one whose girlfriend knew that he already had a ring. And Peter had no idea that she knew he had a ring. Such a beautiful ring . . .
She’d peeked. She couldn’t not peek last night after seeing the engagement ring box in the drawer of his bedside table. She was horrible with self-discipline! Peter knew this. She’d told him on one of their very first dates.
“If a cake is sitting out on the kitchen counter at Hayden’s unattended, I’ll have a nibble,” she said. “I can’t help myself!” She was lucky she wasn’t seven hundred pounds. Thank God for her quick metabolism. “And on Christmas Eve, I peek at every gift that’s under the tree. I hate the suspense.”
She’d found his present that past Christmas—tickets to a sold-out Adele concert that she’d been dying to see. He’d caught her in the act of peeling the wrapping paper back. “You can’t be mad,” she’d told him. She’d given fair warning.
She could still see the diamond. It was from her favorite jewelry designer on Etsy. He must have seen her checking out this woman’s ring collection on Instagram. Or maybe he’d looked at Gianna’s Pinterest page. She had pinned a few of her favorite rings from this designer’s line to one of her boards—not because she was trying to drop a hint that she wanted Peter to propose. So many of her friends had done that with their boyfriends. Why? She would have never wanted a man to feel pressured to propose! She’d just liked the rings, that was all. And she wanted to remember them, for when the time was right. Which was apparently right now. At least in Peter’s mind.
It wasn’t crazy, his thinking. Sure, they had only been together half a year. But they were both in their late thirties. And there had never been any beating around the bush about the topic of marriage.
“I saw on your Match profile that you want two kids,” he’d said on their first date at Amelia’s, the quaint Italian spot he’d chosen.
“Two or three,” she’d said, munching on a cracker and Brie from the charcuterie board appetizer, which Peter had ordered before she arrived, in addition to the Brunello. He’d read on her profile that she was a fan of cheese plates, too.
“I think they’re both going to show,” Peter said now, confirming that he was not referring to His Proposal, but The Reservation.
She had told everyone about it. Well, actually she’d told her petite, college-aged, hostess, Rosie, who filled in her dishwasher, Max, who was also in college and a bit of a jokester, who shared it with her servers, who blabbed to the other waitresses who filled in Peter when he stopped in one day last week to bring her flowers out of the blue. He was great like that.
Her staff had been texting her since bright and early that morning.
Couldn’t sleep last night I was so excited!! Can’t believe the day is finally here!!! The first text came from her server, Claire, who thought Charli and Jack were a modern-day Allie and Noah from The Notebook, even though she’d never met them. No one on Gianna’s staff had. Restaurant turnover was high. It had been five years since they’d last been in. Claire had just heard about them from Gianna and thought it was such a cute story.
Turned your kitchen into a casino. That text came from Max, along with a photo of him placing money in an envelope pinned to a bulletin board that said, “Neither Show.” Beside it were several others: “Both Show,” “Only Charli Shows,” “Only Jack Shows.”
Peter brought a short stack of pancakes over to the kitchen table, as well as plates and orange juice.
The very first time she slept over he’d asked what her favorite breakfast was. They were lying in bed together, twisted up in his sheets, having just had sex for the second time. Better than last night, she’d been thinking. Not the best sex of my life, but nice. Definitely nice.
“Banana pancakes,” she’d told him.
“Banana pancakes it is,” he’d said, popping up and running out to the corner store for the ingredients, then whipping up a batch. He’d made them for her every morning since.
; “What do you think?” he asked as he returned to the stove to tidy up.
That maybe I’m being too picky. She almost blurted out her mom’s favorite line. What more was she looking for in a man? Honestly. Floral deliveries at work! Banana pancakes! Someone who tidied up his stove and made his bed each morning with hospital corners, no less (his mom was a nurse). Men did not get better than Peter.
He must have seen her face pale.
“You worry too much, you know that?”
She did know that. But there was a lot to worry about. It might not have been productive, but it felt productive, and Gianna loved productivity.
“Just trust,” he said. “I’m sure tonight will end in happily ever after.”
There was no evidence to support this.
Gianna hadn’t heard from Charli or Jack since she took The Reservation down. Which meant . . . nothing really, considering they’d told her they wouldn’t be in touch. Each was supposed to decide on his or her own whether or not they wanted to restart the relationship and either show up for The Reservation at seven o’clock tonight (meaning yes) or not show (meaning no). How stressful and potentially humiliating, Gianna had thought, when they explained it to her. Then again, incredibly romantic, if they both walked through the door . . .
But five years was such a long time.
The day had felt like it would never get here to Gianna, and she had nothing on the line. For the longest time, she thought it would remain glimmering in the distance like a mirage, teasing her. Then, all of sudden, here it was.
Charli and Jack had likely each married someone else by now. Or forgotten about the date completely. Not everyone had a memory like an elephant, the way she did. And here she’d gone and gotten everyone’s hopes up. Sorry, staff. Sorry, Peter.
Unless Peter was referring to their happily ever after. Was he thinking of proposing tonight? Oh, that would be just like Peter. Charli and Jack would get their happily ever after—or not. But she and Peter would get theirs, so the night would end well either way. She could see him, thinking this.
She stood up.
“Not hungry?” he asked.
“I’ve got to get home, get changed, get to work.” Talk to Mary Pat, she added silently to herself. Mary Pat would know what Peter was up to. Peter confided in Mary Pat, the same way Gianna did. Her sixty-six-year-old neighbor was a good confidant. She was all about having Gianna over for front-porch chats and gin and tonics.
“Kiss, first?” he said, as she scrambled to gather up her things.
She blinked. Had she just been about to change and walk out the door without thanking him or giving him a kiss for cooking that morning?
“I don’t deserve you,” she said, joking, but thinking maybe there was some truth to it.
He wrapped his hands around her waist, and they swayed gently from side to side as if music were playing. She closed her eyes for a moment and saw the two of them dancing under a white canopy in her parents’ backyard at their wedding. Then, years later, dancing in the evening on the front lawn of their first home, as their three kids ran amuck with the neighbors, before she and Peter rang the dinner gong—Gianna had always wanted a dinner gong—calling them home. And later, tearing up together as they danced at their kids’ weddings. Some days it was so easy to picture a life with him.
Other days . . .
“I love you,” he said, interrupting her thoughts.
Did he though? Did he really? Sometimes Gianna wondered if it were the idea of her he loved more than who she was at her core. Then again, he sounded sincere enough. And maybe no one got you, truly got you, in this life, anyway.
A crack of thunder sounded in the distance. Peter looked from her to the window.
“Looks like that storm the paper called for is coming, after all.”
Were Charli and Jack? Gianna wondered.
She gave him a quick kiss and told him she loved him too, then threw on an outfit she had left at his place and hurried out the door into the blustery spring day, where everything seemed as if it was up in the air—both figuratively and literally.
Her heart rate quickened again as she hopped on the TriMet bus across the street to head home, and Linda’s voice popped into her head: “When you’re feeling anxious, try and find a nice, comfortable place for your thoughts to land.”
Charli and Jack came to mind as she made her way to the back of the bus. Not their Reservation. But their love story. It was such a sweet love story. One she’d thought of countless times, since they’d told it to her.
She settled into an empty seat and closed her eyes.
How did it begin?
Oh yes, they were just a couple kids, she remembered. Two ambitious kids who never imagined they’d fall in love . . .
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three
THEN
THE FIRST LOVE of Charli’s life was a frog named Leggy. She met him on a dissecting tray in her seventh-grade science lab and couldn’t stop checking him out—his external nares (nostrils) his tympani (eardrums), his pharynx (throat).
When she sliced open his stomach, her lab partner, Carla Henderson, flagged over their biology teacher and asked for a hall pass to the school nurse.
Mrs. Deane sighed. “You can go when Lauren gets back,” she said. “But try to tough it out. The dissection is part of your grade everyone,” she reminded the class.
Lauren and five other kids didn’t make it through more than twenty minutes of sixth period, but Charli couldn’t get enough of Leggy’s exam. She stayed in the lab long after the final bell rang inspecting the frog with the help of Mrs. Deane, who looked relieved that at least someone was not totally grossed out by the assignment.
When Charli got home that afternoon, the first thing she did after running upstairs to her bedroom, was call her best friend, Jack.
“Did you do the frog dissection today in biology?” she asked him.
“Yeah. Zoe Allen puked all over herself when she had to identify those gross, squiggly, worm-looking things in his stomach.”
“The small intestines.”
“Yeah. Whatever. It was disgusting!”
“I loved it,” Charli confessed. She yanked up her blinds and saw Jack in his room, sitting on the wooden bench underneath his windowsill.
Jack must have felt her eyes on him because he turned toward the window. “Ew. You’re weird,” he said, making eye contact with her.
“No, I’m not. You’re weird for thinking that. It was so cool.”
Jack stuck his tongue out. “Look, I’m a frog. Ribbit Ribbit. You want to come over here and dissect me?”
“I would if I thought there was anything interesting to see in that brain of yours.”
“Hey, you can’t have looks and brains,” Jack shot back.
“Oh, give me a break.” Charli pretended to stick her finger down her throat and gag herself. She heard enough about Jack’s good looks from the girls at school.
Just the day before when she was in the locker room changing for PE, she’d overheard a group of eighth-grade girls talking about him.
“He is such a hottie,” said Becky Tallen, who had probably outgrown a training bra in the third grade. “I’m inviting him to my birthday party, and I’m going to make sure I get to play Seven Minutes in Heaven with him in the closet.”
Jack laughed now, knowing how it irked her, and then he stood up and grabbed a baseball from the top of his dresser.
“You want to come over and play catch with me before it gets dark out?”
“Are you sure you want me to? I’m tempted to give you a black eye after that last comment.”
“I trust your bad aim,” Jack said, smiling.
Charli stepped closer to the window. “Is that a challenge?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, in that case . . . I’ll be right over.”
Jack tossed the ball up in the air.
�
�Great. See you out front in a minute.”
—
THE FIRST TIME Jack threw a baseball, he knew he was in love. He loved the “whoosh” of the ball as it sailed through the air and the “smack” when it hit his dad’s glove.
“Nice power kid,” his dad said, tossing the ball back.
They were out in his cul-de-sac on the first evening of the year that called for a t-shirt and shorts. It was also the first time that year that Jack could remember his dad being home from work at the law firm where he was a partner before dark.
His dad pounded his glove. “Let’s see it again,” he said. The two gloves and the baseball were a birthday gift from his parents last week. Jack had just turned ten.
Jack wound up a second time. Whoosh. Smack.
“What an arm you’ve got, kid!” his dad said.
Jack beamed.
“Hey Grace, come out and see this!” Jack’s mom who was always around and willing to spend time with him, as if to make up for his dad never being home, came out of the kitchen where she’d been washing dishes, to watch. She had on the red apron Jack had gotten her for Christmas last year, and her blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail.
Jack threw another hard pitch into his dad’s mitt.
“Bravo,” she called, clapping her hands.
“Isn’t that impressive?” his dad said. “We should’ve had this kid in baseball, not soccer last year.”
Jack grinned with pride as his dad tossed the ball back. He was just about to throw it again when his dad’s pager went off. Jack’s least favorite sound in the world was that beep-beep-beep.
His dad took off his mitt and pulled the pager out his pocket. “I’m sorry,” he said, frowning. “I’ve got to go. My assistant’s paging. I’m in the middle of this big case.”
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